Neil Young has said he won’t return to touring until COVID is “beat”.

Speaking on The Howard Stern Show, Young confirmed that people won’t see him “playing to a bunch of people with no masks on,” and said he won’t be touring until the pandemic is over. “I don’t care if I’m the only one who doesn’t do it,” he said.

Elsewhere he went on to criticise anti-vaxxers. “People are not being realistic and they’re not being scientific. If we followed the rules of science, and everybody got vaccinated, We’d have a lot better chance,” he said.

Young then said how thankful he was that “we might be able to beat this. There’s no reason why we can’t. If we came together, we could take care of this. And I have confidence that we can.

“We got a lot of smart people in the world with a lot of great ideas. And the more love there is in the world, the more we’re gonna hear those ideas. We’re gonna make this happen,” he added. Check out the interview below:

In August, Young called on promoters to cancel “super-spreader” COVID-era gigs.

“The big promoters, if they had the awareness, could stop these shows,” Young wrote in the blog post. “Live Nation, AEG, and the other big promoters could shut this down if they could just forget about making money for a while.”

In December, Young released his 41st studio album (and 14th with long-serving band Crazy Horse) ‘Barn‘.

In a four-star review, NME said: “Raw and rugged at every turn, the album captures the telepathic bond that these rock’n’roll renegades have cultivated over the years. Of all the messages we should listen to on this album, the overriding one is that Neil Young remains as vital as he always has been”.