Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Liverpool Echo Arena, 13 July 2014

Neil Young and Crazy Horse started their set at the Liverpool Echo Arena with a 15 minute rendition of Love And Only Love and finished it with a 15 minute and  feedback drenched Like A Hurricane, with Young beating out the rhythm on his guitar fretboard, all six strings broken.

In between the band went through its back catalogue, with songs from Zuma (Don't Cry No Tears and Barstool Blues) to 2013's Psychedelic Pill plus a song getting its first ever airing on this tour (Who's Gonna Stand Up And Save The Earth).

Young plays with an energy more befitting a man half his age, subjecting his guitars to a series of violent assaults as he does everything he can to extricate maximum volume from them.

The only times he is not trying to turn the volume up to 11 are when he plays either his semi acoustic (on a beautiful Don't Cry No Tears) or his acoustic (for a haunting Blowin' In The Wind, which he introduces as 'one of the best songs ever written').  An equally exquisite Heart of Gold follows, with the crowd singing along.

Young is one of rock's famous curmudgeons, but Grumpy Neil is left in the dressing room tonight, with Cheery Neil all smiles and willing to talk to the audience ('Liverpool is full of hard working people ... who like to go for a beer'), joking with his band and talking to the American Indian statue that is stood stage left overseeing proceedings.

Young is not averse to rewriting a song, and The Way Things Used To Be is abruptly sliced in two and ends with a refrain of 'don't rock the boat'.  The backing singers employed to fill out the vocals are kept occupied throughout the set.

It's a two hour sonic assault on the senses by a band that had to cancel last year's planned Liverpool gig because Frank 'Poncho' Sampedro broke his hand. The rescheduled concert is minus bassist Billy Talbot, who was recovering from a minor stroke.  Young himself suffered an aneurysm in 2005, which has seen him working harder than ever.  This is a band that is still a musical force of nature, but time is catching up with its members.

My top five gigs of 2013

A bit previous, as Arfur Daley would say, since we're only in October but here we go:

5.  The Wedding Present, Lille, 13 October 2013

This was a small club gig and there was no mosh pit (it would never happen back home in Blighty) but the Pressies knocked out a tidy 90 minute set with David Gedge throwing the shapes and dragging from his guitar the feedback that seasoned followers of the band have come to expect.  The reputation of the band as jingly jangly indie heroes doesn't pay heed to the monstrous amounts of distortion that they've been producing for 20 odd years, the kind of noise you'd expect to hear at a ....

4.  Neil Young & Crazy Horse, Newcastle, 10 June 2013

concert.  Apparently people were walking out of this and other gigs on Young's 2013 European tour.  More fool them, I say.  Old Neil was on top form, and if you came expecting peace, love, incense sticks and an acoustic ramble through Neil's gentler back catalogue then you really should have listened to his last album, Psychedelic Pill, before buying your tickets.  Or listened to any Crazy Horse album from the last 40 plus years, really.

3.  Elvis Costello & The Imposters, Manchester, 14 June 2013

My ears could still have been ringing from the Neil Young & Crazy Horse concert of four days before, but the sonic assault with which Elvis targeted his audience towards the end of his set was like a short circuit on a human juke box with seven (count 'em) of his early gems fired off one after the other. Throw in Elvis as the Master of Ceremonies wisecracking and gladhanding his audience and you had the Royal Variety Show, thankfully without the Royals.  The audience were slightly less engaged at....

2.   The Wedding Present, Lille, 13 October 2013 (matinee)

but what this gig lacked in atmosphere it made up for in sheer charm with the band playing a seven song 25 minute set with turned down amplifiers and toned down lyrics for an audience of pre school kids and their parents.  I've seen the Pressies over 20 times now, but this gig will live in the memory a long time.  And talking of kids with their parents....

1. The Rolling Stones, Hyde Park, 6 July 2013

The sun was beating down, the son was with me and happy to melt in the heat for a few hours so that we had a good spot when the band came on, and the Stones showed how they earned their reputation as the greatest rock'n'roll band in the world by dipping into their treasure chest of hits and putting on the kind of event that few (ok, no one) can match when it comes to entertaining a big, inter-generational crowd.  My gig of the year (so far!).

Neil Young, Newcastle Metro Arena, 10 June 2013

You sort of know what you're going to get at a Crazy Horse gig. Full on rock and roll at maximum volume. Classic songs. Neil Young leading the band like a man possessed.

But you don't necessarily anticipate the band and road crew shuffling on before the show starts to sing God Save The Queen in front of a huge Union Jack. Or a woman randomly wandering onto the stage mid set  with a violin case and looking as though she might join in with the band before wandering off again two minutes later.

Welcome to Neil's world, where he can get away with ideas in front of several thousand paying punters that a pair of Japanese conceptual artists would struggle to attract a handful of people to watch.

Also, feedback is back. Reprising the concept of his Rust Never Sleeps tour of the 1970s, Young and the band perform in front of huge mock amplifiers and coax every squeal and shriek of noise they can from their equipment.

Featuring a hefty slice of last year's Psychedelic Pill album and one new song, Young leads off with Love And Only Love and then Powderfinger before taking a breather mid set with delicate and unaccompanied versions of Comes A Time and Blowin' In The Wind, giving the latter the reverential treatment that the song's author now  seems incapable of.

Bob Dylan is notoriously unpredictable as a live act in terms of whether you will feel you have got your money's worth. As Neil Young finished his set with Hey Hey My My (Into The Black) and Rocking In The Free World, there was no question as to whether the punters had got value. Crazy Horse had been on stage for two and a half hours and the crowd were still baying for more.

Like the Rolling Stones and other acts that broke through in the 1960s, time will eventually catch up with Neil Young, but there was no evidence of age or any decline in his passion on stage in Newcastle. There's still a handful of tickets left for Neil Young's visit to the Echo Arena in Liverpool in August. It's a chance to see a true rock legend at the height of his powers while you still can. I've got my ticket already.