Stephen Stills: Carry On

The world goes apeshit when the Stones manage to drag themselves out for a few gigs after half a decade or so of indolence, but Neil Young rightly gets a bit prickly when people accuse him of making a "comeback". He tends to snarl that "he's never been away."

Brilliant though it was to be shooting an Imagine film for BBC One, we did experience the occasional tremor of foreboding about making a programme with Nigel Kennedy. We (that's me and director Frank Hanly) had a bit of previous with Nigel - I'd done several print interviews with him, and we'd shot a couple of short films with him for EMI.

The most famous rock festival in history celebrated its 40th anniversary this summer in an orgy of nostalgia. Michael Wadleigh's Academy Award-winning 1970 documentary Woodstock was re-released, the media were flooded with reminiscences and analyses and leading film-makers felt moved to address themselves afresh to the subject.