Born to Brum: Why Bruce Springsteen is adored by blue-collar Britain

Jim White never ‘had a job down the refinery’ but, like 75,000 other superfans, roared along to every song the Boss played at Villa Park this week as if it were his own life the lyrics were mirroring

Bossing it: Bruce Springsteen performing at Villa Park on 16 June (Redferns/Getty)

One of the signs of growing old is becoming aware of how often we are all assailed with tips on how to stay young. And last Friday I discovered the one surefire method of holding back the years: take some of whatever Bruce Springsteen is on.

Arriving at Villa Park for the latest stop-off on the Boss’s ever-rolling world tour, it felt like a Saga outing. A mass of grey hair, wobble and paunches was descending on the turnstiles, where many were obliged to turn sideways to squeeze through. True in comparison to the kind of audience he attracts these days, anyone would look youthful. But the moment Springsteen appeared on stage, it was obvious we were in the presence of a man who gives every impression of having halted time.

Without giving too much away about my own association with chronology, I first saw him in concert 38 years ago. And, beyond a slight sinking of his jowls and a marginal retreat in his hairline, he seems barely to have changed. Granted my seat at the back of the Holte End was so far from the stage I was practically in Bromsgrove. But even from such a distance, it was evident that his energy, his work ethic, his capacity for tearing around entertaining all remain undimmed by the passing decades. Three hours he played, non-stop, the roll call of hits merging into one another with no more of a gap than a brisk “one, two, three, four”. There was barely time to take a breath, let alone engage in the kind of lie-down most of us in the crowd needed just from climbing the steps to our seats. Frankly, it was exhausting watching him.

Bruce Springsteen with the E Street Band at the Letzigrund stadium in Zurich on 13 June (EPA)

But here is the remarkable thing about Springsteen: for everybody there, for all us oldies up on our feet dad-dancing along, he made the vast, steepling grandeur of Villa Park feel as if it was the most intimate New Jersey rock club. All 60,000 rammed into the place were unified in this certainty: he was performing for us individually. And us alone.

Just down the row from me, there was an elderly gentleman accompanied by his wife and son. Urgently heading off for the kind of toilet break I did not require when I first saw the Boss in 1985, I tried to squeeze by. And both his son and wife apologised when the old boy refused to move. He had Alzheimer’s, they explained. But bringing him along to the concert made him feel alive again. Springsteen’s music, the son told me, cut through the advancing fog to connect with his dad like nothing else.

And he was not the only one. I found myself singing along to the anthemic “Born in the USA” with the kind of emotional attachment that insisted it perfectly mirrored my own experience. Except, like the vast majority of those bawling out the lyrics, I wasn’t born in the USA. Nor have I ever had a job down the refinery and I’m pretty sure no foreman has ever said to me that the jobs are going, boys, and they ain’t coming back. And I’ve certainly never been sprung from cages on Highway 9. Yet I sang along to every song he played as if it were my biography that his lyrics were articulating.

Sure, the best pop music can do that, whoever its progenitor. You don’t need to have been born in a government yard in Trenchtown to be moved by Bob Marley, or reckon you have seen a starman waiting in the sky to believe David Bowie is talking directly to your experience. But few have managed to turn the specific into the general in quite the way Springsteen has. He has chronicled Rust Belt working-class life in a manner that makes it absolutely tally with our own, no matter how disassociated our own is from its rhythms.

Bruce Springsteen at the Werchter Classic festival in Belgium on Sunday (Belga/AFP via Getty)

It is clear why: none has harnessed nostalgia as skilfully as he has. There is a common pining for a collective yesteryear that runs through all of his work. Whether it be bluegrass folk, blue-eyed soul, or foot-to-the-floor rock and roll, ever since he began, in everything he does, in his lyrics the past has always been the promised land. And, as we grow older, he becomes an ever more pertinent reminder of better times. It was all there in his spine-tingling, triumphant rendition of “Thunder Road”, a song he wrote as long ago as 1975, its imagery even then a perfect analysis of the fear of passing time.

“So you’re scared and you’re thinking

That maybe we ain’t that young anymore

Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night

You ain’t a beauty but, hey, you’re alright

Oh, and that’s alright with me.”

The fact is even the Boss ain’t that young anymore. There was an elegiac tone to much of the evening, a celebration of lost friends and departed colleagues. He finished with an acoustic rendition of “In My Dreams”, a soulful ballad about how the past lives on in the subconscious. Written as recently as 2020 – 45 years after “Thunder Road” – it sounds as though it has been around forever.

It was clear as he made tears flow across the stadium, that this is a performer who long ago corralled wistful memory to his cause. In truth, for three hours on a balmy June evening in the company of a singular performer, living in the past never felt as good.