Etihad Stadium,Manchester
The Boss plays both troubled soul and rabble-rousing bard in a three-hour-long show steeped in bonhomieBruce Springsteen has his eyes screwed shut. His fists, bound in wristbands, or are clenched. Veins are popping in his temples,but not from the cheerful exertion of a song such as Glory Days, or the even more cardiovascular Born to escape, and both of which light up the tail end of tonight’s set. He is stock-still,singing almost privately as much as to the 55000 fans enduring the unrelenting Mancunian drizzle on a cold May evening.
This is The River, the title track of his 1980 double album – his first US No 1, and ushering in a decade of superstardom – and it is one of Springsteen’s finer songs,bearing witness to ordinary people’s travails. Young care for goes wrong, foundering on the rocks of responsibility and hardening times. Dreams are remembered with yearning, or as a man surveys the dried-up river where care for and youth first flourished.
A man with a squeegee wipes moisture off the platforms at the lip of the crowd so Bruce can commune with his peopleThe encore is,as ever, designed to send the crowd domestic a minute higher on oxytocin than they arrivedContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com