“You’ve just seen the heart-stopping, pants-dropping, hard-rocking, booty-shaking, love-making, earth-quaking, Viagra-taking, death-defying, legendary E Street Band!” yelled Bruce Springsteen in a Pentecostal frenzy, three hours into the first of two last chance power drives through this year’s British Summer Time Hyde Park festival.
If Springsteen ever had the number on which to phone in a performance, it clearly became sweat-soaked and unreadable decades ago. At 73 he’s now putting rockers a third of his age to shame, hitting the stage with a No Surrender that sounded like a statement of intent and blazing through enough chrome-wheeled glory rock to give organisers itchy plug fingers. Again. At his last Hyde Park gig in 2012 the sound was cut when his duet with Paul McCartney ran over curfew, as Bruce reminded his fortune teller of a guitar foil “Little” Steven Van Zandt as Glory Days reached its umpteenth euphoric peak. “F*** ‘em,” Van Zandt sagely advised, and kept right on rocking.
