Star rating: ***
"This is summer?" David Crosby is feeling the cold. Sporting more layers than Liam Gallagher in an Arctic nightclub, one might worry about his welfare on this fortieth anniversary tour with the hippy era's very first super-group. Stephen Stills similarly dons an anorak, and only emigre Englishman Graham Nash is au fait enough with the climate to get down to shirt-sleeves for two different sets culled from the C, S and N song-book.
The first half is a low-key, largely acoustic set delivered by the trio with such bonhomie it's as if they've stumbled on an open mike night. Especially when they rattle through a quartet of covers by 1960s contemporaries, which reveal that the laid-back harmonies are beautifully intact. With Stills concentrating on lead guitar, beyond Crosby's goofball banter, Nash takes charge, his Mancunian resembling the sort of club turn he would've become if he'd stayed in The Hollies. Dedicating Our House to "all the pretty girls in Edinburgh", though, pushes cheese to the limit.
Stills comes into his own in the more uptempo second set, which he leads with blistering guitar solos on Buffalo Springfield's Rock and Roll Woman. Later, the lineage between America and Scotland's west coasts is laid bare on Bluebird, another Stills-led Buffalo Springfield rifferama. By the time he gets to a grizzled take of 1960s protest anthem For What It's Worth, for thousands of baby-boomers in front of him, it sounds like vindication.
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