Fifty years on from his UK debut at London’s Hammersmith Apollo – the subject of a new BBC documentary, When Bruce Springsteen Came to Britain – the New Jersey rocker with the E-Street band in tow kicked of his latest European jaunt, the ‘Land of Hope and Dreams’ tour, with three rare indoor shows in Manchester on 14, 17 and 20 May.

These proved to be the most overtly political of his long career: Springsteen took repeated aim at Donald Trump, referring to the incumbent president as a tyrant who has betrayed the working-class protagonists of his lyrics and songs. Arguably the greatest performer of the rock era, Bruce is nicknamed the Boss because his followers claim he leads by example – Springsteen, so the argument goes, is not a distant rock God, but someone like you or me, just better.

His covenant with the audience requires him performing at the height of his abilities, night after night, to enable the faithful to see their lives reflected back at themselves and to enable them to become the best possible versions of themselves. In Manchester, he referred to himself from the stage as an ambassador for the US, chronicling what his country has done right and what it has done wrong. Back in 1975, he was touted by his record company in London as the already legendary saviour of rock’n’roll, but he was hardly an overnight sensation in Europe.

All 40 tracks featured on ‘Bruce Springsteen Live, 1975-1985’ were recorded in North America; the vinyl box-set, released on 10 November 1986, broke advance records and is to this day the second best-selling live album of all time in the US (behind Tulsa-born country and western superstar Garth Brooks). His latest live release, an EP comprised of his anti-Trump speeches and politically charged songs from the first night in Manchester, is available for streaming and is currently doing brisk albeit not record-breaking commercial trade in the US and other major markets.

Springsteen may have a special relationship with the UK, but the superstar is nothing short of a God in Spain. How did the man infamously born in the USA become a sensation in a foreign land such that an increasing number of UK fans now embark on a pilgrimage to experience Springsteen Spanish style? It was not until the second leg of The River tour in 1981 that Springsteen played extensively in the old continent.

In the midst of Spain’s transition to democracy, the country’s first major rock promoter, Gay Mercader (a relative of Trotsky’s assassin, Ramón Mercader, and nephew of the great Italian filmmaker, Vittorio de Sica), was busy establishing a new market for international touring acts. The Rolling Stones rocked Barcelona’s bullring in 1976 with Bob Marley playing Ibiza two years later. In 1981, Mercader booked Springsteen to play a sports arena in Barcelona. There is no extant professional video footage but, last year, local photographer Francesc Fábregas published a book of his shots of the night alongside essays by Catalan Springsteen fans and industry insiders. Veteran rock journalist and Springsteen biographer Dave Marsh once described Springsteen’s Barcelona debut as the best concert he had ever witnessed. In his autobiography, Born to Run, Bruce recalls the atmosphere inside and outside the arena:

Spain, only years after Franco’s death, was not the country it is today. Even in 1981, the room we played was surrounded by machine-gun toting police. Outside, equipment from the back of our van disappeared up the street and laundry walked itself out of the hotel into the Barcelona night, never to be seen again. There seemed to be a languid, lovely chaos covering all of Spanish life. But the faces in the crowd were some of the most passionate and beautiful on the planet. We played to just a few thousand but the hell they stirred shook the band and was unforgettable. We’d be back.

This romantic(ised) description is somewhat disingenuous as the band sure took their time to return. The marathon 156-date 1984-1985 Born in the USA global blockbuster tour included 18 concerts in Europe – none were in the Iberian Peninsula.

Various theories have been advanced as to why Spain was snubbed. Springsteen’s team were reputedly displeased by the 1981 concert not selling out – markets take time to develop (the debut Spanish concerts by the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were half-empty), and many locals were out of town for the Easter vacation. Unsubstantiated speculation has suggested that French promoters lobbied to keep Madrid and Barcelona out of the itinerary to maximise ticket sales – a sufficient contingent of Spanish fans crossed the border for Springsteen to address them specifically from the stage in Montpellier.

What we do know is that Mercader and Springsteen did not bond. The rock star is diplomatic on the subject; the promoter less so. He claims Springsteen expressed surprise at dinner at the plurilingualism of the Spanish nation-state. This prompted Mercader to respond that, given such ignorance, it was hardly surprising that US foreign policy was such a disaster. I sent a WhatsApp from the metro after watching the Boss lay waste to Madrid last year to tell Gay that the Bruce of 2024 had far exceeded expectations. He responded within minutes with a voice message to say that Springsteen had never and would never float his boat. By contrast, the industry veteran spoke with childlike enthusiasm of breaking box-office records in Seville with two sold-out AC/DC stadium shows he had recently promoted in the Andalusian city. Mercader also first brought the Antipodean rockers to play Spain in 1981 shortly after a thwarted coup attempt had involved MPs being held hostage in the national parliament; since 2000, AC/DC have had a street named in their honour in Leganés, a working-class commuter town in Greater Madrid.

Foreign bands who came to play in Spain during the late 1970s and early 1980s have been rewarded with phenomenal inter-generational loyalty. Their concerts are tied in the popular imagination with the process of democratisation. Following the unsuccessful coup attempt, Spanish citizens rejected the right and rewarded the Socialist Party led by the youthful Felipe González (b. 1942) with a landslide victory in the 1982 general elections. A left-wing party had not been in power since before the Civil War (1936-39), whilst González’s Socialists constituted the first major European government controlled by the Generation of ’68. A few months prior to the general elections, future cabinet members were on show at the Rolling Stones’s triumphant concert at the Vicente Calderón stadium, home to Atlético Madrid football club (arch-rivals of Franco’s favoured team, Real Madrid). Unlike in Latin America, one of the few markets in which Springsteen has never gained a foothold, audiences in Spain rarely viewed Born in the USA as the Trojan horse of cultural imperialism.

Between 1981 and 1988, Spaniards and Springsteen alike improved their cultural and linguistic literacies. On returning to Barcelona seven years after his debut to play the city’s football stadium as part of the Tunnel of Love Express tour, the Boss greeted the 90,000 capacity crowd in Catalan with the words ‘Ja sóc aquí’. The iconic phrase had first been uttered by Josep Tarradellas (1899-1988) – the president in exile of Catalonia from 1954 – on his return home in 1977 after Franco’s death. A young audience at the Vicente Calderón followed Springsteen’s English far better than an older generation of fans who struggled to understand members of Pink Floyd when the band played the Atlético stadium that same year.

Even during the Boss’s most commercially and artistically lean period in the 1990s, Spanish fans never lost the faith; 1992 was as exciting for Spain as it was underwhelming for Springsteen’s career. After marrying backing singer Patti Scialfa, and disbanding the E-Street band, Springsteen released on the same day what are widely considered to be his two weakest albums: Human Touch and Lucky Town. Barcelona hosted the Olympics; Madrid was named European City of Culture; and Seville was home to the Universal Exhibition. Springsteen’s Spanish dates – which included his debut at Barcelona’s Olympic Stadium (with eight sold-out concerts to his name, he holds the record as the artist to have performed most times at the venue) – were promoted by Dr Music, Mercader’s first genuine rival in the national market.

The Boss reconvened the E-Street Band for a reunion tour that kicked off at Barcelona’s indoor Olympic arena on 9 April 1999 and wound up the following year in New York. A live-concert HBO television special filmed in Madison Square Garden shows a band rediscovering their fire, but the concert footage pales in significance compared with a performance recorded in Barcelona for MTV from The Rising tour in 2002. For many aficionados, this is the definitive audio-visual record of the E-Street band firing on all cylinders.

Springsteen’s all-ages Spanish following has only increased in the interim: his visits to the country inevitably make the national evening news. Over the course of the last 30 years, most stadium acts have decamped to the highest bidder, usually Live Nation (a conglomerate encompassing Ticketmaster, which has increasingly dominated the global market and stood accused of exploitative monopolistic practices). There are outliers: in Spain, AC/DC and The Cure still deal exclusively with Mercader (even after he sold his company to Ticketmaster in 2006), and Springsteen has faithfully remained on Dr Music’s roster.

Critics have been quick to point out that the voice of blue-collar America has never clocked on in his life. Even Springsteen acolytes were forced to question their faith when the Boss’s standing as man of the people was brought into question after he adopted a dynamic pricing system for his first post-Covid tour in 2023. The longstanding fan-site, ‘Backstreets’, dedicated to providing commentary on his concerts, shut down in protest.

The Obamas and Steven Spielberg flew over to give moral support for opening night in Barcelona. A sense that Springsteen might be past his prime was intimated by unusually static set-lists as well as YouTube footage of an augmented E-Street band. Additional musicians slowed down the pace and helped disguise perhaps the singer’s ailing prowess. When the second leg of the US tour was postponed after Springsteen was hospitalised with a peptic ulcer, the Boss was seemingly against the ropes. Although selling out quickly, prices for the 22-date 2024 European tour – which began in Cardiff on 5 May and wound up at London’s Wembley Stadium on 27 July – were significantly lower (an average of 200 as opposed to 500 Euros for front pitch standing).

On the one hand, the Madrid chapter of his global fan-base lucked out: the Spanish capital was the only city Bruce and the band graced with three concerts on a tour that also included two dates at the Olympic Stadium in Barcelona. On the other, the omens for his Spanish dates were not great. Madrid was to mark Springsteen’s return to the stage. Under doctor’s orders to rest his voice for ten days, he had cancelled a run of gigs in Marseille, Prague and Milan. With unforgiving daylight sun and a more relaxed attitude to curfews than UK venues (the band arrived on stage five minutes early for the first of two Wembley dates to enable the 31-song setlist to surpass the three-hour mark), outdoor Spanish concerts begin much later. Still, alarm bells rang when there was no sign of action at the advertised start time of 9pm. A quarter of an hour later, members of the E-Street Band arrived on stage one-by-one before a colossal roar of ‘Bruuce’ (which, to the untrained ear, can sound like booing) greeted the man himself who screamed in Spanish to ask, rhetorically, if the crowd were ready before counting off the introduction to ‘Lonesome Day’.

Springsteen’s voice was not on top form: it was far better two nights later in Madrid, and when I caught him again at the end of the tour in London. Jeopardy – the sense that, like a circus act, all could go wrong – is a crucial aspect of the live experience, increasingly absent from stadium shows in the age of auto-tuning and pre-recording backing tracks. Springsteen’s apparent reluctance to ever drink water on stage was, in the 30-degree temperatures of the Spanish evening, just one example of how he goes out of his way to make life difficult for himself.

I still own a vinyl copy of Springsteen’s Live 1975-1985, which I have put on the turnstile ever since I was a teenager. Were he to release a compilation of his most accomplished live performances from the last decade, the majority would come from Europe where he plays to bigger, more youthful and enthusiastic crowds than back home. I would have little interest in listening to them in the comfort of my own home.

The Boss is better than can be reasonably be expected of any septuagenarian but, let’s not kid ourselves, in pure musical terms, he is no match for his younger self. The inclusion of a horn section and backing gospel section underline that the origins of the E-Street band are in soul as much as rock. Equally, however, increasing the number of musicians on stage is an old showbiz trick to slow the pace and change the key in classic songs (fellow New Jersey rocker Jon Bon Jovi is perhaps the most shameless exponent of this tactic). Anthems like ‘Badlands’ no longer deliver the knockout punch they once did, but Springsteen refuses to go gently into the night.

Transitions between songs can be as quick as The Ramones (who rarely played for more than an hour) in their prime, while the vocal demands of the studio recording of ‘Born in the USA’ (perhaps, sensibly, only generally played as a treat in multi-nights runs in the same city) are unforgiving. Carried by the much-misunderstood classic’s military beat and the lungs of the crowd, a great artist facing the inevitable passage of time is central to the live drama of the gig. Trump’s childish retort to Springsteen was to dismiss a man with as good a claim as any to represent the moral conscience of America as a ‘dried out prune’, but the old rocker isn’t ashamed of his age.

Bruce is the sole surviving member of The Castiles, a garage rock band formed in 1964 by George Theiss after watching the Beatles on the Ed-Sullivan show. A monologue on mortality and visiting Theiss’s deathbed, translated into Spanish on the big screens in Madrid, gave way to an acoustic performance (accompanied by a trumpet) of ‘Last Man Standing’. Springsteen’s genius and guile lies in recognising the inevitability of decline and incorporating it into the show rather than just offering a diluted version of his glory days.

Bruce may well be scared to leave the stage. The once seemingly indestructible rock god has opened up in recent years about ongoing battles with depression. Money alone does not explain a compulsive, beyond-the-call-of-duty dedication to his craft and audience. That is not to imply that our blue-collar hero is indifferent to capitalist accumulation. After striking a lucrative deal for his back catalogue with Sony, Springsteen is one of only a handful of musicians to be a billionaire. In the face of criticisms surrounding reputedly astronomical tickets for the 2023 tour, long-term manager Jon Landau’s retort was that average prices were not as high as had been reported, and that paying just northwards of 200 dollars for a normal seat wasn’t unreasonable ‘to see someone universally regarded as among the very greatest artists of his generation’. Reducing everything to the value of economic exchange flies in the face of much of what the Boss myth embodies, but it is difficult to hold truck with Landau’s premise.

A major artist of the mid-late-20th century, Springsteen’s return to Spain proved that, with the right crowd behind him, he remains a serious contender. His current crop of dates, which include a return to the Basque Country, wind up with the rescheduled dates in Milan on 3 July. All bets are off as to how many, if any, concerts Springsteen and the E-Street band have in them beyond that. Catch them while you still can.