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Springsteen in Liverpool [1]
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Date: 2025-06-05
Last night, for the first time ever, Bruce Springsteen played Liverpool, England, home of The Beatles (a band that The Boss credits as one of his biggest influences, and which he tried to imitate with his own first band, The Castiles). The show was in Anfield Stadium, home of the world-famous Liverpool Football Club.
Bruce had a lot to get off his chest. His spoken polemics about Trump were much the same as he recently delivered in Manchester so I'll not try to transcribe them, but the wider show was very much themed around his anger and sadness over what's happening to his home country (although, of course, he still delivered plenty of barnstorming rock'n'roll to get the sell-out crowd partying).
"When the conditions in a country are right for a demagogue you can bet one will appear. This is for our dear leader". That was his introduction to "Rainmaker":
Rainmaker, a little faith for hire
Rainmaker, the house is on fire
Rainmaker, take everything you have
Sometimes folks need to believe in something
So bad, so bad, so bad
They'll hire a rainmaker.
"This is a prayer for my country" was his simple introduction to "Long Walk Home":
Your flag flyin' over the courthouse
Means certain things are set in stone.
Who we are, what we'll do and what we won't.
He invited us to pray when launching into "My City of Ruins". Tears were seen in the crowd around me:
There's a blood red circle on the cold dark ground
And the rain is falling down
The church door's thrown open, I can hear the organ's song
But the congregation's gone
My city of ruins
My city of ruins
The band took a break while he delivered "House of a Thousand Guitars" solo, the better to enunciate his message:
The criminal clown has stolen the throne
He steals what he can never own.
And he closed the show with Dylan's "Chimes of Freedom", before we shuffled out into the night with Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land" on the stadium PA.
This mini European tour was originally a re-visit to play the shows Springsteen was forced to cancel last year (Marseille, Prague and Milan x 2), when he was taken sick after the "hellacious" weather at the show in Sunderland, England. It's now been slightly extended with five shows in England (Manchester x 3, Liverpool x 2), three in Germany (Berlin, Frankfurt and Gelsenkirchen), two more in France (Lille x 2) and two in Spain (San Sebastian x 2).
The mini-tour has now been billed as "The Land of Hope and Dreams" tour and the song itself gets an outing at every show:
This Train
Dreams will not be thwarted
This Train
Faith will be rewarded
This Train
Hear the steel wheels singin'
This Train
Bells of freedom ringin'
Liverpool can occasionally be quite a windy city and, last night, there was a fresh breeze blowing which, early in the show, caught Springsteen's back-combed hair and ruffled it forward over his head. Krasnov, following his recent sour comments about the younger man's appearance, might want to note that The Boss' hair still covers his entire scalp with no need of elaborate construction work and gallons of hair products to hide a bald pate.
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