Neil Young sat on his epic 1988 recording of Ordinary People for two decades before it finally came out on Chrome Dreams II in 2007.

If you had asked me a couple of decades ago whether I wanted to hear an 18-minute song by Neil Young, I’d have been thrilled to say yes. If you asked me now whether I’d like to hear one – complete with multiple guitar solos and several extended horn sections – I would have been a bit apprehensive. And yet…

This epic tribute to the common man has rekindled my longstanding love for Neil Young, and I’d love it if he’d bemuse a vast Glastonbury audience this summer by noodling away on it while they ask their friends if this is the same guy who sang Heart Of Gold (still his only hit single, more than half a century ago).

Ordinary People is a classic example of what makes him one of my favourite guitarists: there are nine verses and by my count there are four electric guitar solos, two sax solos and one trumpet solo. If you want to be critical, you could say the trajectory of the song doesn’t change much over those 18 minutes but that’s fine by me.

The lyrics are good, too, living up to the title as Young pays tribute to “hard-working people” of various kinds – factory workers, boilermen, bartenders, boxers – struggling to survive in an America filled with “silver spoon people” – government lackeys, drug lords, gangsters and high-rollers.

But let’s face it, nobody is really paying much attention to those words with this storm of beautiful noise going on around them.

Young wrote the song for his Freedom album in 1988 (though it didn’t get a release until 2007) with the band from his Bluenotes tour (see below) but left it off the final cut, and he has only performed it eight times since then, all of those being in the late Eighties.

“I think its time has come,” he said when it was finally released in 2007. “People may have been distracted 20 years ago with the fact that I was doing a song with horns. Some people were upset with me. So I didn’t want to have to fight that battle and release the song. It was such a powerful record that it overtook everything that I put it with.”

Neil Young – electric guitar, vocal
Joe Canuck – vocal
Frank “Poncho” Sampedro – guitar
Rick Rosas – bass guitar
Chad Cromwell – drums
Ben Keith – alto saxophone
Steve Lawrence – tenor saxophone, keyboards
Larry Cragg – baritone saxophone
Claude Cailliet – trombone
John Fumo – trumpet
Tom Bray – trumpet (solo)