Concert Review of the Moment: Hop Farm Country Park, Paddock Wood, Tonbridge, Kent, England Concert Reports: 7/6/08

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The Concert Review of the Moment on Neil Young at Hop Farm Country Park, Paddock Wood, Tonbridge, Kent, England Concert: 7/6/08 by jamesayliffe:

After nearly 40 years of admiration, sometimes for his music, sometimes for his attitude, through periods when I hardly heard him at all, to others when I feasted; at last I've seen and heard Neil Young in the flesh. What was most unusual was that this hero didn’t let me down.

[SNIP]

Neil went for the heart’s main aorta from the first song, and I gave myself up to him completely for the next two hours. Any of us could have written a set list with or without any of the songs he played, but I thought the pacing and the choice was nigh immaculate. Once he had played He Hey My My, one of my top ten revolving Neil Young favourites of all time – Rust Never Sleeps was possibly my most played album of 1980 – he could play whatever he liked, and I’ve have been just as happy. As it happened, every song, familiar and unfamiliar, compounded into a blaze of supreme magnificence. I was glad there were such big gaps in my knowledge of his material, because I love hearing music for the first time, and I certainly did that. If there’s anything I love it’s a good trancey guitar wig-out, and he left me drooling with rapture, punching the air and wailing as he did things to his instrument that can’t have been legal, and went beyond rock music in to pure sonics. Prehistoric feedback dragged from the pit of creation ended the night, Neil’s guitar a naked soul exposed, as it lay against the drum-riser, burnt out but still sputtering in the memory of music; utterly ravished…

Might have got a bit carried away there, but I’m still high from it, and I’m about to have thrash at my acoustic, and sharpen some memories of one the very finest gigs I’ve attended since I bought my first ticket, in 1970.