Bruce Springsteen review: The air at the RDS tingles with possibility. Then a passionate, defiant star takes to the stage
Ever-impressive: Bruce Springsteen with Steven Van Zandt and the E Street Band at the RDS on Friday evening. Photograph: Tom Honan★★★★☆
Bruce Springsteen and his ever-impressive E Street Band, including brass and backing vocals, returned to Dublin’s RDS Main Arena on Friday night for a three-hour show filled with energy, humour and invention but also tinged with a sense of poignancy as he recalled the friends he has lost along the way.
The contemplative tone of songs such as Last Man Standing, Letter to You and the moving I’ll See You In My Dreams, which closed the show, contrasted with the lively reworking of songs from the past 50 years of his career, notably material drawn from early albums such as The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle, Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town and Born in the USA, which formed the spine of the set.
And Springsteen responded in kind. The audience is a key player in the ritual-filled drama that unfolds each night. They know the plays, they know the moves and, of course, they know the songs, but he renders them anew in each performance. He achieves this by making the local universal. Of course we don’t believe we are in a small steamy club on the Jersey Shore in the early 1970s, but the spirit of the night survives, even into the cavernous spaces of anonymous stadiums in multiple countries.
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