Three years in Sunderland and not a second looked back on with much favour. A tense time, a bankrupt experience of wet weather and miserable realities. Today is no different. A return to the Stadium of Light where The Boss, Bruce Springsteen, lays down hours and hours of heartland classics. He is of a rare, bucket list quality for those in attendance. Many will remember his heyday but for some, this will be the first and last experience with the Thunder Road hitmaker. It is a song inevitably in the set before the first of many encore songs. Springsteen sounds as intense and spirited as he did in those live recordings his team continually release on Spotify. They are indicators of quality still felt on the stage decades on from Born in the U.S.A.
He may not play the critical breakdown of his home country but a delay to starting the show leads to an explosion of encore hits. If hearing a boom of Springsteen’s best work does not reduce you to tears, then why bother attending? Why indeed. Between the frigid conditions and the man to the right’s foul odour, the show begins to overwhelm before The Boss is on stage. Nabbing a free ticket and rushing around on a series of trains is meant to be the joyous adrenalin bump and flow of the job. But it kills from within and sitting there, motionless, as Springsteen rattles out the best of his contemporary efforts like Letter To You and Nightshift, is crushing. Sink or die. Lay back into the bed of impressive, booming setlist numbers which hear Springsteen rush through a series of tracks with youthful spirit at their core. Two and a half hours from the 74-year-old is impressive not because of his age but because he holds the highest standard for his shows.
Luck runs through for the man on stage who weathered the storm of a career shift two decades ago and for those who are plated up press tickets. Those in the latter are husks of what they were when they started and go to these shows more out of a sense of duty to themselves and their routine than anything else. Seeing Springsteen live is a dream. He will rekindle some embers of the passion which once jutted out and caused such uproar. There comes a point between Backstreets and Beyond the Night where you can feel completely alone. Overwhelming, to say the least, yet somewhat numbing too. Sink or die. A rush of self-loathing and indifference to three years in the field is pierced by Springsteen. He is the first to do so. The break is coming.
Springsteen will mark a wonderful experience for those there of their own volition and for those there because they keep pushing themselves to the brink of collapse it will be a booming show, a timely reminder to take a breath. Springsteen is of such a quality his work revitalises his attendees. A stretch of Born to Run, Glory Days, Dancing in the Dark and Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out holds as much courage as the Commodores cover earlier in the set and the Letter to You remnants. Last Man Standing sticks out like a sore thumb. Springsteen is in the veteran category of musicians and finds himself fighting against the slippery slope which leads to legacy acts. But he is a contemporary musician with fine new songs and is hellbent on playing them. Rightly so. Bob Dylan did the same. Do not bend to audience expectations. Excitement comes through variety and variety is found in the deeper annals of the discography, like Light of Day or the tremendous opener, Waitin’ on a Sunny Day which combats the floods of water quite nicely.
You cannot beat The E Street Band. Steven Van Zandt and company will beat you into place with an instrumental fury which pops on every song. Fearsome work from an exemplary collection of musicians. They put it all on the line yet have no reason to. Springsteen and the band are so clearly driven by passion. Walking home through drenched streets, the chatter is all the same. “That was his last gig.” “Didn’t they play well?” What becomes of Springsteen and The E Street Band after this tour is of no concern to us. Their Sunderland performance rounds off another successful period for one of the finest musicians still going. Exemplary musicians who leave their message clear on stage. If you are to do something, anything, do it with the energy and honesty the band has for these songs. Shockingly moving and expectedly brilliant work from The Boss, whose heavy set of hits and deep cuts provides a nice blur for those hardened, soaked fans.
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