Neil Young Live At Hyde Park Review: An old master reasserts the liberating powers of rock’n’roll

Neil Young, BST Hyde Park, Friday, July 11, 2025

There is a purity of intent to Neil Young that makes him seem, in this busy live summer of 2025, even more of an anachronism than ever. At Glastonbury, his ornery denial of current practice felt to some of us heroic - no pyro, no FX, no cabaret style troupe of special guests: the music and the pursuit of the sound was the spectacle. If cruise ship kitsch felt like the prerequisite for legend success at Glastonbury, Young seemed happier than ever to fail on his own terms.

Headlining BST Hyde Park tonight, he is in a safer and more accepting space, where the extended timbre of an electric guitar matters more to most than a Lulu showbiz cameo. He begins with an invocation – “Back in the old folky days/ The air was magic when we played” – but only the second part of it is actually audible, since Young’s mic isn’t switched on in what turns out to be a symmetrical foreshadowing of how the show will end 125 minutes later.

This, of course, is Ambulance Blues, back in setlist rotation for the first time in 17 years (save a one-off airing in 2019), and fleshed out with a band in a way that Young has rarely performed it live. The Chrome Hearts are the backing here, an uncommonly flexible – by Young band standards – outfit who can work with great subtlety when their leader demands. On Ambulance Blues, it’s the implacably great Spooner Oldham who tracks the song’s wandering path, his organ providing ebb and shade where Rusty Kershaw’s fiddle did on the On The Beach original.

Young was last on this stage, and in this city, six years ago, the first half of an all-time double bill with Bob Dylan. His band that night, Promise Of The Real, proved adept at transforming from Crazy Horse to The Stray Gators from song to song, but they also occasionally cluttered the sound, Lukas and Micah Nelson’s guitars sometimes not leaving adequate space for Young’s own protean manoeuvres.

The Chrome Hearts are ostensibly the same band, with Spooner Oldham drafted in place of Lukas Nelson, but the removal of one guitar from the mix turns out to be critical. Now, Young has a band of great discretion and delicacy but also one whose brutalist attack can accurately mimic that of peak Crazy Horse. Anthony Logerfo is a drummer who can cut the fuss like Ralph Molina when the need arises: his watchful lurch on Love To Burn is impeccable. And a sequence of When You Dance, I Can Really Love, Cinnamon Girl and Fuckin' Up drills down hard on the songs’ blocky ur-punk potential, Young’s belligerent grin as he enters the scrum with Micah Nelson and bassist Corey McCormick an explict acknowledgement of how energising this new set-up can be.

The Love Earth tour, then, finds Young in heroically contrarian form, flipping between his most aggressive and bucolic music, between crowdpleasers and a roster of deep cuts that’s stayed consistent through this European summer jaunt. The two Greendale songs that he’s dusted down, Be The Rain and Sun Green, are fun enough, not least because he gets to play with a remote control megaphone rig that could well have been hotwired as a home engineering project in his shed. But it’s the two late CSNY nuggets, Looking Forward and Name Of Love, that are the surprise keepers. Name Of Love especially is a wonder, Young sat with his harmonica at the pipe organ, the hushed four-part harmonies note-perfect, Oldham on a gaffa-taped upright piano that’s janky and well-loved even by the battered standards of Young’s kit.

These musical antiquities, and the charms and totems that cluster around them, dress the stage for Young’s own comfort rather than a visual extravaganza, but it’s also a conceit that makes a massive gig weird and intimate. There is one concession to spectacle, after a fashion, when Micah Nelson summons down the dangling Stringman synth, dressed with the Dangerbird cut-out, that he’s inherited from Poncho Sampedro for Like A Hurricane. It’s a sacred moment, hilariously undermined by Young himself, who suddenly decides to charge into Hey Hey, My My instead, and who pointedly gestures for the bird to be winched back up mid-fervid solo.

Nelson, though, is unflappable, an MVP whose voice and tone perhaps make him closer to a Danny Whitten than a Nils Lofgren or Sampedro, and whose beat-up guitar, ripped t-shirt and loyalty to old promo cast-offs (a Crazy Horse jacket, no less) show strong aesthetic solidarity with his bandleader.

Young, meanwhile, is a mixture of righteous fury and gentle wisdom, his voice miraculously intact when he brings things close and sweet for Harvest Moon, Old Man and, at the piano as the sun sets, an elegaic After The Goldrush (the gig’s one new addition to the tour repertoire). There are times, too, when his playing seems as good as it’s ever been. This seasoned Young-watcher struggles to recall seeing a better Cowgirl In The Sand than the one he unravels straight after Ambulance Blues, finding new routes and inflections through the song 56 years down the line.

Cowgirl apart, the blustery, questing Crazy Horse songs are mostly swerved in favour of urgency, directness, calls to action. The encore begins with an impassioned Throw Your Hatred Down – one of those lyrics that have only become more pertinent with age – then clatters into a sensational Rockin’ In The Free World. On and on it goes, and again and again the Chrome Hearts judder to somewhere approximating an end, only to steam back into one more validatory chorus.

It is only the Hyde Park curfew that can stop them: Rockin’ In The Free World ends with Young and his fine band with the PA switched off, burning out unheard by the audience. An ironic silencing, perhaps, but what precedes it has been plenty enough. Times move on, and Charli XCX might have taken the Saturday night crowds and headlines at Glastonbury. But if you need a sense-check on how the symbiotic bond between political liberation and rock’n’roll remains potent, even now, a Neil Young gig will do just fine.

Neil Young, BST Hyde Park, July 9, 2025, Setlist:

Photo: Isha Shah