The Real Thing

Springsteen's Live in Dublin seems to these ears an extraordinary triumph of a kind of musical authenticity. This is paradoxical in that he's drawing upon a variety of musical traditions - ragtime jazz, celtic folk, protest song, spiritual, to name just the obvious - which previously were largely foreign to his work. So how does what is essentially a raid upon musics deeply rooted in their various traditions come to seem real on stage, going beyond homage and not for a moment evoking notions of a mode of theft? A mysterious alchemy is at work here, with two crucial ingredients in its process. The first is sheer talent. These guys can play, and don't need to prove it - so they also listen, and you can hear them listening in the space they create. At times there (I think) some fourteen musicians going at it, but the sound never seems cluttered.

The second ingredient is the all-pervading sense that they have something to say, something to communicate - partly this is their love of the music they play, but it also involves an attitude to being. I think the track that best illustrates this is their version of When The Saints Go Marching In. Taken at an extraordinarily slow tempo, with a mixture of soulfully raw lead vocalists, the yearning melancholy of the lyric is allowed to breathe. Somewhere in the background lurks the spectre of Katrina, yet the foregrounded hope the performance expresses seems almost adequate to the tragedy. I don't think I've ever really listened to the words before and a central part of how this music works is by making you listen. Really listen. And also have a monstrously good time whilst doing so.