Bruce Springsteen fans in 'roll call' ahead of Liverpool concert
Superfans of Bruce Springsteen have been showing their loyalty by turning up for a 'roll call' ahead of his Anfield concert.
Hundreds of people gather in Stanley Park at 10am, 3pm and 7pm every day and receive a number to ensure they get the best spot at the front of his gig.
The legendary musician and the E-Street Band will play two concerts at Anfield Stadium this week on Wednesday June 4 and Saturday June 7.
Springsteen fans are used to the ritual of the roll call as the practice has been commonplace for fans going to his gigs since 2009.
It's all planned with the organisers, after their number is written on their hand, they have to return for every roll call to keep their spot.
Fans of 'The Boss' explain the roll call system and why it is worth the wait
One fan says: "As long as you've got your number and you turn up for roll call then you keep that number, but if you don't turn up then you are scrubbed off the list. It's all worth it because some of us are a little bit older and when security come they walk us in, there's no running or pushing in front of each other"
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Daily Mirror
35 minutes ago
- Daily Mirror
'If only Macca and Mick Jagger took on the Establishment like Bruce Springsteen'
I went to watch Bruce Springsteen this week and was blown away. Not just by the talent and energy the 75-year-old poured into a three-and-a-half hour set at Anfield. But his unflinching humanity, uncompromising principles, undying passion for the underdog, and unquenchable optimism in his fellow humans. All articulated in his utter despising of Donald Trump. 'The America I love and have sung to you about for so long, a beacon of hope for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism, and let freedom ring.' That was how he opened the show, and throughout it, to much cheering and applause, he peppered his rousing back catalogue with fierce attacks on 'an unfit President ' and a 'demagogue'. It felt more like a political rally than a pop concert, and, magnificently, it has truly riled the demagogue. After similar rhetoric in Manchester last month, the Great Man-Child called Springsteen 'a pushy, obnoxious JERK' and accused him of treachery, wailing 'this dried-out prune of a rocker ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the country'. Thankfully he won't. And it's a joy to behold. Rather than phoning in his greatest hits and soaking in adulation as his bank account swells, he is channelling raw anger and urging his audience to join in his joyous rage. I only wish some of Britain's musical legends like Sir Mick, Sir Rod, Sir Elton and Sir Macca were equally as bold and used their platform to challenge Establishment injustices, instead of bathing in the reflected glory of knighthoods and not rocking the boat. Springsteen's stance takes real courage, exemplified in the kickback he is facing from sections of his blue-collar fanbase. Last week, in his home state of New Jersey, a Springsteen tribute band called No Surrender was dropped by a venue for fear of a MAGA backlash. His critics say it's cheap posturing. That he's a bad loser who, like the man he attacks, refuses to accept the will of the American people. That he should take a look at all the luvvies who came out for Kamala Harris last year and realise that celebrity endorsements are now dead. But they are wrong. Anyone who hears Bruce express his pain over what is happening to his beloved country knows it's genuine. Besides, he's been sticking up for the underdog all of his career. During the 1985 miners' strike he anonymously handed over a cheque for $20,000 to a support group. As for those questioning his loyalty to America, what can be more patriotic than calling out the fake patriotism of a phoney President who has never cared about anyone but himself? A chancer whose real aim as CEO of the US is to spread his brand to every corner of the world and redistribute wealth further towards his billionaire backers at the expense of the poor. Trump and his people, The Boss told us on Wednesday, 'have no concern or idea what it means to be deeply American. Despite its faults it is a great country. And we will survive this moment'. With true patriots like Springsteen around, America has a chance. Butlin's is offering up to 40% off family breaks in 2025 and 2026.
New Statesman
4 hours ago
- New Statesman
Bruce Springsteen faces the end of America
Photo montage by Gaetan Mariage / Alamy When I met Patti Smith soon after Donald Trump's first victory, she said she'd ended up next to him at various New York dinners over the years, back in the Seventies, when he was pitching Trump Towers. 'We were born in the same year, and I have to look at this person and think: all our hopes and dreams from childhood, going through the Sixties, everything we went through – and that's what came out of our generation. Him.' Smith's sing-song voice was in my head at Anfield Stadium in Liverpool on one of the final nights of Bruce Springsteen's Land of Hope and Dreams tour. Springsteen was born three years after Trump and will also have sat at many New York dinners with him. Those with half an eye on the news would be forgiven for thinking that Bruce has been lobbing disses at the president from the stage between his hits, but his latest show is heavier than that: a conscious recasting of two decades of his more politicised music, with a four-minute incitement to revolution in the middle. Here is a bit of what he says: 'The America I love and have sung to you about for so long, a beacon of hope for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight we ask all of you who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices, stand with us against authoritarianism and let freedom ring. In America right now we have to organise at home, at work, peacefully in the street. We thank the British people for their support…' Clearly few in the US are speaking out like this on stage, and Trump has responded by calling Springsteen a 'dried-out prune of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!)' and threatening some kind of mysterious action upon his return. Springsteen, the heartland rocker, was never exactly part of the counter-culture, though he did avoid Vietnam by doing the 'basic Sixties rag', as he put it, and acting crazy in his army induction. Yet he has become a true protest singer in his final act. He wears tweed and a tie these days, partly because he's 75 and partly, you suspect, to convey a moral seriousness. When I last saw him, two years ago, I thought I saw some of Joe Biden's easy energy. Well, Bruce still has his faculties. The feeling is: listen to the old man, he has something to say. Springsteen's late years have been something to behold. At some point in the last decade he stopped dyeing his hair and started to talk in a stylised, reedy, story-book voice. The image of the America he seemed to represent shifted back from Seventies Pittsburgh to Thirties California: the bare-armed steelworker became the Marlboro Man, and in 2019 there was a Cowboy album, Western Skies, with an accompanying film in which he was seen on horseback. His autobiography Born to Run revealed recent battles with depression. And it is depression you see tonight in Liverpool – in the wince, the twisted mouth, the accusing index finger; in his entreaty to Liverpool's fans to 'indulge' his sermon against the American administration, delivered night after night, to scatterings of applause. It is a depression I recognise in older American friends who fear they're going to the grave with everything they knew and loved about their country disappearing. But depression is also the stuff of life, of energy. Springsteen has been particularly angry since the early Noughties, since the second Bush administration, but this is his moment somehow, and his song of greedy bankers – 'Death to My Hometown' – is spat out with new meaning in 2025, an ominous abstraction. The father-to-son speech in 'Long Walk Home' feels different in this politically charged world: 'Your flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone/Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't'). A furious version of 'Rainmaker' ('Sometimes folks need to believe in something so bad, so bad, they'll hire a rainmaker') is dedicated to 'our dear leader'. As much as I admire Springsteen and seem to have followed him around and written about him for years, the Land of Hope and Dreams tour made me realise I hadn't fully known what he was for. When I saw him in Hyde Park in 2023, the first 200 yards of the crowd were given over to media wankers like me, with the paying fans at the back: every single person I had ever met in London was there, mildly pissed up and whirling about with looks of mutual congratulation. Springsteen had become, to the middle classes and above, a global symbol of right-thinking, summed up by his long stint on Broadway at $800 a ticket. His dull podcast with Barack Obama was the American version of The Rest Is Politics with Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell: men saying stuff you want them to say, to confirm what you already think about stuff (Obama was in awe of Bruce). Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Politics was easy for Springsteen when politics consisted of external events happening to innocent people, rather than something taking place on the level of psychology, in a movement of masses towards a demagogue. The job he adopted, back in the Seventies, was to set a particular kind of American life in its political and historical context: to tell people who they were, and why they mattered. His appeal as a rock star always lay less in his words than in how sincerely he embodied them: his extraordinary outward energy, his mirroring of his audience, his apparent concern with others over himself. After 9/11, someone apparently rolled down a window and told him, 'We need you now,' so he wrote his song 'The Rising' from the viewpoint of a doomed New York fireman ascending the tower. A recent BBC documentary revealed he'd donated £20,000 to the Northumberland and Durham Miners Support Group during the strikes of 1984 – rather as he donated ten grand to unemployed steelworkers in Pittsburgh the previous year. His self-made success and songs about freedom were the Republican dream, but when Reagan tapped him up for endorsements it was a right of passage for Springsteen as a Democrat rocker to rebuff them (I'm pretty sure they tried to play 'Born in the USA' at Trump rallies too). He is quoted as saying that the working-class American was facing a spiritual crisis, years ago: 'It's like he has nothing left to tie him into society any more. He's isolated from the government. Isolated from his job. Isolated from his family… to the point where nothing makes sense.' Now, Trump has taken Springsteen's people (the Republicans were doing so long before Trump), and the interior life of the working man that Springsteen made it his job to portray has been exploited by someone else. 'For 50 years, I've been an ambassador for this country and let me tell you that the America I was singing about is real,' he says, possessively, on stage. Springsteen, like Jon Bon Jovi, sees his fans as workers. The distances travelled, the money spent, the babysitters paid for: that's what the three-hour gigs are all about. It is part of the psyche of a certain generation of working-class American musician to consider themselves in a contract with the people who buy their records. It is not a particularly British thing – though time and again I am impressed by the commitment required to see these big shows, especially when so many punters are of an age where they would not longer, say, sleep in a tent: £250 a night for a hotel, no taxis to the stadium, a huge Ticketmaster crash that leaves hundreds of fans outside the venue fiddling with their QR codes while Bruce can be heard inside singing the opening lines of 'My Love Will Not Let You Down'. Yet the relationship between a rock star and his fan is not a co-dependency: the fan is having a night out, but the rock star needs the fan to survive. It is hard to underestimate the psychological shift Springsteen might be undergoing, in seeing the working men and women of America moving to a politics that is repellent to him. He has not played on American soil since Trump's re-election and it is likely that this kind of political commentary there will turn the 'Bruuuuuce' into the boo. A Springsteen tribute act in his native New Jersey was recently cancelled (the band offered to play other songs, and the venue said no). Last week, a young American band told me they won't speak out about the administration on stage because they're not all white and they're afraid of getting deported. It is the job of the powerful to do the protesting, and, like Pope Leo, Springsteen's previous good works will mean nothing if he doesn't call out the big nude emperor now. The Maga crowd will still come to see him, of course, and yell the 'woah' in 'Born to Run' just as loud as everyone else does – perhaps because music is bigger than politics, or perhaps because politics is now bigger than Bruce. Though his political speeches in Liverpool (it's UK 'heartland' only this tour: no London gigs) feel slightly out of step with a city that has its own problems, it seems fair enough for Springsteen to be telling the truth about America to a crowd who's enjoyed their romantic visions of the country via his music for 50 years. But their own personal communion is suspended tonight, and the song 'My City of Ruins' has nothing to do with 9/11 any more: 'Come on… rise up…' In the crowd, a very old man is sitting on someone's shoulders. Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band play Anfield stadium, Liverpool, on 7 June 2025 [See also: Wes Anderson's sense of an ending] Related
Daily Mail
8 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney reunite in Liverpool! Music legends greet students outside the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts
Bruce Springsteen and Paul McCartney reunited in Liverpool on Friday for a special visit to the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA). The American singer, 75, is currently in the city for two shows at Liverpool Stadium as part of his Land Of Hope and Dreams tour. Bruce has previously described performing in Merseyside as a long-held dream come true, crediting The Beatles as a major influence on his musical journey. And on Friday, The Born in the USA singer was reunited with one of his heroes, as Sir Paul, 82, returned to his hometown. The legendary singer appeared in great spirits as he arrived at the institute he co-founded with Mark Featherstone-Witty in 1996. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the Daily Mail's new showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. A large crowd of students gathered outside the venue, eagerly waiting for Sir Paul's autograph. Meanwhile, Bruce was reportedly ushered in through a separate entrance before later stepping outside to greet the students. One fan looked visibly emotional as he greeted Sir Paul with a warm hug. Although Paul did not attend LIPA, he played a pivotal role in its founding. In 1992, while preparing for his Liverpool Oratorio, he visited his former school, the Liverpool Institute for Boys, which had been closed since 1985. Upon seeing the building's dilapidated state, he pledged to restore it. Four years later, LIPA was established on the same site, co-founded by Paul and Mark as a hub for aspiring performers. Sir Paul remains actively involved with the institution, serving as lead patron, attending graduations, and hosting masterclasses. Bruce and Paul's reunion is certain to fuel speculation about a possible on-stage collaboration during Bruce's final Liverpool show on Saturday. But It wouldn't be the first time the two icons have shared a stage. In 2022, Bruce famously joined Sir Paul during his headline set at Glastonbury. They've also performed together at Hyde Park and MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. During his electrifying first show at Anfield on Wednesday, Bruce paid tribute to The Beatles, declaring: 'It is great for us to be in Liverpool where, for us, it all began.' The New Jersey native was in his teens when The Beatles made their U.S. debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, a moment that profoundly influenced him. He closed the night with a rousing cover of Twist and Shout, a track made iconic by The Beatles in 1963, though originally recorded by The Top Notes.
