Neil Young at Heart

IT MUST HAVE been 1969 or 1970. There was a rave review of Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere in Rolling Stone and I bought it from an import shop in Berwick Street. It had a gatefold sleeve dominated by a "pointillist" photo of Neil Young: an image of him leaning against a tree with hazy Californian mountains in the background. The photo had been blown up so much that you could hardly see Neil’s face – just a few smudges of grain. It was intriguing, almost anonymous.