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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Parisian heights

Charles Spencer on seeing Neil Young in Paris

The other change was less welcome. The food struck me as mostly terrible. The bistros all seem to serve up the same limited menu of ropey steak frites, greasy, gristly boeuf bourguignon and, yes, glutinous French onion soup with tasteless elastic cheese. Admittedly, we were eating at a pretty basic, touristy level, and the food was cheap, but one begins to understand why McDonald’s and Starbucks now have such a stranglehold on Paris. In the old days Parisians would never have allowed such transatlantic interlopers to prosper.

There was, however, one hugely welcome visitor from America during our stay, the great Neil Young; I’d been kicking myself for failing to secure tickets for his recent London concerts and here he was in Paris. Needless to say his shows were sold out, but a charming tout sold me an excellent seat for 400 euros (to the vocal dismay of my wife and son) and it proved worth every cent.

I’ve loved Neil Young since I was 15, when After the Gold Rush was the hip record of 1970 at school, while the thrilling duelling guitar epics on Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere accompanied many a prolonged and enjoyable snogging session with my first girlfriend, the lovely Mandy Street.

At 62, and having recently recovered from a brain aneurysm, Neil is in fantastic form. That beautiful high and lonesome voice is still intact, and was deployed to magnificent effect in the first acoustic half of the show, when he performed alone on piano and acoustic guitar. Pottering about among his myriad instruments and singing songs like ‘A Man Needs a Maid’ and ‘Cowgirl in the Sand’, his stooped, introverted manner and shy introductions made him seem like a delightfully bumbling old don.

After the interval, however, all was changed, changed utterly, as he and his band tore into his rockier back catalogue in a climactic orgy of rumbling, wailing, feedback-drenched guitar solos. The meek figure of the first half now seemed like some deranged and savage Neanderthal on the warpath as he pounded out the riffs and celebrated the sheer soaring strength of rock’n’roll at its greatest.

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