Bruce Springsteen, Wembley Stadium: The Boss brings magic and muscle to the capital
As the gloomy skies above north-west London coated Wembley Stadium in a light drizzle, Bruce Springsteen descended from the stage to meet his people. In the front row of a show that at times resembled a gospel church service in which thousands of worshippers were consumed by joy, a young woman held a sign emblazoned with the words “boyfriend will propose if he can have your harmonica”. Naturally, the Boss obliged. As the house-full crowd roared at the sight of the pair kissing and agreeing to marry, this most active of 74-year-olds resumed the show. “I believe in a promised land,” he sang.
Thirty-nine years after first appearing in the London Borough of Brent, at the old Wembley Stadium, Springsteen and the pulverising E Street Band are still in the business of putting in a shift. Over the course of three-plus hours, on the first of a two-night stand in the capital, the 14 musicians and backing singers performed 31-songs of a heightened intensity that not once succumbed to melodrama. With every setting dialled to the max, the poise and control of it all seemed mythical.
Gurning like a man in keen need of an appendectomy, as ever, Springsteen performed as if his life depended on it. From stage left to right, no one else seemed to have lost a yard of pace, either. Drummer Max Weinberg, the band’s internal combustion engine, remains a metronome of grace and power. The virtuosity of pianist “Professor” Roy Bittan on a show-stopping Racing In The Street was just one example of a group who appear to be laughing in the face of age and time. It was only during Tenth Avenue Freeze Out, when the faces of late members Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici appeared on giant screens at the back and sides of the stage, that Wembley Stadium was permitted a glimpse of the inevitable.
Particularly impressive was the collective knack of turning the songs most marbled with hopelessness into danceable commodities. In this vast communal setting, the originally acoustic Reason To Believe, from Springsteen’s desolate 1982 Nebraska album, was repurposed as a high-cholesterol blues boogie. With its languid tempo, Atlantic City, in which an indebted blue collar grunt agrees to “do a little favour” for the mob, sounded strangely romantic. Only the scarred landscape of de-industrialised Rust Belt towns brought vividly to life in the masterful Youngstown gave voice to anything that sounded like contempt, or rage. JD Vance take note: this is how you write about the American working class.
Beyond the music itself, the Boss allowed the messy business of real life only the briefest moment in the crepuscular London air. With the storm clouds gathering across the New World set to break in the first week of November, an acoustic rendition of Long Walk Home was introduced as “a prayer for my country”. For the first time all night, no one was dancing. “[Our] flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone,” he sang. “Who we are, what we’ll do, and what we won’t.”
Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band play Wembley Stadium on Saturday