The third and final time I have witnessed Neil Young was at the Phoenix Festival on Friday 19th July 1996. It made history as the first ever 4-day festival in the UK. The festival site was located at the cavernous disused Long Marston airfield near Stratford Upon Avon. Gill and I obtained a day ticket and we grabbed some lodgings in Stratford.
It was a staggeringly hot day, one of those exceptionally sultry days that only occur in Britain every couple of years. Before we left the digs and due to the weather, I observed the most gigantic spider I have ever seen, resulting in the door being summarily shut on it and by our return it had thankfully departed….
There wasn’t much forward planning involved as Gill and I were wearing varying degrees of inappropriate footwear and for some inexplicable reason we decided to walk to the site.
Out of the town led onto a winding country road and you could hear the throb and the thrum of the music but after a sustained period of walking the sound didn’t appear to be getting any nearer. We passed a farm with an entrepreneurial punter selling freezing bottles of water from an outdoor fridge. Not long after that we managed to cadge a lift to the site from a kind punter in a passing motor.
We landed late afternoon and first caught Nylon Bombers, an unspectacular Britpop band from Cheltenham who subsequently broke up later that year.
We caught some of the sets of Manic Street Preachers and Super Furry Animals on the main stage. We saw Dodgy whose upbeat track ‘Staying Out for the Summer’ could not have been more apposite!
I enjoyed a Foo Fighters set which was an early career performance from them, the highlight being ‘Monkey Wrench’.
The main support act was one of those artists who was a passing fad at that point in time. Alanis Morrisette went down well with a fair proportion of the audience, but I find it all a tad bland.
Neil Young was backed up by the ever-dependable Crazy Horse. It was by a long way my favourite performance as he was in crackling form and fabulously loud. He opened with a fine trifecta ‘Hey Hey My My (into the Black)’, ‘Down by the River’ and ‘Powderfinger’.
He softened in the middle with a couple of ‘Harvest’ tracks, but it was mainly a guitar fest. The first encore included ‘Cortez the Killer’ and ‘Like a Hurricane’ and the second encore peaked with an outro of ‘Rocking in the Free World’. A superb set overall as he played a lot of my fave tracks. He came off stage after midnight.
John Peel tells the tale that he was the first person to bring Neil over to Britain in the early 70’s and they had kept in touch since. He was there that day and endeavouring to bypass the security staff to obtain permission from Mr Young to play live his set on Radio 1. He finally got the green light with 4 tracks remaining. Later I obtained a bootleg tape of the gig and the recording suddenly morphs from a raggedy sound accompanied by audience voices and footsteps crunching plastic beer glasses to a crystal-clear sound as it moved into the radio level recording.
We made our way to the 100-strength queue where the shuttle buses were due to depart from. After 30 minutes of complete inactivity it quickly become evident that no buses were on the horizon and there was no sign of any taxis either.
The only remaining option was to walk back. There were many stragglers tumbling down a dark windy country lane, all jumping out of the way as cars approached. At certain points, there was a small brook by the side of the road which a giggling drunken lad tumbled into.
After what felt like an age, we turned a bend and saw the water fridge from earlier and I was in full ‘Mr Motivator’ mode despite tears in corner of my eyes as I knew how far we still had to travel. Gill was literally hobbling behind me by this stage. We refer to it now as ‘The March’ and can laugh about it (just!).
The lights of the town finally appeared, and it was about 3.30am when we stumbled into an all-night garage for some much needed water and snacks!
