Saturday 17th May 2025

Co-Op Live, Manchester, England

As I approach the doors of the Co-Op Live arena to scan my ticket, my ears catch the soaring guitars of ‘Learning to Fly’ playing over the venue’s speakers. I’m always buoyed when I hear a Tom Petty song in a concert hall – before this evening, it has happened at two Tyler Childers gigs – because it reminds me of why I decide to be here experiencing such events. A big fan of Petty, I had never seen his band live and, after his sudden death, I realised with a pang that I never would. It made me resolve to never again pass up an opportunity to hear the music I love, and in recent years I have been privileged to witness the likes of Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney and now Bruce Springsteen live on a stage, as well as exploring a wealth of music from a burgeoning country and roots scene, a cast of young unknowns and future greats including the afore-mentioned Childers. All of this comes to my mind as Mike Campbell’s slide guitar solo plays over the speakers. I look up with a smile as a white gull glides through a cloudless blue sky.

This is how I had intended to write my review; a mere narrative of the night, its sights and sounds and feel recorded for posterity, even if only for myself. But the Boss has spoken. Days earlier, Bruce Springsteen had taken to the same stage in Manchester and delivered a planned speech attacking Donald Trump, warning against authoritarianism and charging the President with an assault on civil liberties in America. It’s a speech he will deliver again before his set tonight.

The speech made headline news – and drew a rebuke from President Trump, who labelled Bruce “a dried out prune of a rocker” who “ought to keep his mouth shut”. Consequently, the shadow of Trump looms over this second night. It means that, even as I queue outside the Co-Op Live for Round Two, the story continues to swirl. Will the Boss double down? Will Trump respond again? It means, on a purely selfish note, that I feel slightly peeved at having missed that first historic night simply because I chose the second of Springsteen’s three dates in the city, like a man who walks past 3 Savile Row just as the Beatles are packing up from their rooftop concert. And a devil in me also ensures it means that, when I am at the merchandise stand buying a tour t-shirt, I feel compelled to pick out the orange one.

In a way, it’s a shame that the political overshadows this night of music, for the E Street Band prove to be on great form. Nils Lofgren tears it up with some deliciously dirty guitar soloes and spins around like a man a quarter of his age, drawing many a roar from the crowd. Max Weinberg booms tirelessly on drums. And Jake Clemons proves the boots of the Big Man are not too big to fill, delivering those stirring saxophone notes which take Springsteen’s songs to another level entirely.

This night, then, can be seen as a meditation on power: the political power that Bruce explicitly targets in between songs, but also on the power of music to overcome and transcend differences. When the Boss speaks at the start of the night, it’s not solely a political statement – though it is very much that – but a statement on the value of “rock and roll in dangerous times”.

I must confess: I have an instinctive suspicion of musicians getting political. While I’m not of the opinion that artists should “just shut up and sing”, which has been a charge thrown at Bruce from some quarters since his on-stage statement a few days ago, I do sometimes resent having to work harder to separate the art from the artist. Political statements from artists are not always perceptive, are often simplistic, and at their worst can be opportunistic or self-aggrandising. Reacting to or commenting on those statements, whether for or against, gets you on the radar of some very tedious people, particularly in our social media age, and dragged into exhausting arguments with those who treat ad hominems, non sequiturs and logical fallacies like old friends to be welcomed to dine at table. Online politics is a pit of vipers, and if you fall in you get bit by fangs on all sides.

This is not a charge I lay against Bruce Springsteen, to be clear. His statements are not simplistic or lacking in perception; they show nuance and clarity, even though I find myself surprisingly cold at some of the broader sweeps of his brush. The Boss has always been political in his art, even if tonight feels especially politically-charged, and it’s an essential component of his lyrical content. What is more, there is a noble and unrepentant strain of political protest in the roots of the Irish and American folk music that Springsteen draws water from. Far be it from me to stifle what shoots may choose to grow from that well.

But I do find myself wishing I was sailing into my first Bruce Springsteen concert on calmer waters. Because now, instead of commenting on how fun it is to hear ‘Hungry Heart’ from the stage, or ‘Badlands’, or ‘Born to Run’, I find myself having to get my political ducks in a row. I can’t enjoy ‘Bobby Jean’ or ‘Dancing in the Dark’ to the full, or look back on them with fondness, until I square this circle of how I feel about the intersection of art and politics on Bruce’s stage.

I’m not a professional Trump-hater – certainly, I don’t make it part of my online identity. Nevertheless, I do feel deeply sick about the treatment of Ukraine, and President Zelensky, not least by the toadying Vance. And speaking as we are of power, I recognise the latent power that Trump has ridden to political victory, born out of things ignored until they evolved into something that could no longer be ignored, and I lament that they were suppressed so long that this seemed their only outlet.

I once read something attributed to Phillips Brooks which said that when America names its man, it names Lincoln. As a lover of America and its roll call of great men – not only Lincoln but the diverse talents and character of the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Dick Winters, Ed Murrow and Tom Petty – I find it passingly sad that, twice in the last eight years, America has named Donald J. Trump its man, for want of any better. Bruce Springsteen seems to be struggling to process this more than myself, if his bowed head on stage or his fierce and frustrated guitar solo on ‘Rainmaker’ are any indication. And yet, because Springsteen has posed the question, it leads one to remember that he himself campaigned most recently for Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris to be America’s advocate. Without getting into a political debate over the merits and demerits of that duo, most would surely concede that they are not American politicians of the first rank.

The night of music having been prised open by a political crowbar, more thoughts come pouring through the gap. If Springsteen makes himself the lightning rod for this topic, one must ask the question of what he hopes to achieve. It would not take much work to show President Trump as vain, gluttonous and bullying in his office, but for all his trespasses I find myself nervous at how the words ‘dictator’ or ‘fascist’ are thrown around so readily (though note that Springsteen himself does not use the latter term in his speeches tonight). Partly this is because, having read extensively about the horrors committed by actual fascism in history, I need a higher bar to make that charge. But it is also because – unlike many, it seems – I remember the assassin’s bullet last year. For an artist on stage, branding your political opponent a dictator has the effect of making you appear an icon, a rebel, a folk hero, but to some of the crazies out there it has them crouching on a roof in Butler, Pennsylvania, with a clear line of sight and millimetres away from starting a civil war.

One also wonders if Manchester is the best stage for this principled stance. We have our own fine history of political dissent, of course, but one wonders if Springsteen’s comments would not have been more impactful, and more courageous, if first voiced in an American city. While no doubt heartfelt, in Europe the speech has a sense of tilting at windmills, as though a bunch of soused Mancs on a Saturday could be inspired to march on Washington.

On a stage in England, one wonders if Bruce could have found other worthy concerns to lend his voice to, tailored to the moment, rather than issuing an open-ended call to arms against the latest anomaly in the American experiment. One wonders if he would speak against, or is even aware of, the circumstances of the very venue he plays tonight? The Co-Op Live arena is built on the Etihad campus and part-owned by the City Football Group, an umbrella company that has been accused of sports-washing and financial doping, and which remains an unrepentant actor in a trend that has taken a truly working-class sport and made success largely dependent on which emirate owns your community.

Or Bruce could have used his platform in England to show solidarity with the likes of Elton John and Paul McCartney, two peers who at this moment have placed their names (among many others) in opposition to the British government’s attempt to perpetrate a mass theft of copyrighted art. The disgraceful Data (Use and Access) Bill is being pushed through Parliament as we speak, and would involve asset-stripping the creative industries in order to feed corporate A.I. machine-learning which will, in turn, replace those artists. To use Bruce’s own phrase from one of tonight’s speeches, this is happening now. And what is more, it is something specific that can be targeted for change, and where another cultural icon’s name to the ranks would add great weight and encouragement – and expose the issue to his fans.

Such are the criticisms which can emerge, even among your fans and allies, when you stand on a soapbox. But I find that the more I reason this out, this nexus of politics and art that is so important to Springsteen, the more I am able to recognise his power. Art and story has a unique way of cutting through the bullshit, and as a storyteller Bruce has thought and written deeply about his country, saying he has “tried to be an ambassador for America for fifty years”.

It means that what we witness tonight is the framework of a tragedy. In Trump, perhaps we see what happens when the stories America tells itself meet reality, when the shining city on the hill finds itself under a blanket of fog. In many ways, the Trump administration’s crude realpolitik is not unusual in American history; it would not look out of place amongst Teddy Roosevelt’s imperial attempts, or the various treaties drafted with Native American tribes, treaties signed with the left hand while the right hand taketh away. In such a context, the current President sees no reason not to covet Greenland, or rename the Gulf of Mexico, nor to back Ukraine against naked military aggression unless it surrenders to him its mineral wealth.

To be fair, Springsteen has never been an uncritical cheerleader for the Republic; if anyone takes ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ for a blithely patriotic anthem, it’s because they aren’t listening to the lyrics. But herein lies the two aspects of the current tragedy. On one hand, you have an electorate which wants to make America great again, to bask in the glow of the story of American exceptionalism even while behaving less than exceptionally. On the other hand, you have men like Springsteen who have long channelled a nuanced and exhilarating image of America through rock and roll – that great American invention – who now find themselves with a creased brow and an ache in their voice as they insist that the America they wrote about is real. “It is real,” Bruce says, with emphasis, to the Manchester crowd.

And one wonderful thing about such difficult moments is that they are when artists dig deep and find their power. A Bruce Springsteen set is known for being energetic, but tonight feels especially potent. Almost the entire set is one anthem after another, delivered seemingly without pause for breath, beginning with ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ and ending hours later with Steven Van Zandt’s purple Rickenbacker ringing on ‘Chimes of Freedom’. The politically-sparked energy feeds into the other numbers; a fun and lively ‘Out in the Street’, a raucous ‘Ghosts’ and ‘Murder Incorporated’, to say nothing of that prime Clemons saxophone bursting through each and all of the greatest hits and making everyone here feel more than alive. Bruce often steps aside to allow the crowd to sing iconic lyrics, sometimes even entire verses. It’s a thrilling set delivered in overdrive by the E Street Band, and if the songwriting nuance is sometimes lost in the power, it’s a worthy riposte to outside events. The Boss makes a mockery of Trump’s remarks; this “dried out prune” has plenty of juice.

Even more remarkably, there are moments when the nuance is not lost in the fizzing energy of the Manchester thousands. ‘House of a Thousand Guitars’ is a rare quiet moment, delivered by Bruce alone on an acoustic guitar, and when he sings ‘Atlantic City’, the political context of the night seems to put extra feeling into the line “Maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” In the finest single moment of the night, Bruce draws goosebumps as he sings ‘Long Walk Home’:

My father said "Son, we're lucky in this town
It's a beautiful place to be born
It just wraps its arms around you
Nobody crowds you,
Nobody goes it alone.
You know that flag flying over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone
Who we are,
What we'll do,
And what we won't."

In a pure moment like this one, an artist says more than my thousands of words of prose – more succinctly, and with a greater clarity. I’ve written on a number of occasions in my concert reviews of how I could not hope to communicate in words what these nights communicate in magical moments, often quoting Walter Pater’s line about how all art aspires to the condition of music. At the start of the night, the Boss had roared that “the mighty E Street Band is here tonight, to call upon the righteous power of art, of music, of rock and roll in dangerous times”. On many occasions tonight, he has shown how that power outmatches – it trumps, if you will – all other types of power, including the political.

Perhaps if all art aspires to the condition of music, all power aspires to it also. In Trump’s remarks there is something of envy. In the moment that Bruce Springsteen sings of that flag flying over the courthouse, nothing is more true or imperishable than the America he brings to mind.

Setlist:

(all songs written by Bruce Springsteen, unless noted)

  1. Land of Hope and Dreams (from Wrecking Ball)
  2. Death to My Hometown (from Wrecking Ball)
  3. Lonesome Day (from The Rising)
  4. Out in the Street (from The River)
  5. Rainmaker (from Letter to You)
  6. Atlantic City (from Nebraska)
  7. The Promised Land (from Darkness on the Edge of Town)
  8. Hungry Heart (from The River)
  9. The River (from The River)
  10. Youngstown (from The Ghost of Tom Joad)
  11. Murder Incorporated (from Greatest Hits)
  12. Long Walk Home (from Magic)
  13. House of a Thousand Guitars (from Letter to You)
  14. My City of Ruins (from The Rising)
  15. Ghosts (from Letter to You)
  16. Because the Night (Springsteen/Patti Smith) (from The Promise)
  17. Human Touch (from Human Touch)
  18. Wrecking Ball (from Wrecking Ball)
  19. The Rising (from The Rising)
  20. Badlands (from Darkness on the Edge of Town)
  21. Thunder Road (from Born to Run)
  22. Encore: Born in the U.S.A. (from Born in the U.S.A.)
  23. Encore: Born to Run (from Born to Run)
  24. Encore: Bobby Jean (from Born in the U.S.A.)
  25. Encore: Dancing in the Dark (from Born in the U.S.A.)
  26. Encore: Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out (from Born to Run)
  27. Encore: Chimes of Freedom (Bob Dylan) (from Chimes of Freedom)

Note: An official stream of tonight’s show will be available on Nugs.net here.