Video Review: Neil Young, "Unplugged"

Although supremely shot, Unplugged isn't too visually stimulating but the strength of material satisfies the most selective palate. From the opening of "The Old Laughing Lady" through seven tracks, Mr. Young sits unaccompanied and in so doing creates an atmosphere of excellence.

"The Needle And The Damage Done", for example, retains all its poignancy, and by the time the band begin to assemble for "Helpless" the show has become utterly compelling.

One over-enthusiastic gentleman is moved to yell his thanks after the sublime pump organ rendition of Like A Hurricane, to which Mr. Young replies, "It's nothing. Really." Neil Young has probably just uttered the understatement of the year!

Joe Mackett
Riff Raff
September, 1993

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!