On stage in Berlin, Pegi Young makes a vast space-age concert hall feel like a dusty back- porch in some sleepy truck-stop town. Opening for her husband Neil with a smattering of songs from her debut solo album, Young seems small and unassuming, yet undaunted by the huge crowd. She has, after all, been married to a rock superstar for three decades.

When we meet before the show, Young is sunny and relaxed. Besides her solo set she is also singing backing vocals on Neil's current European tour, so we chat between soundchecks in a stark, empty conference room. Slender and blonde, Young remains very much the Californian hippy child, even in her fifties.

“I'm not that shy about my age,” she smiles. “I feel like I've earned the right to talk about how many years I've been on the planet. I just turned 55 and I'm fine about it. I'm under no illusions that people will think I'm a young emerging artist. But I'm an emerging artist nonetheless.”

Young's debut album, simply called Pegi Young, is an easygoing country-rock affair full of honky-tonk heartbreak and rustic ruminations on love in all its seasons. Featuring long-serving members of Neil's extended musical family, the album includes a few cover versions but mostly originals. Some date back to Young's early twenties, when she was a teepee-dwelling hippy child in rural California.

“Yes son, our generation did some strange things,” she laughs. “It was part of the counterculture movement, I guess. I'd just come back from this hitch-hiking trip and needed a place to live. My friends had built this teepee and they were moving out, so I moved in. I suppose it was an experiment of sorts.”

Young met her future husband in 1974 while working behind a bar near Santa Cruz. Yet here they are, more than 30 years later, a rebuttal to the cliché of rock-star marriages being stormy and short-lived. She doesn't think she is too much of an anomaly among her rock star friends.

“Paul and Linda had a long relationship,” she adds. “Bruce and Patti seem to be doing great. I don't know if there's a secret but I guess there's gotta be a commitment and fundamental respect and love for each other. The ability to change is really important ... To grow old together, to be able to move through the seasons of your life together, does take some flexibility.”

Presumably living on a 1,500-acre ranch in northern California also helps, given that you can spend whole weeks miles apart without even having to leave the property? “Space is important, I can't deny that,” Young laughs. “But not too much space.”

Young's solo music career has been decades in gestation. Her debut public performance was hardly understated, playing to a billion or so TV viewers at the 1994 Academy Awards, singing backing vocals on her husband's Oscar-nominated theme song to the Tom Hanks Aids drama Philadelphia. But only since the millennium has she become a fixture on his tours and records, and only in the past two years did she muster the confidence to make her own album.

“I've had the opportunity countless times - the studio's five minutes from the house,” Young shrugs. “But other things became more pressing for me as an individual, a wife and a mom. And you can't underestimate the confidence factor ... I don't regret not doing it sooner, I'm just happy to be doing it.”

One big factor delaying Young's musical debut was her day job running the Bridge School in Hillsborough, California. She and Neil founded this academy for disabled children in 1986 after their eldest son, Ben, was born with cerebral palsy. “For most of my adult life my family has been the single most important thing to me,” Young says. “And the Bridge School is an extension of my family.”

The Youngs still play an annual all-star benefit concert for the Bridge, but while Pegi remains on the board, the daily running is now in the hands of an executive director. The school's main purpose is preparing children with severe speech and physical impairment for conventional education, then ultimately adult life.

Ben, now 29, was one of the school's founding students and early success stories. He is now an organic egg farmer, and keeps more than 100 chickens on the Young ranch.

Young says: “The true success story for the Bridge School is that the kids, who then become adults, have a means of participating in their lives. Participating through communication is our slogan.”

As a family, the Youngs have endured more than their fair share of health scares. In 2005, Neil underwent brain surgery to remove a potentially fatal aneurysm. While awaiting treatment, he insisted on shuttling back and forth between New York and Nashville to record his Prairie Wind album. His wife now wonders if she should have stemmed his famously furious workrate. “I probably should have, but you can't stop a steam engine, you know?”

By bizarre coincidence, Pegi had previously undergone brain surgery herself, in 1980, to remove a congenital birth defect called an Arterio-Venus Malformation. But in the face of setbacks and medical emergencies, she insists her life has been blessed - “I feel we're both really lucky.”

Six hours after we part, she is back onstage, guitar in hand, tearing through a thunderous finale of Rockin' in The Free World alongside Neil. They walk off together, beaming and embracing.

After more than three decades together, Pegi Young is still standing by her man.

Pegi Young is supporting Neil at the Apollo Hammersmith, London W6, nightly until Saturday. Her album is out on Warners

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