The beginning of a long goodbye or the rebirth of The Boss at 74?
Review: Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium. Sunday, May 5, 2024
It’s 10.30pm and Cardiff is, unusually for this hour in this compact city, gridlocked.
Central Square snakes with train station passengers. Coaches and cabs are clogging up the narrow arteries of Sophia Gardens and Cathedral Road’s vertebrae are stiff with traffic. No-one is getting home anytime soon.
But those cars and coaches, those taxis and trains, are all likely ablaze with exhausted excitement about what they have all just witnessed; a prime-form Bruce Springsteen opening his European tour with a three-hour show at the Principality Stadium.
Skip back a few hours to the pre-show: Cardiff is a marvel of massed intimacy. The closed-to-traffic streets of Westgate and Wood writhe with pedestrians. It’s one hundred-deep at the bar with little chance of getting served by the reeling staff. But the atmosphere is high and the crowd’s dial is set to ‘Having It’. Stadium gigs become this city.
The main event approaches with 95% excitement and 5% sadness. The Boss last played at the stadium in 2013. Now, aged 74, and after a recent run-in with peptic ulcers that saw him abandon the latter stages of his last tour unable to sing, this inevitably feels that it will be the last time he visits the city. If he leaves it another 11 years he’ll be 85. I can’t see it.
In some ways Springsteen does little to assuage that feeling. After a pulsating The River, he talks movingly of the death of his friend George Theiss of his first band the Castiles, noting he is now the last surviving member of that band. He introduces The E Street Band members and seems to dither: ‘There’s someone missing. There’s always someone missing’. He recalls the late players absent from the tour — organist Danny Federici and sax king Clarence Clemons — and about the loss everyone in the crowd has likely experienced in their lives. The tone becomes sombre and some people in the crowd visibly endure moments of deep refection.
But Springsteen isn’t dithering. And he isn’t crudely looking for sympathy. He’s sharing something of himself in order to connect with his fans and death is the great unfortunate leveller. He hits the guitar and it coughs up Last Man Standing. His voice is a blunt force, straining through the years and scars to find the edges of emotion, and the power.
He is 15 songs into the set. There are 14 more to come. And there were 14 before it. This is the deliberate centre of the show. But this is a only a moment. A moment for shared reflection that he has chosen to make. And a moment that he then chooses to defy. A sombre moment he overwhelms twentyfold with positive brilliance.
Almost everything that follows is of towering scale: Because The Night, with a jaw-dropping solo from Nils Lofgren, is monolithic. Badlands, Born To Run, Dancing In The Dark, Born In The USA. It’s the kind of songbook some nations couldn’t muster in their history, let alone one man.
The last time Springsteen played Cardiff the track selection may have been a bit more crowd-pleasing but this set cohered better thematically. It is total mastery of the live form. Springsteen in full flow is an awe-striking experience.
He grants two sign requests (Better Days and If I Was The Priest), dishes out harmonicas like sweets to kids in the front few rows, hugs and is hugged. Scattered around those life-affirming moments are a pulsating Promised Land, the stone grooves of Prove It All Night and Spirit In The Night, and an irresistible Hungry Heart.
There’s even a throat-ripping cover of Twist and Shout before the group bows out.
Covers added a lightness of touch to the set. A swinging version of The Commodores’ Nightshift, from his 2022 covers album Only the Strong Survive, was particularly danceable. The song was illuminated by the sax playing of Jake Clemmons, nephew of the late Clarence. The E Street Band has been replenished in parts but this heart-stopping, pants-dropping, love-making, earth-quaking, Viagra-taking organism probably can’t last forever.
For the moment though, Springsteen seems superhuman, still.
He isn’t raging against the dying of the light. He’s putting new batteries in all our torches for the long journey home. This tour is just getting started.
THE SETLIST (Via SetlistFM)
So Young and in Love (tour debut, first time since 2013)
Lonesome Day
No Surrender
Prove It All Night
Darlington County
Ghosts
Better Days (tour debut, sign request, first time since 2017)
The Promised Land
Spirit in the Night
Hungry Heart
If I Was the Priest (tour debut, sign request)
My City of Ruins
Nightshift (Commodores cover)
The River (tour debut)
Last Man Standing
Backstreets
Because the Night (Patti Smith Group cover)
She’s the One
Wrecking Ball
The Rising
Badlands
Thunder Road
Encore
Born in the U.S.A. (tour debut)
Born to Run
Bobby Jean
Dancing in the Dark
Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out
Twist and Shout (The Top Notes cover)
Encore 2
I’ll See You in My Dreams
