Bruce Springsteen live in London review: Listen up Glastonbury, your next headliner just called

If you take the quickest of looks at the seemingly never-ending tour dates of Bruce Springsteen and The E-Street Band, you’ll soon notice that they’re playing in Italy on June 30 next year – a day after Glastonbury Festival 2025 wraps up.

On the off chance you’re reading this, Emily Eavis, we implore you to take advantage of this situation and do the right thing: book The Boss and the E Street Band for their first Glastonbury slot since 2009. Want proof? Ask any of the near 90,000 fans who packed into Wembley Stadium last night to see The Boss deliver a three-hour rock’n’roll odyssey with the kind of hunger and raw passion that belies his 75 years.

Even a typically British summer can’t derail proceedings from the off, with the singer successfully facing off against moody rain clouds to whip the crowd up into the near-religious fervour for which the famously committed fans of the E Street Band are known. For three hours, it seemed, Wembley became the Church of Springsteen. A ferocious run-through of ‘Born To Run’ with the house lights up delivers a sense of intimacy that you wouldn’t expect at this cavernous venue, while ‘Spirit In the Night’ – complete with a customary cry of can you feel the spirit? – sees Bruce take his role as Wembley’s very own lay preacher.

It’s to Springsteen’s eternal skill, too, that a run of rarities are met with sheer joy by long-term fans and delivered with the kind of inhibiting passion that allows the rest of us to treat them like old favourites within minutes. This is shown on ‘Reason To Believe’ and ‘Atlantic City’ – a rare double blast of 1982’s Nebraska.

Other moments prove hugely emotional too. The first comes as a euphoric run-through of ‘The Promised Land’ sees a fan promising to propose to his girlfriend if he’s given Springsteen’s harmonica. The Boss, of course, duly obliges.

Elsewhere, it’s the frank discussion of mortality on ‘Last Man Standing’ that results in 180,000 weepy eyes throughout Wembley. This septuagenarian might be blessed with the irrepressible energy and verve of someone half his age, but his frank discussion of being the sole surviving member of his first ever band is a striking reminder that nothing lasts forever. “As you get older the presence of death becomes a clarity,” he affirms. “Grief is the price that we pay for having loved well.”

And yet, when you watch Springsteen across three hours, you’ll be damn near convinced that he can go on for as long as he likes. A thunderous rendition of ‘Dancing In the Dark’ makes us convinced that it’ll go down a storm on Worthy Farm yet once more, while the nostalgia of ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out’ – which chronicles the start of Springsteen’s career and pays homage to late band members Clarence Clemons and Danny Federici – is a brilliant reminder of how it all began.

As he ends with an acoustic rendition of ‘I’ll See You In My Dreams’, we’re left in no doubt that the title will ring true. But ideally, we’ll see this master showman – and one of America’s greatest ever storytellers – down on Worthy Farm too. Over to you, Emily Eavis.