‘People thought I was insane': Graham Nash on the birth of Crosby, Stills and Nash

Graham Nash always seemed like the reasonable, peace-making one among his famously fractious compadres, David Crosby, Stephen Stills and Neil Young. But he didn’t get to where he is today by being plagued with doubt or false modesty. Even talking remotely over a Zoom connection, he still radiates a kind of unshakeable certainty.

‘I just trust that the universe loves me enough to support what I’m doing,’ he declares. ‘I don’t seek my life, my life happens to me and I’m perfectly content to let it. Look what I’ve done in my life… Pretty nice!’

‘Joni was the only witness to that sound and it was created in less than a minute’

At 81, Nash is, incredibly, a pre-baby boomer, but mentally he seems about three decades younger. He’s here for a tour that kicked off in Basingstoke and will take him from London to Glasgow to Nottingham to Gateshead, not forgetting his home town of Manchester – though he’s careful to specify that ‘I’m Salfordian, all my life. I think I’ve still retained a little of my accent, y’know.’

For this tour, Nash is keeping it lean and mean. On stage it’ll just be him, plus his regular guitarist Shane Fontayne and keyboardist Todd Caldwell. But the concerts will find him roving over 60 years of music-making, from his early days with the Hollies (the so-called Mancunian Beatles) through to the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young era and his solo work, not least his new album Now, released in May this year.

Now was his first batch of new songs since 2016’s This Path Tonight. In typically Nashian style it’s a mix of the intimate and romantic – including an infuriatingly hummable love song ‘It Feels Like Home’ – with tirades against the state of politics and the planet.