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NEIL YOUNG & THE CHROME HEARTS : GLASTONBURY 2025
- Sugar Mountain
- Be The Rain
- When You Dance, I Can Really Love
- Cinnamon Girl
- F*!#in' Up
- Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)
- The Needle And The Damage Done
- Harvest Moon
- Looking Forward
- Sun Green
- Love And Only Love
- Like A Hurricane
- Name Of Love
- Old Man
- Rockin' In The Free World
- Throw Your Hatred Down
Label : no label
Venue : Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm, Pilton, UK
Recording Date : June 28, 2025
Length : 113 minutes
NTSC : 16:9
Concert Review (The Guardian) : Neil Young’s second headlining appearance at Glastonbury has a turbulent history, even before you get to his publicly expressed fear that, despite being a Canadian with American citizenship, he won’t be allowed back into his adopted homeland because of his criticism of Donald Trump. He announced that he was dropping out of the festival even before the lineup was announced, having picked a slightly baffling fight with the BBC over their coverage of the event, which he described as a “corporate turnoff”. Two days later, he announced he’d changed his mind, although the wrangling over whether or not the BBC would be allowed to livestream his performance seems to have gone down to the wire: last week they issued a statement saying they wouldn’t, but in the event the live stream went ahead. A man who’s been conducting his career according to his own baffling internal logic for the best part of 60 years, Young clearly sees no reason to change his approach as he nears 80: not for nothing is his online blog called the Times Contrarian. It lends a certain frisson to his Glastonbury appearance: as longstanding fans will tell you, with a mixture of weariness and fond admiration, you never quite know what he’s going to do, although what the floating voters who invariably make up a significant percentage of a Glastonbury audience will think of it is anyone’s guess. He takes the stage clad in a tattered plaid shirt, jeans and a Casey Jones hat pulled down over his face: in old age, he increasingly looks less like a rock star than a mechanic from a small American town who distrusts anyone not born within a mile radius of its centre. He dispatches a version of Sugar Mountain on acoustic guitar, before the Chrome Hearts arrive. This is essentially his earlier outfit Promise of the Real augmented by 82-year-old keyboard player Spooner Oldham, a man whose career stretches back to Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett’s legendary late 60s albums. They may well be the best backing band Young has assembled since Crazy Horse, their sound simultaneously tumultuous and lumbering and heavily distorted. Cinnamon Girl, from 1969, and 1990’s Fuckin’ Up alike conclude with lengthy barrages of noise: during the latter, guitarist Micah Nelson creates feedback by throwing this guitar into the air. At their best, they’re impossibly thrilling. Young’s lengthy guitar solos have an impassioned, almost caustic quality, and the sense of the musicians huddled together at the centre of the stage sparring off each other is really striking. At one point, it seems as if Young is going to start rolling out one venerable classic after another, to general delight: a version of Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black) is followed by an acoustic section featuring The Needle and the Damage Done and a lovely, lambent take on Harvest Moon provokes the audience into singing softly along. But simply playing a crowd-pleasing selection of what you might broadly describe as the hits wouldn’t be very Neil Young: instead, he throws in Sun Green, a painfully slow, musically unchanging track from his coolly received, ecologically themed early 00s concept album Greendale. It has 18 verses, and lasts so long that you’re occasionally gripped by the very real fear they’ll still be up on the Pyramid stage playing it long after the festival has ended. Some of the floating voters take this as a cue to see what’s happening elsewhere on site. But then he plays Like a Hurricane, accompanied by Nelson playing a keyboard that seems to be suspended from the roof of the stage. An acoustic version of Old Man is warmly received yet makes for a weirdly downbeat end to the set, but an encore of Rockin’ in the Free World offers what you might call the full festival experience. The screens keep flashing on to the audience: there are people on their friends’ shoulders singing along. A suitably inscrutable onstage presence for most of the night, Young is visibly enjoying himself. He leaves the stage having headlined Glastonbury in a manner entirely in keeping with his longstanding reputation.
Concert Review (Independent) : And so Neil Young wanders into the wide-angled glare of the Pyramid Stage, blinded by the on-air camera lights, having succumbed to what he previously dubbed the “corporate turn-off” of the modern-day, red-buttonable Glastonbury experience. “How you doing at home in your bedrooms?” he grumps, his stand against the Beebification of the event faltered and his set duly broadcast. But, to be honest, he should be thankful for the additional audience. The Make Everything Pop Again brigade have long argued that Charli XCX should be in this 79-year-old legend’s slot, and you can only concede the point – Young’s Pyramid crowd is as sparse as any headliner’s this writer has seen since Youssou N’ Dour in 1992. As he takes the stage alone, with just a guitar and harmonica and clad in a back-lounge shirt, to strum modestly through 1977’s “Sugar Mountain”, the scene is very much giving mid-afternoon at the Acoustic Stage. He’s met with no little reverence from the faithful though, and as his Chrome Hearts band join him for a refined churn through the heavyweight grunge country of “Be the Rain”, he undoubtedly still sounds like a bill-topping force. Adding loudhailer yelps through a megatron of a mike stand – numerous effects microphones lined up across a trident of vocal-skewing possibility – he belies any potential accusations of tired old fashion. And the CSNY-style harmonies of “When You Dance, I Can Really Love You” and crunching power rock of “Cinnamon Girl” prove him as capable of thundering through a mighty catalogue as any of Glastonbury’s regular rock greats. What develops is kind of a gnarled, intense country rock equivalent of Bowie in 2000. Half an hour in, Young is unleashing “Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)” in the style of a demonic REM, then following it by sitting alone on the drum riser for a vulnerable solo “The Needle and the Damage Done”. In turn, a loping, languid “Harvest Moon” strikes up, a bayou beauty of a song that will make those at Glasto now a-brat think themselves accursed they were not here. It’s perfect crowd-pleasing for Young’s select, blessed crowd. His idea of a special guest is Hank Williams’s guitar, held aloft at the end of the gorgeous, pastoral CSNY song “Looking Forward”. His pyrotechnics are strictly of the fretboard variety and generally aimed into a circle of bandmates. His headline-catching political soundbites often come buried in narrative and metaphor: witness the harassed protester of “Sun Green”. But for a man who, on some recent albums, has been in a battle with himself to record the longest song possible, the first hour is remarkably tight, hit-laden and unflabby. A loose, lumbering, grimy blues segment is more challenging, but Young pulls it back with a spacey and dynamic “Like a Hurricane”, his keyboardist playing a wire-suspended keyboard with black wings. And as he takes to a rustic organ for a frail but sublime “Name of Love”, powers through a cased-in-brimstone “Rockin’ in the Free World” and utilises his watching audience of millions to make a pointedly anti-war, anti-hate and (subliminally) anti-Trump protest statement with “Throw Your Hatred Down”, his original point is wholeheartedly proven. Glastonbury shouldn’t become all about audience share, televisual spectacle and trend-chasing popularity. It always has, and should always be, about the planet’s best music performed with heart and intensity for anyone who wants to gather to hear it. And by and large, the BBC’s cameras got Neil Young’s best side.
Concert Review (Rolling Stone) : The road to Neil Young‘s second ever crack at headlining Glastonbury has given organisers, you sense, the kind of logistical headache that could only be cured by taking a metric tonne of ibuprofen. It began back in January when he announced the slot on his own website, before making a U-turn days later and stating he was pulling out due to the “corporate control” of the BBC. In another twist, he then went back on that withdrawal and said he would be playing after all. All this, of course, before the man himself requested last week that the show couldn’t be broadcast on the BBC. You’ve probably guessed what happens next. Yep, another u-turn. It’s to no one’s surprise, then, that Young’s Pyramid headline show is delivered entirely on his own terms. He arrives on stage in a battered flannel shirt before going straight into ‘Sugar Mountain’ – a neat reminder of Young’s formative days in the early 60s. But it’s performed to a notably small crowd. There’s no doubt that Charli XCX feels like tonight’s real headliner for most on site, and that is reflected by one of the weekend’s sparsest crowds. We arrive just as Young starts and get to the very front in a matter of minutes, a relatively rare feat for Glastonbury headline crowds. For those in attendance though, there’s plenty of Glastonbury Moments™ that make it worth their while. The swooning romance of ‘Harvest Moon’ sees the whole crowd swaying as one and ‘Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)’ is met like an old friend. The furious ‘Like a Hurricane’ sees Young’s excellent new band The Chrome Hearts turn the song into an absolute monster, while his keyboardist thrashes the life out of a winged piano that has arrived from the rafters. Young keeps crowd interaction to a minimum but, in fairness, sounds brilliant for a man approaching 80 during a 90-minute set. It’s just a shame that we didn’t get to hear it on ‘Heart of Gold’ – which would have finally been the moment that this set of deep cuts and sporadic hits could have found take off. It never truly reaches that point, but you sense that die-hard fans of the curmudgeonly legend will have no complaints. Nor too, it seems, do those at the Pyramid Stage who scream back every single word of ‘Rockin in the Free World’ as he wraps up his set. This, they will tell you, is Neil being Neil. A headline show delivered, for better or worse, entirely on his own terms.