Saturday 27/06/09 Neil Young, Seasick Steve, Fleet Foxes @ Hard Rock Calling, Hyde Park, London

Let us begin by throwing down a gauntlet of sorts: If you go and see Seasick Steve at a festival and don’t enjoy his unique concoction of burnt down vampire blues, ramshackle homemade instrumentation and mischievous storytelling then you need to write back to me explaining why you are such a fucking bore.

It has recently become a bit fashionable to question his integrity and authenticity, like “OOOH, GOTCHA- you’re don’t really give tramps hand jobs and busk for cider down Tescos so I can’t possibly enjoy your hobo showmanship”. Oh please stop.       

Thankfully, instead of carving ‘4real’ into his arm live onstage, Steve brings some raucous blues and an effortless charm to a sunny day in Hyde Park, captured best in the improvised version of ‘Dog House Boogie’.

Don’t know about you but I still can’t enjoy his recorded output though and it looks like he is going to need to enter into some kind of Dylan-esque perpetual tour to keep people interested.  

Ah, Fleet Foxes. What more can be said other than they justify their inevitable place in the lineage of great evangelical Americana. Good to see that all of that critical frothing at the mouth from last year wasn’t wasted on them, they sound bigger and more harmonious than ever, from the opening ‘Sun Giant’ right through to a gorgeous ‘Oliver James’, making Gigwise and 40,000 other disciples swoon before them.  All you need are ears to enjoy and they won’t even make you drink Jesus Juice.      

Seriously though, Robin and his band of merry men are a timeless voice in the wilderness of these bleak times. Hallelujah!       

However poignant the opening line of first song ‘Hey Hey, My My’ (“The king is gone but he’s not forgotten”) may seem right now, tonight needs to be about celebrating music royalty who remain with us. Headliner Neil Young, for his part storms onstage resembling a hard as nails pissed off farmer wielding a wall of country feedback instead of a pitchfork.

Notoriously a contrary character, he puts that entire notion aside to summon up the ghosts of his past and present tonight. So, we’re treated to a hypnotic ‘Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere’ and a primal, brilliant, white-hot take on ‘Cinnamon Girl’.  The guitar onslaught is eventually followed by a stripped back acoustic interlude providing shelter from the storm that features ‘Heart of Gold’ and a communal sing-along of ‘Old Man’, all sung with the bright glow of campfire warmth that permeates most of Young’s 1970’s albums.  

Despite this, your enjoyment of a Neil Young concert will invariably be defined by a tolerance of face melting guitar solos, as Young erupts them across the stage approximately every two seconds.  

Still, this is kind of the reason that ‘Down by the River’ still sounds immense 15 minutes in, the same reason that Neil Young has inspired every great American band of the last 20 years (Flaming Lips, Built to Spill, Grizzly Bear- Jeez, It would be easier to start a list of who ISN’T half decent and greatly inspired by Young).       

My face still melting from all of those solos, I get up to counting 9000 choruses to ‘Rockin in the Free World’ before I’m consumed entirely by its circular whirlpool of melodic, glorious noise.

For the finale, Young launches into a warped version of The Beatles’s ‘A Day in the life’ (which starts off sounding bizarrely like his own ‘Broken Arrow’) and is joined for a joyous duet by Sir Paul McCartney, which ends with both music legends arm in arm tinkering over a vibraphone. Like two faces of a Rock N Roll version of Mount Rushmore, they stand imperious and reflective for a second before disappearing into the humid London night.