The free concert in Ukraine that Neil Young announced a few weeks back looks like it isn’t happening after all. Young has cancelled, saying that he couldn’t “in good conscience” take his band and crew into a war zone.
“We had a good venue, close to a shelter, but the changing situation on the ground was too much,” Young wrote on his website, Neil Young Archives. “I could not in good conscience take my crew and instruments into that area. My apologies to all. Ukraine is a great country with a good leader. Slava Ukraini.”
Plans for the concert were still in their infancy. No date or venue had been announced and it could well be that having looked at the current situation - there is, at the time of writing, still no ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia - as well as the insurance costs involved, Young concluded that it just wasn’t viable, considering the potential danger to all concerned.
Young has been a prominent supporter of Ukraine since the initial Russian invasion in February 2022. That same year he described it as “the crazy war of an old dying guy who wants to relive his life and make things better for himself because of mistakes he thinks were made 50 years ago.”
Still, the European leg of Young’s ‘Love Earth’ tour with the Chrome Hearts goes ahead. It includes headlining slots at Glastonbury in June and Hyde Park on 11 July.
By then, his debut album with his new-ish backing band could well be out. He released a new single, Big Change Is Coming, in February and has written on his website that he hopes the album will arrive in April: “It is in mastering now to make the vinyl, CD and digital copies. I am very happy and relieved to have this done in the short time it took. The album art has been completed. I am working on the lyric sheets now, hoping to hand-write the words and get them in, in time…”
He continued: “It is a happy feeling I have today, knowing I have made an album I think people will enjoy. I hope it’s out in April. That would be pretty fast. Playing with the Chrome Hearts was a joy as we recorded song after song at Shangrila in Malibu. I wrote these songs in November and December.”
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