On a day when the North West was drowning under torrential rain (yet another "wettest June on record", as though it's now become a contest), we were prepared to be Lost In The Flood at Manchester City's Etihad Stadium as Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band returned to town. We'd been lucky at previous outdoor Bruce concerts in Manchester, enjoying rare sunny days at both the Lancashire County Cricket Club and Old Trafford (the first time I saw him, at the indoor MEN Arena, the weather wasn't a worry). But it was inevitable that holding an outdoor concert in June in Manchester was going to risk angering the weather gods sooner or later, and on the day the Isle of Wight festival sank into the mud, we were ready for the worst.
It had rained all day. Not just rain - buckets, frogs, cats and dogs, a plague of locusts - and the forecast for the evening looked just as grim. As we trudged over to the stadium in the drizzle, we enjoyed a brief respite from the torrents, but nobody expected to stay dry over the next few hours. Bruce and the band took to the stage at 7-15, and suddenly the rain stopped completely. At 8 o'clock it made a brief return bid, but the band launched into Waiting On A Sunny Day in response and drove the clouds away. There were a couple more minor showers at 9 and 10, but neither lasted more than a song or succeeded in dampening the electricity in the atmosphere.
At 62, Bruce Springsteen has the stamina of a man a third his age. A three and a half hour set flew by in what felt like minutes, and we could easily have watched the band perform twice that and still wanted more. Having seen the boss live three times before, I've heard him play many of my favourite songs at one time or another, and while there are certain ones he just can't drop (Born To Run, Thunder Road, Dancing In The Dark), it's not a problem that we didn't get Glory Days, Born In The USA or anything from Tunnel Of Love this time. There was plenty more to keep us enthralled. The sound was a little muddy for the first few songs and there were the inevitable arseholes in the audience who'd paid £50 to chat / shout with their friends or drink as much overpriced beer as they could rather than watch the band, but once the show got going, such distractions ceased to matter.
It was another thrilling performance from the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, earth-quaking, nerve-breaking, Viagra-taking history-making, legendary E Street Band... but also a hugely emotional one, this being the first time they've toured without The Big Man, saxophonist Clarence Clemons, who died last year. The tributes brought tears to my eyes, but so did the fact that those enormous shoes have been filled by Clarence's nephew, Jake. The lad blows a mean horn himself.
I've been a Bruce Springsteen fan most of my life and, unlike many of my heroes, he's never let me down. He even managed to drive away the rain on the wettest day of the year in the wettest city in the north. Bring on that wrecking ball!
