Bruce Springsteen and his E Street Band blew into Birmingham on Friday night, thundering through a barnstorming three-hour set for their devoted fans like there was no tomorrow.
And in a way, there isn't. Amid the usual exuberant rock anthems and the joy and soul of a Springsteen show there lurks a new darkness on the edge of town. These days, themes of death and mortality float through many of his newer songs like wisps of smoke from a dampening fire.
The band, of course, are sensational – the legendary E Street Band stalwarts augmented by the E Street Horns, extra percussion and some choice vocalists; everyone rehearsed and drilled within an inch of their lives.
An opening parade of sinewy songs from 1978 (“Prove it All Night,” “The Promised Land”) to 2020 (“Ghosts,” “Letter To You”), all presented with the vigor of a man three decades younger than Springsteen’s apparently ageless 73.
Bruce and the incomparable E Street Band blasted through musical history with smiles, shared microphones, slapped hands and ace musicianship.
I can’t help but notice that all the newer songs Springsteen has introduced into the set dwell on age, mortality and loss. “I’m alive!” he roars on ‘Ghosts’, like he is trying to prove it to himself. The past looms large all night, and Bruce introduces his solo acoustic performance of ‘Last Man Standing’, from 2020’s ‘Letter To You’.
Silencing the crowd, he talks about the death of his friend George Thiess in 2018, who recruited the teenage Springsteen to his first band, The Castilles. Springsteen is now the sole survivor. He tells how his death affected him and brought a new clarity of mind and purpose.
“We are standing on the tracks with the white hot lights of a train bearing down upon us,” he declared. “Death’s final and lasting gift is an expanded vision of life itself. It made me realise I need to appreciate every moment. At 15, it's all tomorrows. At 73, it's a lot of goodbyes,” he said. “That's why you have to seize the day and make the most of every minute.”
And that is at the core of this show, snatching life from the prospect death, rocking till you drop, with every ounce of vigour in your creaking bones. It achieves a quality of almost religious apotheosis whenever the audience takes up the refrain, turning rock songs into secular hymns.
‘Wrecking Ball’ is one such moment, with the huge crowd bellowing “hard times come, hard times go” then carrying the whole song forward on a wave of “oh-way-ohs” so that it feels like the band are forced to move in time with audience, rather than the other way around. It is joyously unifying, and it happens time and again.
Bruce Springsteen has been a musician for six decades, a rock star for half a century, maybe the greatest of our times, and, on the evidence of this blistering live performance at Villa Park, Birmingham, with the E Street Band, he is still very much the man in charge.
On a balmy Birmingham night beneath a dark velvet sky, Springsteen and his magnificent ensemble, The E Street Band, delivered almost three hours of roaring, soulful, moving and inspirational rock and roll.
From the continued shouts of “Bruuuuuuuuuuce” – which started in the summer evening air even before this mammoth set got underway – then three hours in the company of Springsteen and his E Street Band – a magnificent 18 strong ensemble shot through the heart with the very essence of rock ‘n’ roll. Springsteen, still lean and mean at 73, and his group in full flight is to see rock music ascend to its most communal point.
The band played, the crowd sang, the union of souls in song and spirit was glorious to behold. Yet there was an understated edge to this whole occasion that amped up the jeopardy and made it feel more vital, the burning question of whether we will see such a thing again?
The first song played was ‘No Surrender’, a growl of unified defiance, a pummelling insistence that this band of old comrades would give it all or die trying. The last song performed was ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’, solo and acoustic, a tender farewell to an old friend laced with a bittersweet quarrel with mortality. It was a poignant final note for such a fantastic display of musical vigour.
The band arrived on stage all dressed in black, like an outlaw gang, the Wild Bunch on a last death defying raid. They look great, and they sound better, a virtuoso outfit perfectly in tune with each other, pushing and pulling, locking and flowing, bringing music to life in ways that you seldom hear at mass entertainment now. It is old school and all the better for it. But high definition big screen close ups revealed gnarly old fingers and deeply lined faces.
They were in their thirties when they recorded ‘Glory Days’, and its cheery nostalgia sounded like a bit of a joke. Now, it is practically their theme tune, one of the highlights of the set. “Time slips away and leaves you with nothing mister, but boring stories of glory days.”
Two E Street Band stalwarts are no longer with us, organ player Danny Federici and saxophonist Clarence Clemons (the latter potently replaced by his nephew Jake Clemons in 2011). Six members are septuagenarians. The Rolling Stones have proven that you can rock on into old age with energy and style, but (Jagger’s athletics aside) even the Stones don’t put on shows as forcefully relentless and physically draining as Springsteen’s epic three hour assaults.
Drawing on a lifetime in music spanning folk, rock and jazzy, funky hinterlands, the show pummels audiences into submission, with even the deep cuts blasting out like blood and thunder, and every band member giving everything they’ve got, all the time, at full tilt.
And, like the sheer length of their sets and the stagey cross talk routine that Springsteen and guitarist Steven Van Zandt indulge in towards the end of their performance (“Stevie! I think it’s time to go home!” “I don’t wanna go home!”) it loudly telegraphs the sensation that this band are still having the time of their lives on stage, 51 years into their career.
Solos are spun out on a lengthy version of ‘Kitty’s Back’ – a jazz-rock outlier in Springsteen’s oeuvre, from 1974’s ‘The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle’ - as if it’s their solitary chance to grab the limelight.
One song after another, delivered without pause, the selection leaping between decades while keeping the intensity roaring - into a cover of the Commodores’ 'Nightshift' that attempts to dig past the original’s slick 80s gloss and retrieve an old-fashioned gospel-soul song from beneath it.
As he weaves through golden oldies (‘Because The Night’, ‘The Promised Land’, ‘The E Street Shuffle’, ‘She’s the One’, ‘Backstreets’) and newer songs and covers (‘Nightshift’, ‘Letter to You’, ‘Ghosts’, ‘Wrecking Ball’ and ‘The Rising’) he looks in total command of the night brigade.
Bruce seems aged but ageless.
Who could ever tire of ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze Out’, ‘My Hometown’ or ‘Badlands’, although these days the sexual charge of songs such as ‘Prove It All Night’, ‘Thunder Road’ and ‘Out in the Street’ has dissolved into the whimsical rather than the physical.
Whether he’s excavating ‘Candy’s Room’ from the recesses of 1978’s ‘Darkness on the Edge of Town’ album or powering thorough ‘Glory Days’, as the night wears on, the stage-side screens cut from the band to the crowd ever more frequently.
With sometimes as many as five guitars being played on stage at once, the 73-year-old sets up duels with the piratical Little Steven and Nils Lofgren. More than once, Springsteen goes mano a mano with saxophone player Jake Clemons, nephew of the late E Streeter Clarence Clemons, who died in 2011.
His back turned to the crowd, Springsteen conducts the five-strong horn section. He duets with backing singer Curtis King, whose falsetto on their soulful cover of 'Nightshift' by the Commodores are sweet sounds indeed. He pogoes while soloing on guitar, then rips his black capped-sleeved shirt open during ‘Dancing in the Dark’, revealing some burnished pecs gilded with silver chains.
Since this tour set off from Florida in February, the set list hasn’t, perhaps, enjoyed as much spontaneity as previous E Street Band tours, with Springsteen calling out rarities at the drop of a hat. But there remain a few slots in the running order where variables cycle in and out. Tonight’s lesser-heard gem is ‘Mary’s Place’, a soulful party tune from The Rising (2002) that locates transcendence in music once again. A rip through ‘Thunder Road’ still moves my soul like it did when I first heard the song nearly 40 years ago and we are treated to a debut outing on this tour of ‘The River’.
Then the smashes. There is a sprint finish in the encore. A whirlwind of chest-beating, open-hearted anthems ('Born in the USA', 'Thunder Road', 'Born to Run', 'Glory Days', 'Dancing in the Dark') are still played with all-or-nothing passion, despite the fact Springsteen has performed them thousands of times although he makes them as fresh as if they were recorded yesterday.
They are reserved for the show’s conclusion, which makes the opening sound like a band gently pacing themselves. ‘Born in the USA’ concludes with a frantic, climactic drum solo and crashing guitars, with Springsteen yelling encouragement at drummer Max Weinberg, as if he’s somehow fearful that ‘Born in the USA’ wasn’t sufficiently rousing and anthemic to start off with.
“Born to Run,” performed during the encore with the houselights up, is still the most thrilling live concert moment ever.
It is beyond showbusiness. It is rock music as a kind of church. And as uplifting as it is, there is an underlying poignancy, a sense that this is reluctantly, defiantly, yet inevitably coming to an end. On every show to date, the evening ends with Bruce standing alone, his slight figure etched under the spotlight, playing harmonica and guitar.
Alone on stage at the finale, Springsteen croons into the void. “Death is not the end,” he sings on ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’ in which he sings to his long dead friends but also, I think, to the loved ones he will leave when it is his time to go.
“When all our summers have come to an end, we'll meet and live and laugh again, because death is not the end,” is his final ghostly message. But the amazing Bruce Springsteen and his phenomenal deathly hallows are totally life-affirming in the end.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing the greatest rock star of our time at full force with the greatest rock and roll band in the world, I would urge you to catch this tour. Right now, Springsteen is absolutely and undeniably and inspirationally still the Boss.
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