40th Anniversary Celebration of “Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night” presented by Nick Barker & The Studio Instrument Rentals

Australian pub rock icon Nick Barker and his bespoke band The Studio Instrument Rentals will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the classic Neil Young album ‘Tonight’s The Night’, re-creating the record track-for-track together with an extended encore of other Neil Young gems. Nick Barker’s one-off band, The Studio Instrument Rentals named after the famed recording studio, features Michael Barclay (Paul Kelly & The Coloured Girls) on drums, Michael Hubbard (Spencer P Jones & The Escape Committee) on guitar, Grant Cummerford (Matt Walker and Jeff Lang) on bass, Shane Reilly (Tex Perkins) on pedal steel guitar and Bruce Haymes (Renee Geyer) on keyboards. A veritable who’s who of the credible Melbourne music scene. The show was deemed a huge success recently at the Yarraville Live Club, so make sure you reserve your tickets early for this one folks!

Neil Young’s ‘Tonight’s The Night’ was the Canadian artist’s sixth studio album and was actually recorded some two years before its release, for the most part in one day on 26 August 1973 at Hollywood’s Studio Instrument Rentals. An achingly beautiful expression of grief this album was inspired by the drug overdoses of Crazy Horse guitarist Danny Whitten and roadie Bruce Berry.  It peaked at #25 on the US Billboard charts in 1975 and is widely regarded as “the Neil Young fans’ Neil Young album” featuring The Santa Monica Flyers on such magic moments as “Come On Baby Let’s Go Downtown”, “Roll Another Number”, “Alburquerque” and the title track “Tonight’s The Night”.

As Dave Marsh poignantly wrote in Rolling Stone magazine of Neil Young’s ‘Tonight’s The Night’, “The record chronicles the post-hippie, post-Vietnam demise of counter culture idealism, and a generation’s long, slow trickle down the drain through drugs, violence, and twisted sexuality. This is Young’s only conceptually cohesive record, and it’s a great one.”