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Camden music review| grooves | Bruce Springsteen | Arsenal | Emirates Stadium | E-Street Band | Rock gig | Paul Keilthy
REVIEW: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN
Emirates Stadium
YOU usually get all sorts at a christening – believers and agnostics, those here for the spirit and those just here for the beer.
“Let’s baptise the Emirates,” cried Bruce Springsteen on Friday night, and for most of the audience for the first rock gig at Arsenal’s all-seater stadium, there seemed little doubt that a god was in the house.
Springsteen attracts a devotion that can baffle the unconverted. But he rewards it, too. He spent two-thirds of the show in among his followers, laying on hands, taking requests.
Those who doubted that he would rise to the challenge of filling the stadium’s vast spaces were confounded. From first to last of a three-hour set he bristled and rocked, playing, according to those who count these things, 28 songs, picked from a repertoire that stretches over 30 years.
“Nobody ever played here before? Really? We better test that structure,” he said, and his congregation rejoiced.
There was evidence in the crowd that those anointed by the 58-year-old Springsteen have indeed been blessed, many of them by children, and a solid few by grandchildren.
But while the family atmosphere held no one back, it added to a sense in this agnostic that Springsteen’s fanbase has drifted – despite his efforts – from non-conformism to the established church.
Followers say that his 2007 album, Magic, is his most political to date, and he prefaced his excerpts from it with a short speech on rendition and the new front on civil rights.
And he began the show with his elegies to the American manufacturing age, closely tied in place and time to 1970s US.
Both these passages were treated with the respectful applause that a sermon deserves, but the crowd came alive for their favourite hymns, Born To Run and Dancing in The Dark, for the rituals and good fellowship that come of long acquaintance. But it may be that Springsteen needs no new converts, and he surely would not seek them in a cathedral full of fans. They were grateful to see the old faces of the E-Street Band.
A crowd that came determined to enjoy itself filed contentedly out into the Ashburton Grove evening, confident that all was well with the old ways, the old Boss.
Paul Keilthy |
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