Springsteen sings the body politic

Photograph by Richard Saker for The Observer

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band
Co-op Live, Manchester

Since his 2016 memoir and its subsequent run on Broadway memorialising a period of deep introspection, fans have become acquainted with a kind of meta-Bruce Springsteen: a singer-songwriter who could reflect upon – deconstruct, even – a long career built on his youthful obsessions. There are a lot of cars, motorbikes and roads in his work, symbolising the freedom they grant, despite Springsteen confessing to not having had a driving licence at the time of writing anthems such as Born to Run.

But on the first night of his European tour, resuming dates that began in 2023, the Springsteen who turns up is a far more definite article. He stakes a strong claim to be the voice of the American conscience; the working-class firebrand who still has new and excoriating things to say about the state of his country; an artist who is both comrade and heir to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

Taking to the stage at 7.45pm, the better to fit in a nearly three-hour set, Springsteen kicks off by calling on the “righteous power of art, music and rock’n’roll in dangerous times”.

The US, he says, “is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration”, and asks the crowd “to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring”.

He has come dressed for work: in a crisp white shirt, waistcoat and tie. There’s a seven-album box set out next month full of previously unheard music. He doesn’t mention it once. The forthcoming biopic of the Nebraska era, starring Jeremy Allen White? No reference.

This run of shows is subtitled the Land of Hope and Dreams tour, and the set list of old has had significant, mordant updates. A slew of themed songs attests to Springsteen’s long history of caring deeply about the body politic, and to how elastic his material can be.

The very first cut, Land of Hope and Dreams, posits a train as a metaphor for many things: the path out of this life, a music genre – rock’n’roll – and, indeed, an entire country, that takes on saints and sinners alike; a song that tonight transforms into a vision of a great meritocratic melting pot, powered by faith and courage. Soon we’re into Darkness on the Edge of Town, which takes on an ever- more malevolent hue.

Great swathes of tonight’s rousing performance are given over to songs such as My Hometown, Death to My Hometown, Youngstown – a Celtic thrum from The Ghost of Tom Joad, and featuring a sensational guitar solo from Nils Lofgren – and My City of Ruins, all bitterly mourning, in one vein or another, a small-town peace and comfort that has been irrevocably shattered, or an unwelcome change that has come, through no fault of anyone’s, but usually down to macroeconomics, or high-level human folly. These songs tell of personal tragedies bound up in wider currents of decline.

There is a live debut for tonight’s keystone track Rainmaker, from 2020’s Letter to You album, which uses the tale of a con artist’s ploy to describe how desperate people place their faith in those peddling easy answers to complex problems. It starts starkly, with just Springsteen and powerhouse drummer Max Weinberg, but when the band come in, they come in as hard and heavy as the times.

Before House of a Thousand Guitars, a song in which Springsteen sets out his values, he takes aim once again at the state of the nation. “The last check on power after the checks and balances of government have failed are the people, you and me,” he says. “It’s in the union of people around a common set of values now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism.”

Later, before My City of Ruins, an even longer and more eloquent introduction lambasts “an unfit president and a rogue government” before Springsteen quotes James Baldwin and expresses hope that these times, too, shall pass. After more than 50 years in the business, he doesn’t feel like an artist of yesteryear, but one rising to meet the present moment with his most pointed political statements ever perhaps – and a back catalogue full of empathy and rage with which to back them up.

“This is a prayer for my country,” he says, introducing Long Walk Home, a song about one man’s alienation from everything that once seemed dependable. Its lines have magnified resonance. “You know that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone,” he sings, “Who we are, what we’ll do and what we won’t.”

Of course there are other Springsteens in the mix too. The chronicler of industrial decline is also a loverman, a sentimentalist and a soul revue arena-filler who has come armed with horns and keys, Jake Clemons’s saxophone and the E Street Choir, a band programmed to uplift.

There’s room, as there very often is, for his biggest hits at the three-quarter point – Springsteen seems to love them as much as his fans do – and for a liberal sprinkling of romantic blockbusters such as Hungry Heart and Dancing in the Dark. Rarely aired live, Human Touch gets its first outing for a while. Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out still has time to remember departed band members such as sax player Clarence Clemons, Jake’s uncle.

But even the love songs end up sounding like statesmanlike oratory through tonight’s refracting lens, emphasising constancy, fellow-feeling and purpose. These tracks change in dialogue with one another. The Rising, a song written for the fire service personnel who dealt with 9/11, channels a message of joining together to vanquish bleakness that has other, vivid applications.

Song after song spells out how Springsteen believes “in a promised land”. He doesn’t merely offer a multiple-decade critique of his country’s failings, but an alternative vision of how things should be. The set closes with an impassioned cover of Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom, and the audience files out of the arena to the sound of Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land. Springsteen has long been a consummate performer, but this might just be a show for the ages.