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There's also another in the Telegraph, but I can't find that on their website yet ...


Bruce Springsteen
Pete Paphides at The Point, Dublin




WITH Norris McWhirter no longer around to measure these things, it may never be a matter of public record. Nonetheless, you would struggle to recall a crowd that took less time to warm up than Bruce Springsteen?s audience in Dublin.
Twelve seconds I made it ? just long enough for a bleary fiddle and an unsteady brass section to clamber aboard for the opening boom-thump of O, Mary, Don?t You Weep.



As a country where the singing storyteller has long enjoyed privileged status, Ireland has always had a soft spot for Springsteen ? and that was before he went and released a folk album. The adoration by his audience, then, was no surprise. Whether he would manage to reproduce the tipsy conviviality of The Seeger Sessions in an 8,500- capacity hangar was another matter.

Perhaps it was the liberation of singing lyrics that originated in a place other than his own head, but at times he brought a physicality to historical ballads such as Jesse James that was almost comical: cocking his leg up like an over-watered labrador when his excitement could no longer be contained; and accidentally thumping his wife Patti Scialfa with the neck of his guitar on Open All Night.

Not for Springsteen, then, the folk-singer?s default tendency to present these tales as if they were sonic museum pieces. The voice he found for Old Dan Tucker and John Henry sounded like a lifetime of cold showers ? hoary, magnificent and alive. And, while his spoken introductions revealed a keenness to convey the history of these songs, he also wasted no opportunities to highlight their contemporary relevance.

The mass displacement of Americans that is described in the Dust Bowl ballad My Oklahoma Home threw up parallels with scenes in New Orleans that, in the words of Springsteen, ?none of us thought we would ever see?. When his 18-piece band finally came to play the song, they did so like a phantom Mardi Gras, triggering a dip in the emotional temperature that rose only with a riotous Pay Me My Money Down.

So Bruce Springsteen can now add the title of folk-singer to his long list of achievements. In fact, the writer of Born in the USA and Nebraska (from which he performed two numbers) was a already a folk-singer in every sense that mattered. It was a point gracefully underscored when he returned to encore with a Celtic soul reading of his own My City of Ruins from his post-9/11 song cycle The Rising. As Springsteen drove the song home to its affirmative gospel coda, the line between the Telecaster-wielding rock star of yore and his new downhome incarnation finally evaporated.


Tonight: Hammersmith Apollo ? sold out
Don't waste your time waiting
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Here's the Telegraph one :

The Boss evokes New Orleans
(Filed: 08/05/2006)

Adam Sweeting reviews Bruce Springsteen at The Point, Dublin


Springsteen's last tour was a bare-bones solo affair in support of his Devils & Dust album, even if he did travel with 25 guitars and a trunk full of harmonicas.

This time, to perform material from his folk-song collection We Shall Overcome - The Seeger Sessions, he fronts a 17-strong ensemble which sprawls across the stage blowing, plucking and squeezing an arsenal of instruments including tuba, trombone, banjo, violin, pedal steel guitar and accordion. In place of the sulphurous sturm and drang of the E Street Band, Springsteen has forged a rollicking, homespun sound which evokes New Orleans marching bands and railroad gangs on the wild frontier, while he sings about sinners, stevedores and refugees.

Pete Seeger, bewhiskered doyen of the folkie left, gives the album its unifying motif, but Springsteen has focused on the timeless quality of the songs. What Springsteen seems to enjoy most are the band's free-ranging looseness and the liberating experience of delving into a catalogue even more extensive than his own.

The best pieces mix powerful, simple melodies with an irresistible rhythmic swagger ("there are no rock tempos, this band rolls," says Springsteen). They opened with O Mary Don't You Weep, originally a Negro spiritual but here doused in Sam Bardfeld's mournful Yiddish fiddling. Springsteen barking out the lyrics over his own crisply-strummed acoustic guitar, while Ol' Dan Tucker sounded like a bunch of gold prospectors swigging whiskey by the campfire. His own song Open All Night had been rearranged as Fifties jump-blues, featuring harmonies devised by his wife, Patti.

Springsteen claims that The Seeger Sessions material serves no specific political agenda, but the previous Sunday, he performed in New Orleans and lambasted President Bush's pitiful response to Hurricane Katrina. Several songs might have been written for the bedraggled Crescent City, not least How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live? and My City Of Ruins.

The latter was another Springsteen original, and its rousing prayer for communal transcendence eclipsed many of the old standards.

In paying his dues to folk history, Springsteen is marking out his own turf in the great tradition.

At London Hammersmith Apollo tonight
Don't waste your time waiting
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