Neil Young kicked off his set last night in Hyde Park with My my hey hey. I was hoping that maybe he’d added an extra verse or two now that Johnny Rotten is hawking dairy products with a reserved dignity I’ve only previously seen in a bar in Naples where a group of prostitutes was trying to improve international relations with a group of matelots from the USS Puget Sound. That was the sole disappointment in a stupendously good set. More of this later.

Young was playing at a mini festival sponsored by a multi-national chain of music themed cafes which helpfully sell T shirts in order to identify the most imbecilic and naive tourists in a city to the local muggers. Also on the bill were The Fleet Foxes and Seasick Steve both of whom I’ve seen in recent months in much smaller venues. The Foxes are not designed for large scale outdoor performances. Their music is too fragile and complicated for that setting and while they were perfectly good it was not as thrilling as a show in a smaller theatre. Seasick carried it off pretty well with his robust blues boogie.

The utter low point was Ben Harper. That part of my brain which processes information about musicians called Ben had persuaded itself that he was Ben Folds – who is one of those people I keep intending to find out more about. Nope! Literally the only memorable feature of his music was how utterly unmemorable it was. If a computer program had been written to produce well crafted, muscular blandness that would have been the result. The good thing about it was that it gave you a strong desire to see what else was on and that turned out to be the pleasant surprise of the day. Step forward the Magic Numbers. They were staggeringly good. It’s my fault entirely but I thought they were a bit past their sell by date. Absolutely not. They had a huge tent singing along, jumping up and down and full of the joys of summer with as good a specimen of lively guitar pop as you’ll hear this side of Christmas. It’s worth making an effort to see them.

How to begin to do justice to Neil Young last night? He wisely opted not to treat the audience to a start to finish performance of his last album and rampaged through his back catalogue. He divided into three broad sections. The loud bit; the fairly quiet bit and the second loud bit and gave you most of what you wanted to hear. Neil loves a good ending and the closing of Cinnamon girl was probably longer than the original album version as over and over again he seems to meld with the spirit of his guitar to produce sounds that only he can imagine. Just once it felt that it would have been better if he’d been asked to trim five minutes off a song – if memory serves it was fifteen minute version of Down by the river. On the other hand the original version of Rockin’ in the free world is absurdly short and he has rightly extended it with the sort of guitar work that justifies the price and the sore legs with about fourteen false endings.

Young was on good form last night. He was smiling a lot more than is his habit and in a nice touch he threw a bit of work to a musician who is down on his luck and probably needed a few quid for a falafel burger burger and cup of tea. Paul Mc Cartney came onstage for the encore number A day in the life. Even for those of us who never really got The Beatles it was a lovely moment to see the two of them up there and if you’d ever wanted to see a crowd going wild that would have been your chance.