Bruce Springsteen brings the curtain down on the E Street Band’s Irish tour with a Croke Park stunner

From the opening ‘Lonesome Day’ to the closing cover of Shane’s ‘Rainy Night In Soho’, it was vintage Brooooooce!

There’s a point in every Bruce show where the turbo-charger kicks in and it goes from good Springsteen to great Springsteen!

Tonight that happens just four songs in when ‘Two Hearts’ swoops and soars and generally gladdens the heart like the Marvin Gaye and Kim Weston soul classic, ‘It Takes Two’, it briefly segues into. The sinew-straining intensity of the performance is also confirmation of The Boss’ full recovery from the peptic ulcer disease that forced him off the road last year and lead to nagging fears that maybe, just maybe, the E Street Band party was over.

It follows an opening triple-whammy of ‘Lonesome Day’, ‘Night’ and ‘Surrender’, which has people abandoning the beer queues and sprinting to their designated seats in times that Usain Bolt would be proud of.

Unlike last Thursday when Páirc Uí Chaoimh rivalled Old Trafford in the sub aqua department, the weather gods couldn’t be any more benevolent today with the sun high above Croker as dazzling as Little Steven’s new Ultrabrite smile. As trusted a lieutenant to Bruce as he was to Tony in The Sopranos, Van Zandt is on fire tonight as is Nils Lofgren whose slide guitar-playing never ceases to amaze.

Another early set highlight is ‘Darlington County’, which poignantly name-checks the now fallen World Trade Center and features perhaps the greatest “Sha la la”-ing in popular music history.

Being the Lord’s Day, it’s only right that Bruce then whisks us off to a Rock ‘N’ Roll Revival Meeting with the opening psalm, Nebraska‘s ‘Reason To Believe’, getting its first live airing since 2016. And, yes, that was the riff from Norman Greenbaum’s ‘Spirit In The Sky’ you heard during it! The religious fervour levels are further upped by ‘The Promised Land’ and go completely off the scale during ‘Spirit In The Night’, which features the sax-iest of solos from Jake Clemons who as ever does The Big Man proud.

Among Bruce’s multifarious talents is the ability to make something he’s sung – and you’ve listened to – a trillion times sound like it’s just been written. Tonight’s shining example being ‘The River’, which may be forty-four years old but still captures the moment when youthful optimism turns into middle-aged resignation better than any song before or since. It gets extra marks for The Boss’ beautiful falsetto, those tonsils of his showing no signs of septuagenarian wear and tear.

Springsteen is also expert in making other people’s songs his own, as evidenced by his take on ‘The Nightshift’, The Commodores’ eulogy to Marvin and Jackie who, one imagines, would be as blown-away by the six-piece harmonies at the end as the rest of us are.

As he did twelve months ago in the RDS, Bruce dedicates the haunting ‘Last Man Standing’ to George Theiss, the only other surviving member of his first ’60s band, The Castles, who died in 2018 from lung cancer. As he talks about the importance of keeping lost loved ones in our hearts, it pops into my head that during that run of shows The Boss met with both Charlie Bird and Shane MacGowan, neither of whom are sadly here to witness his Dublin return.

The song Bruce stole back from Patti Smith, ‘Because The Night’, finds Nils pirouetting round the stage like an Olympic ice skater – albeit one festooned in enough rings, feathers, scarves and other finery to make Keith Richards look like a chartered accountant in comparison.

He’s no less animated during the one-two combo of ‘Wrecking Ball’ and ‘The Rising’, which is as explosive as anything we witnessed last night during the Fury vs. Usyk fight.

I’ve just had Niall Stokes on the ‘phone telling me that’s my quotient of sporting analogies used up for the month.

After a mass singalong version of ‘Thunder Road’, we’re into encore territory with the opening ‘Land Of Hope And Dreams’ paying its usual respects to The Impressions’ ‘People Get Ready’, a song that played a major part in the young Bruce’s education and still fuels his writing and live shows.

It’ll be a cold day in hell before the E Street Band stop performing ‘Born To Run’, which like ‘The River’ has the ability to instantly make you feel like you’re eighteen again. Ditto the following ‘Bobby Jean’, a song guaranteed to bring you back to your first teenage crush – hello, Ruth Marshall! – and the heartbreak of losing them, which never entirely goes away. Whether Ruth Marshall feels the same way is debatable…

If Croker had a roof, it would be blown off by ‘Dancing In The Dark’ which is a reminder of how hard Max Weinberg is able to hit his drum-kit. He joined the E Street Band in the same year – 1974 – as Roy Bittan whose mellifluous piano ushers in ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out’. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, but the mid-song tributes to fallen comrades Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici still have me welling up.

During one of his forays into the crowd somebody plonks a tweed cap on Bruce’s head which gives him a bit of a rock ‘n’ roll Michael Healey Rae look – an oxymoronic sentence that I suspect the Kerryman will be more pleased with than the New Jerseyman.

The music snob in me momentarily wants to clock the person two seats down who goes, “Ooh, a Beatles cover!” when they launch into the obligatory ‘Twist & Shout’, but that gives way to me joining the rest of the crowd in shaking my funky tail feathers.

The show appears to be over when, without introduction, Bruce & Co. launch into a mass singalong version of The Pogues’ ‘Rainy Night In Soho’ which is one master storyteller doffing that cap to another.

It’s been another life-affirming display from the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, love-making, earth-quaking, Viagra-taking, justifying, death-defying E Street Band!