Passion, booze, madness and comradeship: Bruce Springsteen’s special relationship with Ireland

The closing notes of Thunder Road echoed over Slane Castle like the rumble of gathering storm clouds. As the music faded, Bruce Springsteen walked offstage for a scheduled intermission. He wasn’t sure he wanted to come back.

Backstage, he went into a huddle with his manager Jon Landau, the former Rolling Stone journalist who, in 1974, had proclaimed, “I saw rock and roll future, and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” His memories of Slane are less dramatic than the recollections of the singer himself. “Standing in an open field with 100,000 people” – estimates of the attendance vary wildly – “is not something your brain can comprehend. People forget how big he was for those few years in the 1980s. Bruce Springsteen was a household name. It was Bruce, Madonna, Michael Jackson and Queen.”

Bruce Springsteen, Steven Van Zandt and the E Street Band at the RDS Arena in Dublin in 2023. Photograph: Tom Honan His upbringing in New Jersey perhaps makes his music especially resonant with Irish audiences: Springsteen, who during his time here last year, in Co Kildare, where his great-great-great-grandfather grew up before emigrating to New Jersey, in 1853, sings about wanting to escape the stifling boredom of small-town life and head off into the great unknown.

“For an adult, the world is constantly trying to clamp down on itself,” he said. “Routine, responsibility, decay of institutions, corruption: this is all the world closing in. Music, when it’s really great, pries that shit back open and lets people back in, it lets light in, and air in, and energy in, and sends people home with that and sends me back to the hotel with it. People carry that with them sometimes for a very long period of time.

Slane-Castle Croke-Park Belfast Cork Dublin Kilkenny

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