Bruce Springsteen in Dublin review: The Boss brings curtain down on glorious Irish sojourn
Bruce Springsteen and Steven Van Zandt on stage at Croke Park, Dublin. Picture: Collins
Many people have asked why Bruce Springsteen is so wildly popular with Irish audiences. He sold out the RDS three times last summer and completed a four-night tour around the country with Sunday night’s Croke Park celebration. There’s one word that keeps coming up, a small but powerful one. Joy.
It’s in the air as we squeeze through the gates of Croke, luckily avoiding the queues that unfortunately led to others missing the start of the gig. The sunshine helps, although as the good people of Cork proved last Thursday night, it isn’t essential. When the band walks out at about 7.10pm, the stadium explodes with noise. Springsteen leads the greatest live rock’n’roll band in the world into a breathless opening salvo of ‘Lonesome Day’, ‘Night’, and a ‘No Surrender’ which has us all “ready to grow young again”.
Loyal lieutenant Steven Van Zandt joins him at the microphone to Mick and Keith their way through ‘Two Hearts’, uniting thousands more, and even though the sound in the stands for this opening section (it improves later) is akin to listening to a Springsteen album through your neighbour’s wall, it doesn’t matter because it’s already an euphoric experience. Springsteen’s roared vow in ‘Ghosts’ as he steps down to fans pressed against the barrier, that by the end of the set, he’d leave no one alive is well on its way to being fulfilled.
He is our reason to believe, this is the promised land that rock n’ roll always assured us was out there. He throws his telecaster to a roadie as Jake Clemons’ saxophone takes over and The Boss, down at the front again, gifts a young girl both his harmonica and a memory she’ll treasure forever.
As it was in the pit in Kilkenny, and as it surely was in Belfast and even through the deluge in Cork, the opening bars of ‘Hungry Heart’ send a current of electricity around the arena. Every face beams as Bruce gets out of the way and lets us sing the opening verse and chorus.
He finally takes a breath and wishes us a good evening before standing still for a beautiful ‘My Hometown’ and a hymnal ‘The River’ proving that voice hasn’t lost much, if anything, as he approaches 75.
Bruce and his band can do no wrong. Nils Lofgren spins like a child at a birthday party during ‘Because The Night’ and ‘She’s The One’ is a landslide of sound where Bruce strikes a pose, one hand in the air, one hand on his battered Telecaster, that should be immortalised in bronze.
The E Street Band don’t wait for an encore because this charge in the air can’t be dissipated. There’s a sea of hands in ‘Born To Run’ and a delirious 80,000 voices scream ‘Hey, baby!’ into the night sky during ‘Dancing In The Dark’, and, just as in Kilkenny and Cork, a beautiful, moving ‘Rainy Night In Soho’.
For me, it was ‘Bobby Jean’ which had me welling up, thinking about those good souls and “all the miles in between”, and 'Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out', celebrating Springsteen’s fallen friends, not with a sigh but with a smile. “Oh yeah, it’s alright!” And for three blistering, boisterous, beguiling hours, it really was alright. Cares and worries melted away as every single wide-eyed watcher was suffused with joy and that liberating promise of rock n’ roll was delivered.
“We’ll be seeing you,” Springsteen promises as he finally, reluctantly leaves the stage. Only a fool would bet against it but even if he doesn’t return, he has gifted us something special over the last week and a half. There was magic - and joy - in these nights.
