PERHAPS tellingly, Neil Young's only real dialogue with the crowd is in musing: ``What happened to the Apollo Theatre? That was a good place.'' Maybe Young's spiritual home is in a venue synomymous with the 70s, but even that fails to fully explain why his reunion with Crazy Horse failed to spark the same number of highs as when he was backed by Booker T and the MGs three years ago at the same venue.

Where the R&B band provided a sharpness to the performance that made it truly great, the muted environs of the SECC are rather less suited to the incendiary guitar duelling between Young and Poncho Sampedro which fills its rafters with some extraordinarily climactic layers of noise during the likes of Cortez The Killer, Cinammon Girl, and Like A Hurricane.

Elsewhere, Hey Hey My My is more punk than last week's pretenders, the Sex Pistols, and Bite The Bullet and Pocahontas are fine representations of his 1970s creative peak.

It is unfortunate, therefore that Young chooses to reflect little on his equally strong late 1980s and early 1990s catalogue, choosing instead to bludgeon his way through acoustic versions of Needle And The Damage Done and Long May You Run. On Saturday night Neil Young wanted to rock, and subtlety was not on the agenda.

Although still writing prolifically and inspiring thousands of infinitely less noteworthy hacks, Young seemed shackled by the presence of Crazy Horse into a performance that looked backwards more than forwards, inwards rather than outwards. It was, however, still an enjoyable, if bumpy, ride with more than its share of truly uplifting moments.