The festival headline tradition is hit’em like an avalanche from the off… but Springsteen didn’t. Instead he walked on with saxman Clarence Clemmons and sang one for the cognoscenti: Joe Strummer’s song about a Glastonbury encounter, Coma Girl.
In pics: Bruce Springsteen at Glastonbury, June 27, 2009.
But after that poignant opening, it was all “1, 2, 3, 4” and the “pants-dropping, love-making, Viagra-taking” E Street Band rocking Life and Death and things more important than that. Everyone got sore throats howling the big choruses as they rolled and tumbled down Badlands, Prove It All Night, Because The Night, No Surrender (duetted with Brian Fallon from New Jersey newcomers Gaslight Anthem), Promised Land, Born To Run and more, powerhouse piledrivers no one can match.
For casual Springsteen observers momentum was all. A couple of times when he stopped singing to invite the masses into taking a verse all he got back was a murmur as the passionate front rows piled in and the rest said, Er… sorry. Eventually, he noticed and laughed, but that disconnect didn’t amount to a hill of beans compared to the big fun and the search for a moral compass to guide us through dark times.
Right from the start Springsteen was yelling his catchphrase for the night, a line from Radio Nowhere, “Is there anyone alive out there?” - demanding that, amid all the singing and shouting and bouncing, mortality got its oar in. Knowing “what it’s like to live and die” in Prove It All Night and enduring loss of work and home and love in Johnny 99, The River, and The Ghost Of Tom Joad, and telling whoever’s handy to “take your knife and cut this pain from my heart” in Promised Land.
But then his keynote speech in pastiche TV preacher tones during Working On A Dream vowed that “Right here in this field we want to build a house of love – that’s our job” and that’s why that whole irresistible E Street force is right behind every song that comes through with an “I believe in the hope that can save me” (Badlands) and “I believe in the promised land”.
Even in front of the tens of thousands he didn’t really know, Springsteen could still pull off the beautiful grace of the 19th-century gospel encore Hard Times Come Again No More and The Rising’s mystical response to the 9/11 catastrophe.
So, delivered and received at different levels, and magnificent every which way. That house of love project? Job done.
In pics: Bruce Springsteen at Glastonbury, June 27, 2009.
11:38 AM | 28/06/2009
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