To paraphrase Dolly Parton, it must take a lot of care to look as chaotic as this. I’m referring not to Neil Young himself, not exactly, but to the astonishingly cluttered stage around him, dressed to look like – well, backstage, really, behind the scenes at some lost old-time opry. There are klieg lights and spots strewn around, cables and stands everywhere, a huge, antique wind-machine with wooden blades, variously battered musical instruments apparently abandoned at random, and a single, ominous, baffling red house telephone of roughly 1974 vintage. Everything looking worn and used and tested and true, and in no need of replacement. Oh, and, obviously, there is a man standing way at the back, turned away from the audience, silently painting amid a stack of large canvas backdrops. It’s a stage-set, of course, and the first clue that, whatever he’s engaged upon amid the red-velvet splendour of Edinburgh’s venerable Playhouse theatre for his first UK gig in five years, Young, who makes his bizarre entrance trying to hide behind the painter as he carries a large canvas bearing a single “N” to an easel at the front of the stage, sees it as a performance in every sense of the word. The drama’s precise meaning will remain unclear to all but him, but it’s as compellingly weird, as hauntingly beautiful, as stormy and electrifying as anything he’s ever done. Even by his own considerable standards, Young, wearing the kind of loose, off-white suit a US Defence Secretary might favour for a field visit to Iraq, appears to be in a strange mood. The audience bays but he ignores them, utters not a word. Sometimes, when the shouting gets too loud, he throws his arms over his face, warding it off in a manner that suggests Marcel Marceau being spooked by a horse; at one point, he actually falls cowering to his knees. He sits alone inside a circle of acoustic guitars – seven of them, plus a banjo – absently, fondly, touching one and then the other, as though waiting for them to tell him which one wants to go first. He dips his harmonica in a china teacup of water like a man dunking biscuits in a rest home. He looks shambling, distracted; and then he starts to play, and his focus and intensity sucks the breath from you. The facts are that we get a solo acoustic set followed by an electric set, and anyone who has glanced at setlists from earlier in this tour will know that he has been throwing in songs from some of the most obscure corners of his catalogue. Knowing that in advance, though, does nothing to dilute the impact when, after a gorgeously warm “From Hank to Hendrix,” Young begins “Ambulance Blues.” The abandoned closer to 1974’s desolate "On The Beach" is song he has barely, if ever, played live before this tour, but one that certain fans have tattooed on their minds. All the same, tonight, as he hunches over the ever-dying thing, it feels almost as though he is creating it on the spot, sucking each stray chorus out of the air, forever fading away, forever coming back in with one more last thought. He follows it with three more songs you thought you would never hear him play: the unreleased “Sad Movies,” then, shambling to one of the pianos, a truly astonishing “A Man Needs A Maid” (substituting the recorded version’s orchestral fills with chilling, Dr Phibes-meets-"Trans" blasts on an aged electric keyboard), and “Try,” another unreleased song from the legendary aborted "Homegrown" album. Lurching from these into some of his most iconic “Neil Young” songs – “Harvest”, “After The Gold Rush”, “Don't Let It Bring You Down”, “Heart Of Gold” – the impression is of an iPod on shuffle, and on fire. That frayed falsetto sounds as strong, as pure, as distressed as it ever has; close your eyes, you could be listening to an Archive recording from three, four decades ago. Listening, watching, I’m struck by a thought: will Bob Dylan ever take the chance to go so naked before an audience again? Between songs, he keeps up his silent, shambling routine, wandering the stage like a man who doesn’t know where he is or why, sometimes standing and staring vacantly off at what the painter is painting, still working away at the rear of the stage. At one point, Young stands and holds his hands up to one of the little purple standing spotlights, warming them on the light – at first I think it’s a comment on the bitingly cold night leaking into the theatre from outside. An hour later, I’m not so sure. We’re coming toward the end of a colossal electric set. Backed by veteran associates Ralph Molina, Rick Rosas and Ben Keith, Young, changed into a paint-splattered black suit, has been wailing and whaling away at the guitar he calls Old Black as if he might never get the chance to play her again. Dropping the stumbling gait he affected for the acoustic half, he’s leaning, grooving, stepping ass-shaking and almost pogoing as he tears out damn-near definitive workings of mangled warhorses including “Down By the River”, “Hey Hey, My My” and a towering “Powderfinger.” He’s climaxing, though, with a voyage through one of his newest songs, “Hidden Path.” Largely written off as a meandering lowpoint on the "Chrome Dreams II" album, the song is transformed into a long, classic, violent stone jam to stand alongside any of the above. 15 burning minutes in, it’s seemingly endless, and you don’t want it to end. And, at its most intense, as he pulls at the howling riff, Young wanders to a massive klieg light that drenches the theatre in a blinding golden glow and stares into it, bathes in it, as though trying to climb inside the light. Thinking back to this little pantomime with the smaller light, I wonder, is there a connection here? What is he trying to say? Who could ever say? Rummaging through the backstage of his mind, Neil Young, at 62, is, quite thrillingly, as vitally unknowable, as far out there and as far inside himself as he ever has been. I doubt even God knows what he has in mind for his six-night stand in London. DAMIEN LOVE ACOUSTIC SET From Hank To Hendrix Ambulance Blues Sad Movies A Man Needs a Maid Try Harvest After the Gold Rush Mellow My Mind Love Art Blues Don't Let it Bring You Down Heart Of Gold Old Man ELECTRIC SET Mr. Soul Dirty Old Man Spirit Road Down By the River Hey Hey, My My Too Far Gone Oh, Lonesome Me The Believer Powderfinger No Hidden Path Fuckin' Up Cinnamon Girl

A couple of things I played rather a lot over the weekend: the second Brightblack Morning Light album from 2006, which reminds me of unbearably hot afternoons in our old office, and which still sounds gorgeous on a windy Saturday afternoon in March; and “Supreme Balloon”, the 24-minute title track of the new album from Matmos. “Supreme Balloon” – the album, that is – initially seems like something of a departure for the Matmos duo. As the thoroughly eloquent press release explains (I wonder if Drew Daniel himself wrote it?), the album was entirely constructed on antique synths: Moogs, Arps, Korgs and so on, plus a very grand Coupigny modular synth housed at Radio France and previously utilised by, and I quote, “some of the titans of musique concrete”. “Supreme Balloon”, we’re told, is not such a conceptual piece as its predecessors: the traditional Matmos technique of sampling odd sounds, then making thematically consistent music out of them (most famously, I guess, on the operating theatre squelches which became 2001’s A Chance To Cut Is A Chance To Cure), is abandoned here. I’m usually a little suspicious of music which seeks to ellide form and content in this way, suspecting that it’s more akin to stunt art than aesthetically satisfying music. But the rigorous, vigorous smartness of Matmos, and the playful music which comes out of their intellectual processes, has never failed to be enjoyable as well as satisfying. The same goes for “Supreme Balloon”, which is far from just a bunch of tracks made out of synths. In some ways, I think it’s a celebration of how electronic music has a history: that this music, so doggedly presented as futuristic, has a backstory that can match rock for richness. It’s a celebration, too, of how synthesisers have been the tools that powered both the classical avant-garde and the notionally disposable, kitsch extremes of pop and dance music. Matmos, it seems, are intent on collapsing the barriers between high and low art – or maybe I’m overthinking all this, and they’re just having fun with some cool old toys. Listen to the squelching epiphanies of “Polychords”, anyway, and you’ll find something that’s as rooted as much in the work of Chicory Tip as, um, granular synthesists. And while “Mister Mouth” may feature Marshall Allen from the Sun Ra Arkestra on, yep, a breath-controlled oscillator, its frantic squiggles aren’t a million miles from the stuff being made by all those hotwired Gameboy jockeys riding the underside of the nu-rave boom. Matmos are better, mind. “Les Folies Francaises”, meanwhile, is a baroque trinket by Francois Couperin which the press release has the good grace to admit has been “given the Wendy Carlos treatment”. But it’s that title track I’m fixated on: a gently undulating electronic meditation, which floats into the same rapturous airspace as any number of early ‘70s kosmische types (the admitted reference is Cluster, which is a good starting point). I’m reminded too, though, of something fractionally earlier – the salute-the-sun ecstatic wobble of Terry Riley’s “A Rainbow In Curved Air” (Riley apparently turns up himself on a vinyl bonus track, “Hashish Master”, which I don’t have here). It’s compellingly beautiful. A historical recreation, I guess, but one imbued with such love and melodic sophistication that it demands to be treated as the equal of its influences, not as their derivative. It’s an irony that might amuse them, hopefully, that while Matmos have made some fabulous and genuinely innovative records in the past (“A Chance To Cut”, “The Civil War” and “The West” are all terrific), this expansively lovely, historically resonant epic of synth-psych might just be my favourite thing they’ve ever done.

Earlier, I’d been telling someone that when I saw Pete Doherty at a small Soho club called Jazz After Dark, back in January 2006, it had occurred to me, no doubt somewhat fancifully, that this was to some perhaps small but nevertheless vital extent what it might have been like to see the fledgling Dylan in some bar in Greenwich Village, when the 60s were still young. This was at a launch last night for Asking For Flowers, the excellent new album by Canadian alt.country singer-songwriter, Kathleen Edwards, whose records to date have invited comparisons to the best of Lucinda Williams and post-Wrecking Ball Emmylou Harris. On Asking For Flowers, which is produced by Tom Scott, who helmed Whiskeytown’s Strangers Almanac and has elsewhere worked with Wilco, Lucinda, Johnny Cash and Tom Petty, Edwards is backed by a pretty stellar cast of veteran session men, including drummer Don Heffington, bassist Bob Glaub, pedal steel player Greg Leisz and her husband Colin Cripps on lead guitar. Tonight, it’s just her and Colin on stage at the Gibson Guitar Studio, just off Tottenham Court Road, where she’s playing the second of three showcases to promote the new album – yesterday she was in Paris, tomorrow she’ll be in Stockholm. Even without her ace band, the songs she plays are richly evocative in the story-telling manner of Lucinda or Josh Ritter, and her natural charm and wonderful voice are wholly beguiling – especially on the stinging “You Always Play Me In The Cheapest Key”, the bittersweet “I Make The Dough, You Get The Glory” and the bereft lament of “Scared At Night”. After their short set, we have a drink and although I’m meant to be on my way across London to the Rhythm Factory in Whitechapel Road, where Pete Doherty’s playing a solo show, supported by Television Personalities, I hang around while Colin tells me about some dates he and Kathleen played with Bob Dylan in Montana that took them in three days from Jackson’s Hole, to Big Sky and Billings, Colin giving the impression of Dylan moving at lightning speed across the state, everyone racing just to keep up, breathless in his slipstream. An hour or so later, I’m fighting for space at the bar of the Rhythm Factory after a probably predictable kerfuffle over the guest list and where on it my name might be. I’m talking to Terry Edwards, who I know from Gallon Drunk and Tindersticks. Terry’s DJ-ing tonight and is soon off for a stint at the decks. It’s around 11 o’clock when a bunch of people who look like they sleep in bus shelters start shuffling around the small stage, most of them with their heads down, like they’ve dropped something they can’t find on the floor and are having trouble remembering what it is they’ve lost. This turns out to be Television Personalities and I think what they might have just been looking for is their drummer, who’s apparently gone missing, just as they’re meant to be starting their set, which they begin without him, Dan Treacy – that’s him in a black overcoat and woolly hat, glowering at the crowd with what quickly becomes mutual hostility – not much bothered by his absence. They’ve just kicked into something resembling a tune when a burly fellow in what appears to be several T-shirts and a string vest clomps on stage, settles behind the drum kit, which he then proceeds to batter with some abandon, sounding not unlike a man hammering fence posts into unforgiving ground. What Television Personalities are now playing is a cheerless dirge that I think is called “All My Dreams Are Dead”, which is not inappropriately titled since it soon leaves me wholly without the will to live. Before it’s over there are loud boos from most quarters and the first of several pints splashes onto the stage, making Treacy’s evidently grim mood grimmer by the minute. “You’re shit,” someone loudly tells him, a critically blunt but not entirely inaccurate assessment on the evidence before us. “I may be shit,” Treacy replies somewhat forlornly, “but at least I’m getting paid for it. How much do you earn?” he then asks, and is then inclined to moody silence when when he’s apparently quoted a sum which probably roughly equals his lifetime earnings. It goes on and gets unfortunately no better, the third number coming to a messy halt when the band appear to realise none of them are playing the same song. The crowd are now noisily antagonistic and Treacy looks painfully exposed and evidently frustrated by the chaos around him, of which he is principal author. It’s something of a relief for everyone, then, Treacy included I’d wager, when they finish and quit the stage, my sympathy going with them. Another hour or so later, with Pete strumming listlessly through a vagrant version of “Albion”, I wish I’d left with them, Pete having turned in a fitful performance, sadly lacking anything like the lustre of the better times I’ve seen him play. The Rhythm Factory is something of a safe haven for Doherty and Babyshambles and tonight it’s full of hardcore fans, who bellow along with everything – a mash-up of old Libertines songs, “What A Waster” and “Can’t Stand Me Now” among them and meandering bits and pieces from Down In Albion and Shotters Nation. For the most part, he’s lazily satisfied with starting a song and then handing it over to the crowd whose gurning singalongs at least have the merit of enthusiasm, which is something Pete is showing little of. There’s a not bad “Back From The Dead” at one point, and a very good "Unbilotitled", but the mood here is one of distraction rather than engagement, a rather glum drift towards the inconsequential - as if he’s finally getting as tired of these songs as much as some of his fans are. Tonight's restless rowdy throng are perhaps too easily pleased and clearly want only the stuff they can join in on without having to give any of it too much thought,but most of these songs have been around for as long as anyone can remember, and surely in need of urgent replacement. He’s going to need to pull off something memorably special at the Albert Hall to get everyone back on side, something of which he’s entirely still capable – even if much of tonight remains best forgotten. I probably would have left in a more disgruntled mood, but the last thing I hear Terry Edwards playing is great and puts me in good humour for the long ride home – Warren Zevon’s “Werewolves Of London”. All together now, AHHHHH-WOOOOOO.