137. Bruce Springsteen
Wembley Stadium
5 June 2016
Springsteen. The Boss. The denim Messiah. The man who made New Jersey seem like a mythical land of heartbreak, Chevrolets, and working-class optimism. My relationship with Bruce’s back catalogue is complicated: impressive early form, slightly erratic mid-section, and a confusing present, which also sounds like a standard description of romantic history.
Let’s be honest, the golden era was unimpeachable. Born to Run, Nebraska, The River, Darkness on the Edge of Town. These were albums made by a man with dirt under his fingernails and poetry leaking out of every pore. Even some of the ‘80s pomposity was tolerable in small doses. But by the time we got to Wrecking Ball and High Hopes, I’d checked out. It all started to sound like someone reading The Grapes of Wrath over a marching band.
Here’s the rub: despite the occasional musical misfire, a Springsteen gig remains a holy rite. A Springsteen gig is not a gig at all, it’s a marathon baptism in rock’n’roll, with more sweat, more saxophone and more dad energy than is medically advisable.
So, when the Wembley Stadium show rolled around, I broke my self-imposed Bruce-fast and tagged along with a die-hard fan (not one of my regular gig co-conspirators, but someone who loves The Boss so much, it would have been of little surprise if he had “Born in the USA” tattooed on his backside). We staked out a spot on the pitch, hoping for spiritual enlightenment or at least a decent view of Max Weinberg’s drum kit.
What followed was four hours. FOUR. No opener, no encore break, no intermission. Just a relentless, E-Street-powered, bar-band-from-the-heavens explosion of joy. It was like being mugged by joy for an entire afternoon, with Clarence Clemons’ sax ghost in the getaway car.
Bruce himself, now in his late sixties, looks like he could still win an arm-wrestling contest against a cement mixer. He grinned, he leapt, he growled, he howled, and he did that preacher thing where he spreads his arms like he’s about to heal someone through the power of Backstreets. Honestly, I think if someone had fainted in the front row, he’d have laid hands and shouted them back to life through the sheer force of “Badlands”.
The setlist was a fever dream of fan service. “Hungry Heart” had the crowd singing like it was an all-hands karaoke intervention. Handwritten cardboard signs went up in the air like students trying to get the attention of the substitute teacher, and Bruce, consummate showman, picked them out. “No Surrender”, “Candy’s Room”, “Be True”, all played with such effortless swagger, you had to assume the E Street Band either rehearses every song daily or has some kind of musical hive mind.
Then came “Because the Night”, which, not to sound jaded, I’ve now heard live three times in six months, including from Patti Smith herself. But Springsteen’s version still landed like a righteous punch to the heart, all fire and glory.
The final salvo was pure gospel: “Born to Run”, “Dancing in the Dark”, and the inevitably tear-jerking “Thunder Road”, which saw 80,000 people swaying like a field of Springsteen-branded wheat. No surprise guests, no pyrotechnics, no gimmicks. Just a man with a guitar, a band with muscle memory stronger than gravity, and songs that still know exactly where to punch you in the chest.
You can call a Springsteen show a lot of things: indulgent, overlong, suspiciously free of toilet breaks. But above all else, it’s joyous. A reminder that rock’n’roll, in the right weathered hands, can still mean everything. And if you’re not up for singing “Born to Run” in a stadium full of strangers, then I’m sorry, but we can’t be friends.