Saturday 27 June 2009

Like a hurricane...



Neil Young was awesome. I found myself being dragged through crowds of people by a hyperactive gay man in high-heeled wellies and clutching onto the hand of new-best-friend Cat to the front-ish of the Pyramid, as you do. One song in and wellies decided he was bored and vanished, leaving me and Cat to rock out to the godfather of grunge.

By chance, found ourselves standing next to the prettiest man in the whole entire festival, in front of the most stoned person I have ever seen and a group of very drunk men, who I think wanted him to play Helpless Old Man, or were just heckling.

Mr  Young was dressed...in a sort of shirt-cape combo, and wasn't terribly talkative, but seemed happy enough in what he was doing. We were treated to The Needle and the Damage Done, Hey Hey Hey, Heart of Gold and of course, a never ending version of Rockin' in the Free World - a perfect closer. We jumped, yelled, whooped, did the mash potato and generally behaved like people do when they're at festivals, clapping, waving, bouncing and shouting.

I've managed to damage my voice with all the yelling and I sound a little more like Daria then I'm entirely happy with. Totally worth it though.

He was pure rock, all the way through, ripping the strings out of his battered Les Paul, the camera zooming in on the trashed instrument, resting against an amp in a clear "this sums up rock n' roll in one single image" moment. This however, was slightly ruined when Neil (we're on first name terms now) then stormed over to the Xylophone (or possibly Glockenspeil - anyone know the difference?), ripped the.. hitty bits out of the woman's hands, banged out a few notes, snarled and then contemptously hurled the stick things out into the middle of the stage, before leaving again.

...torturing guitars and amps is part of rock n' roll lore. Drum kits - sure. Xylophones - not so much. 

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