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What I’d say about Neil Young, having twice interviewed him, is that he lives up to the legend, bracingly so. “The first thing you have to understand about me is that no one tells me what to do,” he tells me, by way of emphatic introduction when we meet originally in 1989. “What I’m saying here,” he goes on, his restless eyes fairly blazing, “is that I don’t give a damn. Never have. Never will.”

Something about the way he says this makes me think he’d like me to contradict him so we can have a row. I stay sensibly quiet.

“I do what I do,” he continues, “I can’t do anything else. If that means fighting with the record company over every album, every time I go out, then that’s the way it’s gotta be. It doesn’t really bother me. You can’t stand still. You don’t stop, ever. If you stop, you’re dead. And I’m not ready for that. So I keep going out there. “Hell,” he says finally. “That’s my job.”

Twenty years on, Young’s legendary truculence, the notorious contrariness, the sheer fuck-you bloody-mindedness he shares with Dylan, remains undimmed, as this month’s cover feature by Jaan Uhelszki, which starts on page 40, so vividly demonstrates. And this is why, of course, we love him and he continues to an unwavering affection bordering often on awe, even as his dogged waywardness has frequently tested the patience of his sometimes baffled fans.

In the end, though, we simply wouldn’t want him any other way.