Now it's getting late: on Neil Young, ageing and fatherhood

Spectator

3 days ago

Neil Young once saved my life. Or at least, that's how I remember it.
This was at an outdoor show in Finsbury Park in July 1993. I had pushed and squeezed my way almost to the front of a large crowd shortly after being passed something of dubious provenance to smoke. One moment everything was perfect: he was playing that romantic late career hit, 'Harvest Moon', the sun was setting, the moon, conveniently, rising, and I was swaying along, rapturous. But then, suddenly – bang… I fainted.
This is the only time in my 45-year gig-going career that this has happened. But I was gone. I was briefly unconscious, then I came to lying on my back on the grass, looking up at dozens of legs all around and above me, almost on top of me. I realised that I needed to get up but I was still woozy, too weak to stand. I needed to gather my strength. Meanwhile Young was getting to the end: 'But now it's getting late… And the moon is climbing high.' I could no longer see the moon, just those legs.
Then 'Harvest Moon' ended and applause and cheers came over my head, but I still couldn't stand. And this is when Neil Young saved my life, which felt at this moment as if it was in the balance. He did this by playing a ballad, 'The Needle and the Damage Done' (which is, perhaps appropriately, about the dangers of drug misuse).
Because of this slow number I was able to spend another two minutes with my head between my knees steeling myself to get up. Had he played a rockier number – and 'Powderfinger', 'Down by the River', 'Like a Hurricane' and 'Rockin' in the Free World' were all on the set list that night – the space would have become a mosh pit and I would have been trampled. But 'The Needle' saved me.
As it ended I finally managed to stand and then retreated to where it was less jammed to watch the rest of the show, shaken by how imperilled I had felt. And I realised that that song selection had been crucial in me getting out uninjured.
I've seen Neil Young play a few more times in the years since – most memorably in an explosive performance at Brixton Academy in 2002, one of the best live shows I've ever been to. Alexis Petridis's review of that night in the Guardian concluded: 'Like one of his own guitar solos, you suspect [Neil Young] could go on forever.' And he pretty much has.
But when I saw he was playing again this summer in Hyde Park in London, exactly 32 years to the day of that collapse in Finsbury Park, I initially had no urge to go. He'll turn 80 this autumn – and after seeing now voiceless Bob Dylan disappoint too many times, I felt Young would probably be going the same way.
But then Number One Son started badgering me to take him. He's recently converted from being almost exclusively into hardcore US rap to preferring the rock bands of the early 1970s: Led Zep, the Stones and now also, it seems, Neil Young. So it felt like an open goal opportunity for some parent/child bonding.
Arriving in Hyde Park, I realise I am at the younger end of the age spectrum in the audience, a rarity these days. We miss the first support act, Van Morrison, because he finishes half an hour earlier than he was listed to. It seems Young has made a late alteration to the timings to give himself longer on stage. We do see Cat Stevens and get to hug each other as he plays 'Father and Son' – a touching moment, even if the song is about parent-child estrangement.
Before the main event, son goes for drinks and comes back ambitiously holding four pints. One minute you're feeding crying babies in the middle of the night, the next they're getting the beers in, I reflect. In Neil Young terminology, it seems like only yesterday that I was '24 and there's so much more' – Number One Son's age next birthday – and now I'm the old man being urged to look at the young man who is 'a lot like you were'. And indeed my son, I see, is a lot like I was. He is soon urging me to go further into the crowd. And we do this, with our four pints, only this time he does the pushing and apologising and I simply follow.
I find myself thinking again of that night in 1993 when I came close to getting crushed and of other misadventures in my twenties that might have stopped me making it to my fifties. A number of my friends from those days didn't make it.
Young opens his set with 'Ambulance Blues', which notes: 'It's easy to get buried in the past.' And he's right. So I try to stop brooding and to concentrate on enjoying the evening – to be in the moment, as they say these days. Once again he plays both 'Harvest Moon' – son's favourite – and 'The Needle and the Damage Done'. This time I manage to stay vertical.
It's a wonderful night. The heatwave makes the air shimmer and Young can still sing that haunting high tenor, even if he is a curmudgeon who looks like a tramp. But, in fairness, so, increasingly, am I. Young also plays 'Hey Hey, My My', the companion piece to his punk era song that states: 'It's better to burn out than to fade away.' I wonder if he still thinks that?
A couple of years after my 1990s white-out I attended another outdoor gig, in this same spot in Hyde Park – the Who, Eric Clapton and Bob Dylan – and wrote about it for a Sunday red-top. I recall writing the extremely snarky intro: 'Hyde Park became Jurassic Park last night as the dinosaurs of rock turned out to play.' Those dinosaurs would have been considerably younger then than I am now, I realise.
One of these days Neil Young will die. I'm hoping he predeceases me – and I'm hoping I predecease my son. Who knows what will happen to any of us. But it was briefly pleasing for all three of us to be in the same field for one evening in the summer of 2025.