Harmony preserved

Best known for being a member of one of rock's first supergroups, Graham Nash is bringing his distinctive voice to New Zealand for the first time.

- GRAHAM REID

On 81-year-old Graham Nash's new album Now - a title emphasising his existence as a contemporary artist there is I Watched It All Come Down,"making music, playing it loud".

And he did.

Blackpool-born Nash, a longtime Angeleno with little trace of an American accent, was in that wave of British Invasion bands in the wake of the Beatles when the Hollies - which he co-founded with Manchester schoolmate and lifelong friend Allan Clarke - swept up the charts with Just One Look, Here I Go Again, I'm Alive, Bus Stop and a string of top-five hits elevated by the band's three-part harmonies.

But when his songs were rejected for being too complex for their pop audience - his 1967 slightly delic King Midas in Reverse just scraped into the British top 20he chafed.

Escape came unexpectedly in Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon - at the home of either Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas or Joni Mitchell, the story changes - when he sang with David Crosby and Stephen Stills.

Their magical harmonies connected and, joined by Neil Young, the second performance of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young was at Woodstock. But seeds of internal dissent were there from the start.

"We had to put Crosby's name first, otherwise he'd be impossible to live with," Stills told me in 2007. "Of course, once we put him first there was no living with him.

"We didn't like each other like all good bands are supposed to, but it was much harder to pull away. We didn't want to be married to a band because basically you either killed each other off or just became so dissolute and self-destructive that you couldn't work.

"But we did all that anyway." That same year, Crosby told me, "That [tension] was a good thing and that's worth it to put up with [Stills]. I'm very good friends with Nash and love him dearly.