When Bruce Springsteen Came to Britain, review: how The Boss was reborn in the UK

Telegraph

2 days ago

Music has an amazing power to take you right back to how you felt at a time and a place. As soon as the opening bars of Born in the USA pumped out of my TV screen, I was back at Wembley in 1985, the sun shining like summer and life would last forever.
I wasn't alone, the memories that peppered When Springsteen Came to Britain (BBC Two) highlighted Bruce Springsteen 's special knack of making massive stadium gigs feel deeply personal. There was Hazel from Manchester, still starry-eyed decades on from being plucked from the stalls to the stage to dance, Courteney Cox-style, with her idol. And a wee lad from Essex given the mic to sing the words to Hungry Heart.
It was these moments that marked out from the crowd an otherwise fairly standard talking heads music documentary. There were snippets of an interview with The Boss himself, a random band of celeb fans paying homage and brief bursts of electric live footage. But it was when the show veered off familiar tracks that it hit home.
It may feel like ancient history, but there was miner's wife Juliana recalling how Springsteen, without hype or ceremony, privately gifted $20,000 to help families struggling during the miners' strike in her pit village, like it was yesterday. 'He's a hero to us, always will be.'
When we did get to sit down with the man himself, there were nostalgic memories of how the young Bruce picked up a guitar for the first time after hearing The Beatles on the radio and how, after his first show in London, he hid in his hotel room because he thought he'd been terrible. He'd been great.
In truth, there was nothing much in this that Bruce fans – can you see where I'm coming from? – hadn't heard before. The programme made a half-hearted effort to play up the overplayed hype machine that semi-stalled Springsteen's career in Britain, tagging him the new rock messiah when he was fresh out of New Jersey bar gigs, but we were essentially here to celebrate Bruce in a story that stayed just this side of hagiography.
Fair enough. It's hard to stay a man of the people when you've sold a billion records but, unlike a lot of rock stars, it genuinely feels like Springsteen has stayed as close as you can to your roots when you live in a mega-acre ranch. He's still the lyricist who spoke directly to teenage fanboy Rob Brydon, his tales of blue-collar New Jersey drawing close parallels with the steel mills of South Wales.
'When I was young, I had Paul Weller talking about Down in the Tube Station at Midnight – what the hell is a tube station? I was from Port Talbot!' recalled Brydon, a Boss doppelgänger (would I lie to you?) in his youth. 'I felt much closer to New Jersey than I did to London.'
I actually hadn't listened to Springsteen in a while, but music has the power to take you right back. Time to bust out my 1985 Born in the USA Wembley t-shirt. Summer's going to last forever again.