"Old man take a look at my life, I'm a lot like you" sang Neil Young in 1972. When he sings it again in 2008, he could be channelling his younger self, peeping from the past at his own 62-year-old frame. Despite the monkish bald patch, the years etched on his owlish face and the rich man's guitar collection that now surrounds him, Neil Young the old man is a lot like he was back in 1972.

I arrived at the Apollo last Thursday pre-disappointed by experience of watching ageing legends, of Bob Dylan's wheezing and Brian Wilson's jittering. The merchandise stalls and grey heads that attend these events never put me in the best frame of mind. So how glorious-to hear just how well preserved Young's voice remains as he struck up From Hank to Hendrix. It's the same keening treble that it ever was, still conjuring highways and horses, heartache and heaven.

He's not the most technically adept guitar player, but that's never what counts. Young knows what a guitar is for. He's never afraid to conclude a phrase on an unmoored minor chord where most songwriters would opt for the happy resolution of a major. And now, even when he stretches out Down by the River to a 20-minute squall in the electric second half, it's never lazy noodling, more like a quest.

Shambling bear-like around the stage, warming up his harmonica, barely uttering a word, Young still cuts a fascinatingly outsider-ish figure. It's a position that allowed him to bypass the coked-up pomposity of his former cohorts, Crosby, Stills and Nash; that earned him the respect of the first wave of punks in the Seventies and the grunge artists of the early Nineties; that makes his strung-out 1973 album Tonight's the Night my favourite by anyone ever.

So: a triumphant return? Young always hated the idea of a comeback.

In 1992, he looked at his contemporaries cashing in on a wave of Sixties nostalgia and shuddered: "The music the Stones and The Who play now has nothing whatsoever to do with rock 'n' roll. Spiritually, it's all Perry Como. But I never went away. I just did other things."

When you're out of time in the first place, you don't need to worry about things like relevance.

Tonight and tomorrow, returns only.