The Promised Land
Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band - ‘Liverpool Stadium’ 04/06/2025
“The implicit promise of a Bruce Springsteen concert is that this is what it’s all about”, Greil Marcus, 1980.
I’ve always wanted to see Bruce. So, when he announced he was coming to My Hometown on my birthday, it was too good an opportunity to miss.
My first Springsteen album was probably not the most obvious starting place, but I have always been a sucker for artwork, so when I bought my weekly two for £10 CDs from HMV at the height of my musical discovery journey, I plumped for Nebraska. A bleak frosted highway framed by stark and menacing red letters, it looked cool as fuck. I did not know what was inside...
It is a doom-laden, desperate and dour set of songs, from an era of low mood and mental health. The protagonists are losers, loners, or killers. It is not your typical Bruce experience. Yet the songs have deep, icy waters, with something to say about the USA, society, and life. Sometimes it's in a shrug of resignation, "I guess there's just meanness in this world"; sometimes it’s a practical perspective, “I’ve got debts that no honest man can pay”. It’s eerie and otherworldly at points, all from a single acoustic guitar and a tape deck. As an on-the-fringe emo teenager, I fell in love with this through both the sheer fuzzy romanticism of it and an overly bleak world view. Now, as so much rings true about the world and getting older, it’s an almost painful listen, to be rationed and devoured when the outside gets dark and cold and quiet. He will only play one song from this tonight, but it’s my favourite from it, or second, or third.
The ubiquitous Greatest Hits from 1995 was also knocking about on the CD pile, as I think it was in every household in the Western World. Sticking this on, it was easy to delve backwards and forwards, through all the songs everyone knows, to albums crammed with hidden depths and gems. They created worlds and landscapes to escape into. I wanted to be in them, driving all night, chugging beers in bars and letting the wind blow through my hair. The American adventure, a yearning that we all at some point have dreamt of, at least before the bigots and cranks that appeared in Louis Theroux documentaries suddenly started to run the country and the world. Listening back now, this is a fundamental part of the journey; the warnings are all there, the glory and ambition mixed with damning indictments, coaxed and couched in his music.
And yet, I never got round to seeing him.
But here I am, amongst it finally, quite near the front due to my ‘in-for-a-penny’ approach to this particular gig, waiting. With no support band or warm-up DJ and having curbed my day-drinking to enjoy the night fully, it is a slightly strange atmosphere, almost flat. I needn’t have worried.
I guess only someone who’s done this a thousand times before in front of literally millions of people can start with an obscure offcut, albeit a thunderous one. My Love Will Not Let You Down never made it onto Born In The USA so lots of the crowd (and myself) are relatively unfamiliar with it, yet it contains enough push, pull and vigour to sweep everyone up into it, a hymn for those uber-devoted fans to sing every word to and a startling entry point for the more casual. It’s an inverted Dancing In The Dark, and a message to us all that this will both kick ass and be a night to remember.
We launch into Lonesome Day and Land of Hopes and Dreams, intercut with the call-to-action of the Chicago soul classic People Get Ready and Bruce’s first impassioned speech against the situation in America.
The first four songs are the aforementioned opener, and then three cuts from his ‘later’ stuff.
No pop classics.
Yet, I am deeply struck by the sheer musical force above us from a band made up of mainly 70-year-olds, and Bruce. I leaned into my partner about 3 minutes in and said, “Look how much he means it”, and he does. He’s a 74-year-old who's played virtually every stadium, arena and country you could imagine. Yet there is not one drop of complacency or forced showmanship in him. He’s concentrating, grafting, singing, grunting, sweating, taking it all in.
He still fucking means it.
Admittedly I did go for a tactical wee during Death To My Hometown, so I assume everything carried on without mishap in my absence, but I was safely back in my spec just in time for the freewheeling No Surrender, a joyous romp through one of the more typically ‘Bruce Rock’ numbers, a carefree four minutes of joy we all need. Next, dedicated to “our dear leader” is Rainmaker from 2020s Letter To You, which I enjoyed but didn’t devour when it was released. As it happens, this is a revelation: “Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, they'll hire a rainmaker”. It is both confrontational yet lacking in full judgement, a condemnation but non-hectoring, a sadly realistic outlook on how we got here.
Next is The Nebraska One, Atlantic City. It's a looming, sepia-tinted ode to desperation, love, and naivete. Whilst also being a thoughtful meditation on widespread uncertainty regarding legalised gambling during its early years in the coastal resort town, and how big business and corporations can loom over a whole region, they can revive or hollow out cities whenever they want, the people don’t matter, the numbers do. Our main character just wants to get by, but it's impossible, and his love and life suffer because of it, which makes him want to use drastic measures to get ahead or get out. This version is performed with a full band, which takes some of the menace and edge from it... But it’s still a highlight.
From there, we sweep into a trio of bona fide classics.
The Promised Land would have been enough without the tear-inducing ending of Bruce trading harmonica solos with a young girl on his shoulders, then gifting her said harmonica to take home. It’s a heart-melting, spontaneous moment and is rightly given one of the night’s biggest roars. Hungry Heart gives us all a guilt-free singalong (albeit one laced again with double meaning and food for thought) before The River woozes its unearthly way onto stage, winding down dimly-lit embankments full of loss, lies, love and inevitability, swirling its way into the sky and washing over us below. Bruce holds the notes at the end impressively, no, heroically, at the end; it transforms from an all-time classic merely being performed to a moment of wonder, something intangibly life-affirming yet profoundly sad. “Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true, or is it something worse?” Well, you tell me.
“There’s a body count incorporated into our way of life. We’ve come to accept the expendability of some of our citizens’ lives and dreams as just a part of the price of doing business.” Bruce Springsteen, 1995
Youngstown follows from the dusty, downbeat hidden gem The Ghost of Tom Joad. It is essentially a folk history lesson on the generational rise and fall of said town in Ohio, from the discovery of iron ore in the 1800s through to the decline of the steel industry in the second half of the twentieth century. On this night, it is somehow transformed into a blast-metal rock furnace, with jarring pointy solos ringing out from Nils Lofgren’s guitar, another example of how these songs can be morphed and shifted into any shape and yet still work. Murder Incorporated follows, and it’s a one-two punch of songs that seem hand-picked to put a hand up in anger, revolt, and defiance in the face of a rising fascist evil.
Still in full flow, we get a chunk of new-to-modern numbers.
Long Walk Home, introduced as “a prayer for my country” tells us that we’re in flux, yet we still have hope, before we get the dreaded Solo Acoustic Moment, and the worrying potential for some serious wank. We’ve got House of A Thousand Guitars here: not one of the more famous tracks on show. Yet again, in defiance, it works, stark and sombre yet still with light somewhere, somehow, at the end of the tunnel.
My City of Ruins, a post-9/11 lament, is wonderful, a real surprise standout, now staring at the ashes of not just that sad day but all the wreckage, collateral, and prejudice that followed. The Rising and Wrecking Ball straddle a ‘cover’ (is it a cover if you wrote it in the first place? Who knows, who cares?) of Patti Smith’s Because The Night, and if there is a very slight dip in energy and enthusiasm, it's here.
We’re exhausted watching these people throw out their guts on stage, so how must they feel?
Not to panic, because possibly the best rendition of the evening follows, Badlands reinvigorating and rousing us all towards the end we don’t want to come, with every person belting it out defiantly, triumph in the face of adversity. “Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king” resonates more now than ever before.
The epochal Thunder Road closes out the official set. It's slowed down a tad to act as celebratory showcase for all the band, and whilst in my dream scenario it would have had more of the vim and chaos of the studio version, it is still Thunder Fucking Road, and you can’t argue with that.
A quick bow and a flash of light heralds the encore, muscling in with Born In the U.S.A., roared out by each soul, then Born To Run, which, when I thought about seeing Bruce live, was the one I wanted to savour, so it’s an almost biblical feeling as I listen to him and those around me utter every word. It is the quintessential Springsteen song, raucous and pomp yet still hemmed with love, affection, and realism. Ever noticed how he doesn’t want to merely shag Wendy? Not ‘the girl’, Wendy is given a name, an identity, and he wants to be your friend, he wants to guard your dreams and visions. It’s a sweetness that shouldn't be glossed over. Neither should the fact that the glorious mystical breakdown that begins "Beyond the Palace hemi powered drones scream down the boulevard” and ends with “Kids are huddled on the beach in a mist I wanna die with you out on the streets tonight” probably scopes out the entire panoramic history of middle-Americana more in 40 seconds than any epic film or documentary or series ever has (and I love The Sopranos). I think details like this matter in explaining why tonight is not just a concert, it’s nigh-on a spiritual experience.
We rattle through a crowd-pleasing Bobby Jean, Dancing In The Dark and Twist And Shout (hey, The Beatles are from round here y’know?) before Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out pays tribute to those that the band has lost, and gained, in the shape of saxophonist Jake Clemons, performing those wonderful solos in place of his late father Clarence.
Is closing with Chimes of Freedom a little on-the-nose? Maybe, but on-the-nose has been the preserve of the many malignant presences of the world for years now, so who cares, who doesn’t want that message ramming home after such a night? Much has been made of Bruce’s anti-Trump, anti-fascist, anti-plain-evil speeches (they are not ‘rants’ if they are softly spoken, thoughtful pleas for peace and level-headedness), and I can see that maybe people think that its all too worthy, all done in an arena of yes, a mainly white and (gulp) middle-aged echo chamber of people lucky enough to be able to spare the money and time to be here. Sure, they have a point. But also, he doesn’t have to do any of this. He could play the hits, take the money and run and rest on his reputation as being ‘a bloody good bloke’. He frankly doesn’t need the hassle. Yet he does, and has done in his lyrics and actions all his life. Can it make a difference? God knows. Probably not. But he can inspire more of us to put our necks on the line, just a tiny bit more, then there’s hope yet.
Symbolically, for this struggling centrist-lefty who now gets cranky with back and leg ache at such a long stand, the only two people who annoyed me near us were a bald man who shook his head at one of these speeches (why are you here mate? Have you not paid any attention for the last 50 years?) and a drunken moustachioed crowd-barger who repeatedly shouted “yes comrade” and generally annoyed everyone before a reassuringly Scouse threat to “drop you lad” if he spilt a fella’s pint. Now, nobody wants violence, but this blue-collar man’s experience would surely have been approved in some measure by The Boss.
Afterwards, we shuffle through dark parks and Backstreets home, with special buses heralding the ‘Bruce Springsteen Shuttle’ in their neon, faded mansions of Newsham Park, trying to look proud still amongst the very dereliction Springsteen often touches upon.
It’s a low key end, but one that allows reflection, songs of my life that I could almost see in my head brought to life amongst thousands, a new found appreciation of newer material I’d overlooked, and the adrenaline replaced by a sense of sadness and dread yet wonder, hope, and happiness...
"Everything dies, baby, that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back." Bruce Springsteen, Atlantic City
