Whereas all these movements were turning away in their various directions from

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Published: August 1, 2010

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Whereas all these movements were turning away, in their various directions, from the origins of rock’n'roll, Springsteen seemed intent on forging himself in its purest flame, a decision widely misunderstood.Initial attempts to pigeonhole him as the new Bob Dylan were based on little more than his early affiliation with John Hammond, the distinguished talent scout who signed both men to the same record label, and perhaps to something as innocent as the use of the word “diplomat” in the first line of the first track of his first album, inevitably and damagingly evocative of a similar usage in “Like A Rolling Stone”. Of his contemporaries, Springsteen seemed then to have a genuine affinity only with Van Morrison – the Van Morrison, that is, of tight, rousing three-minute rock-and-soul songs like “Brown-Eyed Girl” and “Domino”, not the crabby solipsist he was becoming.The tone of Springsteen’s songs arose from an unabashed and romantic love of all the music he had grown up adoring, but it was a matter of the spirit rather than the style. And as the word spread about the sort of shows he and his band gave, it became apparent that he was also redefining the experience of the rock concert, finally erasing its origins in the low- budget package shows of the Fifties while vaulting over the self-indulgence of the Woodstock era. He and his musicians took hold of mainstream rock’n'roll, turned it upside down, shook out all the trash, and gave it a new sense of possibility.By the time he returned in 1981, playing the wonderfully varied material from The River, he was in full bloom. Tens of thousands gathered to see him perform the miracle of making a concrete barn feel like a small club on the New Jersey shore. In Manchester, he jumped into the audience and they carried him on their shoulders. At Wembley Arena, he opened the first of five shows with an eyes-shut blast through “Born To Run” aimed at exorcising the demons of the past.This was a time when he was still able to wander along the Brighton sea front in the hours after a show, talking with insight and optimism about his aspirations.

The last song on The River, a restrained, resonant country- style ballad called “Wreck On The Highway”, seemed to offer a path to maturity. A year later, the solo album titled Nebraska pursued the intimacy while coarsening the texture. But in 1984, with the release of Born In The USA, he made a much firmer move in the opposite direction, beefing up the music, polishing the surface and simplifying the content in order to capture a mass audience.Thereafter his shows became increasingly predictable, while his writing gradually lost its freshness. Although it was no surprise when he jettisoned the band at the end of the 1980s, his use of journeymen in their place made the 1992 tour as drab an experience as the albums, Human Touch and Lucky Town, from which the bulk of their material was drawn. Long criticised for concentrating on a narrow range of subjects, finally he found that his obsessions had worn bare.Springsteen knew what was going wrong.

A year later he released a single called “Streets Of Philadelphia”, which represented a radical development of the stripped-down style of “Wreck On The Highway”. The theme song for the film Philadelphia, it became one of his biggest hits. As if encouraged by its reception, in 1995 he released The Ghost Of Tom Joad, an acoustic album full of quietly angry songs inhabiting the worlds of John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie.A cynical old fan might look back at Springsteen’s career and identify this as yet another astute move engineered, in all probability, by his manager, Jon Landau, a former rock journalist who understands the perverse workings of the critical mind. Such a view would have difficulty surviving an encounter with “Youngstown”, the album’s highlight, a song that does for the steelworkers of Ohio what Dylan did for the people of the Minnesota iron range in “North Country Blues” 30 years earlier.And so he returns, with “The Promise” and a promise. By realigning himself with the E Street Band, he encourages the expectation of the sort of unconfined joy experienced by those who attended the shows of 1975 and 1981. But it can’t be that simple any more, however hard we might wish it to be so, and the true measure of Springsteen will be found in the success with which he manages to evoke the remembered pleasures of the past while dealing the reality of the present and the hope of the future.He has always res- erved the right to change without warning or permission.

Some years ago, just as he was entering his artistic decline, I wrote in this paper about how he had first appeared to us in the guise of the young Al Pacino, small and quick and funny, before slowly metamorphosing into Sylvester Stallone, growing muscles where his brains had been. Intriguingly, and for whatever it may be worth, the latest pictures make him look like Robert De Niro.Bruce Springsteen plays Manchester Evening News Arena (0161 930 8000), 1, 2 May; Birmingham NEC (0121 780 4133), 16 May; and Earl’s Court SW5 (0171 373 8141), 18, 19, 21, 23 May.. Any day now a new poet laureate will be appointed, so naturally the air is buzzing with contrasting views on the extent to which poets should be up with the news. On the whole, contemporary poetry is a private concern, tending to reflect on and celebrate an individual sensibility, and this does seem something of a narcissistic decline since the days when poets saw fit to narrate The Charge of the Light Brigade, say, or the blood-stained trenches of the Great War. But the finest modern poets – Derek Walcott and Tony Harrison, for instance – remain loyal to the classical position of the poet as bard: the narrator of dire events in memorable verse. Ever since Homer sung the wrath of Achilles, the human love of war has inspired literary masterpieces – the Old Testament and Malory, Tennyson and Tolstoy. Poets thrive when they ride, as it were, into the valley of death It is, after all, the lair of the tragic muse

Verse is usually a symptom of war, not its cause.

But the present calamitous conflict in the Balkans has had poetry in its blood from the start. The papers have been full of references to the epic poems inspired by the original 14th-century Battle of Kosovo, usually to show that the present turmoil is the continuation of an ancient feud. It is never very convincing: it would stretch the credulity of most West European readers to imagine that Serbian soldiers in Kosovo recite bolts of medieval verse en route to the villages they are cleansing. But the epic narratives inspired by that first battle do tell a remarkable story.
The battle took place on June 15, 1389.


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