Surprised there is no thread for this series of UK dates. Neil rolled back the years in Glasgow on the first night of his UK tour. He had a coupla hillbillys throwing corn over the stage. We were laughing and never expected the beautiful shrill voice outta nowhere. it was After the Goldrush, and Neil was in a beat up hat on a beat up stand up piano making the most beautiful music on the planet. It took us by surprise , but he followed up with Heart of gold, Comes a time and a wonderful Unknown legend. He introduced Promise of the real with my favourite NY song, Out on the weekend. This is the song that got me into Neil. And then it just slid into Americana heaven. Alabama, Words, Down by the river. We timed that one as we had heard about a 40 minute version in the states. Well, we got 20 minutes. Love and only love was longer. Neil was hanging with the band, rocking like a bastard. He closed out with @#$%& up. He is a Shaman. An unbelievable gig.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2016-06-11 12:44 by letitloose.

I can't wait to see him in Milano in July . Among the old legends, he is the one who has still something to say.

Saw NY Glasgow on YouTube sounded amazing.
Looking forward to seeing him perform next month at Waldbuhne Berlin where I last saw the Stones play 2 years ago.

I´m going to O2 in London tonight. The set lists from this tour are really cool and the Promise of the Real sounds like a proper backing band. I hope he plays Cortez the Killer tonight. But first up is Exhibitionism!

Quote
The Worst.
I´m going to O2 in London tonight. The set lists from this tour are really cool and the Promise of the Real sounds like a proper backing band. I hope he plays Cortez the Killer tonight. But first up is Exhibitionism!

I think you will luv Neil with POTR. I saw them last fall & until recent Cure shows, it was the best show I'd seen in a long time. Probably the best I've seen Neil without Crazy Horse. In fact, I'd probably rather see him with POTR than with Crazy Horse at this point. POTR seem to have reenergized Neil & the shows have been wonderful. Enjoy!

I will see him tonight at O2. Looking forward.

Setlist from Leeds last night - good ones:

After the Gold Rush
Heart of Gold
Comes a Time
The Needle and the Damage Done
Mother Earth
From Hank to Hendrix
Out on the Weekend
Unknown Legend
Wolf Moon
Words
Winterlong
Walk On
If I Could Have Her Tonight
Down by the River
Powderfinger
Cowgirl in the Sand
Mansion on the Hill
Love to Burn
Rockin' in the Free World

Encore:
When You Dance, I Can Really Love
@#$%&' Up

Quote
mtaylor
I will see him tonight at O2. Looking forward.

Setlist from Leeds last night - good ones:

After the Gold Rush
Heart of Gold
Comes a Time
The Needle and the Damage Done
Mother Earth
From Hank to Hendrix
Out on the Weekend
Unknown Legend
Wolf Moon
Words
Winterlong
Walk On
If I Could Have Her Tonight
Down by the River
Powderfinger
Cowgirl in the Sand
Mansion on the Hill
Love to Burn
Rockin' in the Free World

Encore:
When You Dance, I Can Really Love
@#$%&' Up

I was there , on the floor. An incredible gig ! I would put it in my all time top 5 by anyone, including the Stones....... My ears are still ringing !

Quote
straycatuk

Quote
mtaylor
I will see him tonight at O2. Looking forward.

Setlist from Leeds last night - good ones:

After the Gold Rush
Heart of Gold
Comes a Time
The Needle and the Damage Done
Mother Earth
From Hank to Hendrix
Out on the Weekend
Unknown Legend
Wolf Moon
Words
Winterlong
Walk On
If I Could Have Her Tonight
Down by the River
Powderfinger
Cowgirl in the Sand
Mansion on the Hill
Love to Burn
Rockin' in the Free World

Encore:
When You Dance, I Can Really Love
@#$%&' Up

I was there , on the floor. An incredible gig ! I would put it in my all time top 5 by anyone, including the Stones....... My ears are still ringing !

I want a tape of this one! River into Powder into Cowgirl...Wow!

"I want a tape of this one! River into Powder into Cowgirl...Wow!"

It was..........intense !


sc uk

Imho the band's still warming up. The 1st three shows of the tour have been taped and shared and (imho) none of these gigs come close to the ferocity of the 2015 shwos in the US.

To follow the tour look here :
[www.sugarmtn.org]

"If I Could Have Her Tonight" 2nd perf ever since 1968... After "Vampire Blues" and this one I wonder what Neil will dig up next!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2016-06-11 15:43 by dcba.

I have the recordings of Glasgow and Dublin from DIME, amazing stuff! It is evident to me that POTR are Neil's new Crazy Horse!

Get some 2015 tapes off Dime : they're even more amazing.

Hello,

I can only parrot what all you fine IORRians have already said about this tour..this band. Unreal and stupendous...if you can get to The O2 tonight (yeah, I know Eng are playing their first game in the Euros but with NY & POTR at least you're guaranteed a result) then I cannot recommend them highly enough. Right, SC UK? Hell yeah...good to see you!





























The following is from a piece in Uncut magazine by Michael Bonner:

“I just don’t listen,” says Neil Young. He is considering the capricious turns his career has taken and whether, along the way, he has ever listened to any advice offered to him by his fellow musicians. “Many years ago, I was touring in England, maybe 1973,” he continues. “I was playing Tonight’s The Night. We had an opening act, The Eagles. Glenn Frey said to me, ‘Why are you destroying your career? You have this incredible record that came out [Harvest], and everybody loves it. Now you’re singing about heroin and overdoses and cocaine and gunshots and blood all over the car. What are you singing this stuff for? Why do you do this?’ There’s no answer. I don’t have an answer.”

Young is currently in the prestigious surroundings of his UK record company, Warner Brothers, for a bespoke event to launch his latest album, Earth – a tremendous live set recorded on tour with his current backing band, Promise Of The Real. Taking place in a bright, airy space in the middle of the building, which also doubles as the company’s canteen and bar, the event consists of a Q&A followed by a playback of the album. The audience consists of journalists, band members and crew and a smattering of celebrities including Noel Gallagher and the actress Caroline Catz.

High up on a wall – decorated to emulate the sleeve for Pink Floyd’s album The Wall – hangs a large photograph of Young, intended to promote tonight’s event: ‘An evening with Neil Young’. In the photograph, Young is depicted wearing a grey suit jacket and a white hat; he looks spruce and clean-shaven, with his muttonchops neatly trimmed and his eyes bright and clear.

“The guy in that picture, he’s scary,” Young says, gazing at this image of his younger self. “That was a long time ago.” He points at his face. “This is now.”

‘Now’ – aged 70, that is – Young is wearing a black t-shirt with the word ‘Earth’ emblazoned on it. Over that, he wears a grey check shirt while a black hat barely restrains his hair, which is gradually turning white.

Earlier, Young has been 20 minutes late arriving – caught in traffic on the motorway, it transpires – and while we waited, Weld – Young’s 1991 live album with Crazy Horse – was played over the stereo system. It might seem a little unfair to stack an album as storied as Weld next to his current live effort. But hearing Weld so close to Earth helps put this new album into valuable context. Both records find Young and his backing bands at their most rapturous and expansive. Promise Of The Real sound not unlike Crazy Horse, and deliver the crunching riffs, deafening major chords and harmonies that have typified many of Young’s best records.

While Weld offered a pleasing summary of Young and Crazy Horse’s many peaks together, Earth has a different agenda. Recorded on last year’s Rebel Content tour, Earth brings together songs from throughout Young’s career that address his lengthy, quixotic history of eco-activism, stretching back to 1970’s After The Goldrush.

“This album is a natural progression of things that started in my head maybe 5 or 10 years ago,” Young explains. “I started thinking about the concerts that I’d done, the songs that I’d been singing for some years and how I’d come round to focus on things that I think matter now more than my own personal life. So I decided that I’d try to put these songs together – the songs that represented something – in a tour.

“I was in the studio listening to live recordings that I’d made. I listened to 25 shows, which ran to 2 ½ to three hours. I listened and listened and picked the tracks that we liked, and those are the tracks that make up Earth. When I listened to all these tracks, that’s when it came to me what I was doing. That if I chose these tracks, we were going to be singing about this thing for years.”

As anyone who has followed Young’s career recently will have noticed, he has taken issue with the McCorporations who dominate the agricultural industry. On his last album, The Monsanto Years, he levied a sustained attack against the with agrochemical giant and their patronage of genetically modified seeds.

“In the short run, coffee gets you going,” he says. “But after a while, you have another cup and it’s like any drug, you start taking it. That’s what they’re doing to the land. At first, it seems more productive because its jacked out of its mind, it’s completely going off. After a few years, it can’t sustain that, so it’s over. What’s the solution to that? Luckily, the scientists have come up with the idea that you just use more of the product, then everything will be fine. So more pesticides.”

The purpose of Earth, says Young, is straightforward. “I wanted to say something on behalf of the animals and on behalf of the organic things on earth that are being polluted by all of these GMO seeds and the diversity that we’re losing through all this.”

Among the album’s highlights are several tracks that have not been performed live since the early Seventies, including “Vampire Blues” and “Hippie Dream”. The former, from On The Beach, is an assault on the rapacious oil industry. Young dates the song: “1973,” he says. “‘Sucking blood from the earth’. It sounds good. ‘I’m a vampire / sucking blood from the earth / give me 20 barrels worth’. That’s cool. Over time, it turned out not to be so cool. Not cool at all.”

“Hippie Dream”, meanwhile, reflected Young’s increasing dissatisfaction with the way the Sixties’ ideals had become corrupted. The line, “Just because it’s over for you / doesn’t mean it’s over for me”, was reportedly directed as David Crosby, who was then struggling with a heavy drug habit.

“That was me speaking to a drug addict that was wasting a lifetime,” Young acknowledges. “But it’s not what songs are about. People say things because they feel them, but if you really feel it, really believe it, then everybody everywhere feels that you really believe what you said then they apply it to their lives. It’s not precisely what I was talking about. They have a feeling, they can latch onto that as being authentic and real then they can actually ride and go wherever they want to go with it.”

“I’m a rocker,” concludes Young. “I just sing what I believe and what I’ve learned. I’ve studied it, I’ve spent a lot of time doing that and I take it very seriously.”

EARTH is released on June 17 by Reprise."
Cheers,

Simon.

Leipzig July 20th!!!! and if you get a second go check out the venue unbeleiveable.M

Great pics SimonN!

Looking forward to listening to Earth to relive last years US shows.
And dare I say, if the show I saw last year at the Forum is anything to go by, Neil and band just might be THE highlight of Desert Trip (well at least in the top 6 ).
Seriously though, I look forward to seeing him again more than any other band on the bill - including the Stones.

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

Great Pictures Simon ! It was really good to catch up pre gig. I might have to do more of these drive-to gigs.........sober and remembering them is a revelation
He is without doubt the real deal. I thought a pairing with the Stones would work at Desert trip, but after seeing this show , they shouldn't risk it

SC UK

.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2016-06-11 20:31 by jambay.

Quote
letitloose
Surprised there is no thread for this series of UK dates. Neil rolled back the years in Glasgow on the first night of his UK tour. He had a coupla hillbillys throwing corn over the stage. We were laughing and never expected the beautiful shrill voice outta nowhere. it was After the Goldrush, and Neil was in a beat up hat on a beat up stand up piano making the most beautiful music on the planet. It took us by surprise , but he followed up with Heart of gold, Comes a time and a wonderful Unknown legend. He introduced Promise of the real with my favourite NY song, Out on the weekend. This is the song that got me into Neil. And then it just slid into Americana heaven. Alabama, Words, Down by the river. We timed that one as we had heard about a 40 minute version in the states. Well, we got 20 minutes. Love and only love was longer. Neil was hanging with the band, rocking like a bastard. He closed out with @#$%& up. He is a Shaman. An unbelievable gig.

YES. I saw Neil at the O2 in Dublin last week. Incredible show...really much prefer to Crazy Horse backing him up...Don't miss it...

Amsterdam,Ziggo Dome ~~ 9 Juli !!

Just listened to a tape of the Belfast show. I don't think this collaboration has peaked yet. Scary (& good)!

Quote
crholmstrom
Just listened to a tape of the Belfast show. I don't think this collaboration has peaked yet.

Yeah I just got a hit of the Lille show (June 13) and to me it sounded like a cover band trying to replicate what NY was doing on the 1991 live album "Weld".

Take "Love To Burn" it's pretty good, it lasts 17 minutes but a person (me) who bought "Weld" back in 1991 won't be that impressed by it.

Like I said to me the tour hasn't yet reached the heights of the US 2015 dates.

Hate to go against the grain, and fly in the face of all the glowing reviews but I was at the Glasgow show, and was not quite so impressed. The show started brilliantly with Neil in fine voice, however I felt it lost momentum towards the end, and that he was very self-indulgent. I was expecting a few long guitar solos but there was just too much pointless noodling for my tastes and not enough actual songs in the last hour of the show.

I certainly feel that songs like Cortez, Hurricane, Harvest, Powderfinger, Old Man, Helpless, Keep on Rockin, Hey Hey My My, Country Home, When you Dance etc would have been preferable to the extremely long version of Love and Only Love which closed the show before the encore. Nice to see a band jamming and enjoying themselves but the audience around me were getting a bit bored and restless, along with myself.

I realise that some people will admire him for NOT playing all of his "warhorses", but as a more casual fan, I was disappointed. Having seen Bruce Springsteen absolutely slay his audience a few days earlier, I was slightly underwhelmed by Neil, although there is no doubt his band are great musicians. Each to their own I suppose.....

I see that he did "Revolution Blues" in London. That would be a bucket list one for me.

Quote
HonkyTonkJan

I realise that some people will admire him for NOT playing all of his "warhorses"

I'd tend to think he relies too much on warhorses.
Check the June 11 show setlist for the acoustic segment :

1. After The Gold Rush
2. Heart Of Gold
3. Long May You Run
4. The Needle And The Damage Done
5. Mother Earth (Natural Anthem)
6. Out On The Weekend

"Heart Of Gold" & "The Needle And The Damage Done" imo Neil can stop playing these till he retires.

A rare man, never disappoints me. The London gig was up there with the very best i've ever seen him, with all manner of different backing bands

A last trooper of the old guard that still sounds as good today as he ever did. With maybe Tom Waits in close company but that's it.

Quote
andy js
A rare man, never disappoints me. The London gig was up there with the very best i've ever seen him, with all manner of different backing bands

A last trooper of the old guard that still sounds as good today as he ever did. With maybe Tom Waits in close company but that's it.

I'm thinking Iggy Pop should be on this list, too. The tour with Josh Homme was stellar.

Proof:

[www.youtube.com]

Not for me, I love old Iggy (well with the Stooges at least) but i've never been mad impressed with him live