Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Boucher Playing Fields, Belfast
★★★★★
The notion of “no surrender” carries a lot of resonance in Belfast, writ across gable walls and inked on to skin. But when Bruce Springsteen opens his show in the city on Thursday night with No Surrender, you know that he’s got a variation on the theme.
This immense show is dedicated to lost friends, about “things that leave us, and what remains”. Springsteen wants us to be true to memory, ideals and the essence of the departed. He plays it like a revival tent show. This is no time to backslide. He wants the hands in the air, all the hearts on the line.
He follows with Lonesome Day, Prove It All Night and Ghosts. There’s a brass section, a choir and the cherished E Street faces. Springsteen wears a black waistcoat, a white shirt and cherry-red Doc Martens boots. His presence is astounding.
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As expected, he’s not going to say much until the band gets revving, an hour into the show. But the songs say plenty, and there’s a great pivot in the evening when The Promised Land is revealed.
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The E Street Band has been active for half a century. The band leader will celebrate his 75th birthday in September, yet he looks ring-fit and eager. Springsteen and his band still play three-hour shows, pulling favourites and rare tunes out of the songbook and manifesting a joy that’s genuine.
Belfast returns the warmth. It’s his first show in the North since 2013, and it’s a delight to hear the return of Hungry Heart and Backstreets. When he sings Spirit in the Night you remember the debt that young Bruce owed to Van Morrison’s lyrical soul. Later, the mouth-organ riffology of She’s the One appears to mutate into Morrison’s Mystic Eyes.
Max Weinberg hits the snare drum with an emphatic thump on The Rising. Jake Clemons is playing sax, throwing shapes with Springsteen and being the worthy successor to his late uncle Clarence.
The final 10 songs are momentous, and the 18-piece ensemble does not falter. Steven Van Zandt throws the repartee around on Glory Days, while Thunder Road steers into an audience walkabout by the pit, as the singer collects trinkets and embraces the faithful.
Fifty years ago to the day, Springsteen and the E Street Band opened for Bonnie Raitt at the Harvard Square Theatre, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The music journalist (and future Springsteen manager) Jon Landau was at the gig and wrote up a ridiculous piece of rock lore: “I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” Yet many of those gathered in the early summer glow of Belfast will concur with the declaration of 1974. He has prevailed.
You want Springsteen to be tireless, to carry us over uncertain times once more. But he also knows that the gig is finite. Hence the tone of his 2020 album, Letter to You, wreathed around loss and farewells.
Which is how he leaves Belfast, just his voice, an acoustic guitar and a last deal of generosity. He sings I’ll See You in my Dreams. He takes us quietly but resolutely into the night. Cherish your benediction from the Boss.
