He has a long history of political activism. He has failed to mellow with age: not for nothing is the news section of his website called the Times-Contrarian according to Young’s recent post on it, when his lawyers advised him “that contractually I didn’t have the control of my music to, I announced I was leaving anyway, because I knew I was”, which is pretty much the most Neil Youngian response imaginable. He spent a substantial chunk of the 1980s making wildly uncommercial albums, apparently with the specific intention of annoying his record label, which ended up suing him for being unpredictable – it lost, perhaps because, as his labelmate Elton John put it, its lawsuit “felt a bit like suing Neil Young for being Neil Young”. The years that produced his most famous work also played host to Young wilfully sabotaging his own commercial prospects in order to follow his muse (or, as he memorably put it, “heading for the ditch”) suddenly abandoning tours midway by directing his tour bus to pull off the motorway en route to the next show whimsically declining to release a succession of completed albums and incurring the wrath of his partners in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (CSNY) by removing their contributions from the master tapes of his songs before releasing them. He is famously among the most ornery, uncompromising and capricious of said blue-chip legends.
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