'Ken Loach with a chromium steel car' ... Bruce Springsteen last night. Photograph: Brian Rasic/Rex Features
I have a theory that on the subject of Bruce Springsteen everyone has at least one idiot friend. The very mention of his name will turn these normally urbane and intelligent people, who have no trouble with spelling or cooking a risotto, into morons. "I can't stand Springsteen", they'll say.
Why not?
"Just can't."
Right. But why not?
"All that Born in the USA stuff. Look at me, ooh I'm a big, hairy, chest-thumping American. Listen to my big, hairy music. And if you don't I'll get my government to drop a bomb on you."
I know that appearances can deceive, but people who have no trouble figuring out the relationship between lyric and music in a Smiths song fall apart on the subject of Springsteen. Or maybe it's just good old fashioned snobbery. Bruce Springsteen doesn't deal in half measures, doesn't spend his time onstage hanging from the microphone stand or staring at his shoes. Instead, he works up a sweat, he gurns for a connection. Last night he and the magical, pulverising E Street Band did just that in London, laying waste to the horrors of the O2 Arena (can't get there, can't get in, can't get a drink) and replacing them with a performance that must be described as world class.
You don't have to listen to the kind of things the man says, but anyone who dismisses his music as being a sentimental proletarian hop have got it wrong. As an author - as a voice - he is in the same tradition as John Steinbeck and Mark Twain. He's Ken Loach with a chromium steel car. He could hardly be any more morally aligned with the working core were he to crack open a cover of When I'm Cleaning Windows.
The strange thing, the remarkable thing, about this is how authentic it all seems. The tickets for last night's show were expensive, the arena impersonal and devoutly capitalistic. Everyone involved was either making or spending money. But the Boss has remained untouched by the cynicism that tends to stick to proselytising performers.
Maybe this is because Springsteen himself doesn't proselytise, he empathises. A quarter of a century ago he released Nebraska, the first devastating critique on the cruelties of Reagan's America. If you listen closely, since then he's been saying all kinds of things that decent people don't want to hear. It's just that he's been saying them in nice songs, or at big concerts. Last night he used two words that you can bet your right arse cheek will never be spoken again from the stage of the O2 Arena. In relation to the US federal state robbing its citizens of their rights, he used the phrase "habeas corpus."
What's he gonna do about it?
"Sing a song about it," he says, with a smile that explains it all. "That's what I do. I sing songs."
Radical.
Review: Bruce Springsteen at the O2 Arena.
