My relationship with Bruce dates back to Born To Run, which places its origins firmly in 1975. The first time I saw him live was at Wembley Arena in ’81, doing The River tour. By the time he was filling Wembley Stadium with Born In The USA in ’85, I’d had a couple of kids so the four years between concerts somehow seemed a whole lot longer. By contrast the gap between my second and third gigs was considerably shorter because I travelled to Northwest London two nights in a row – on the 3rd and 4th of July – and was treated to two almost completely different three and a half hour sets (the latter kicked off, unsurprisingly I guess, with Independence Day).

So much had happened in my life in the three years before I saw him touring Tunnel Of Love in Sheffield in ’88 that it seemed even longer. The last time I bought a ticket to see him he was playing the Milton Keynes Bowl in ’93; and the last time I ever saw him was in Crystal Palace Park in 2003. By that time the price of his tickets had risen to over £30, which I’d decided was just a bit too rich for my blood (I had four children by then). Besides my house was just across the road from the park and I could enjoy the whole thing simply by opening my patio door. However my friend Mick had a spare ticket and asked me if I’d like to join him and his mates gratis. Well I’d known Mick even longer than Bruce – since primary school – so it would have been rude to refuse.

Over the next couple of decades my finances more or less flatlined, while the cost of Bruce’s extravaganzas seemed to rise exponentially, until I could only gape in wonder at the sort of money people were paying for basic, let alone ‘VIP’ tickets, so there was zero danger that I would ever have the sort of disposable required to ever see him live again; but I comforted myself with the thought that I’d seen him at his very best in the ‘80s so I was content to continue our love affair from afar.

I continued to buy his albums as he released them on CD; but having rediscovered my record collection and bought a new record deck a few years back, I started purchasing any new releases that caught my attention – perhaps half a dozen or so per year – on old school vinyl records. Brand new albums I bought by up-and-coming artists like A Void, Joy Cookes and Project Blackbird or bigger names like Little Simz and FONTAINES D.C. were all £25, whereas when I considered buying a copy of Springsteen’s Western Stars it was thirty-five quid!

I seemed to have spent a large chunk of my adult life defending Bruce’s blue collar schtick, particularly after he started making serious money, but I did so largely on the basis of the incredibly good value I’d witnessed him packing into his live shows and the kind of sincerity that he always managed to convey on stage; so I was genuinely angry when I Tweeted my disgust at the price of his latest album, which I considered a massive “Fuck You!” to all the ordinary workers – irrespective of the colour of their collars – who had contributed to his wealth across the decades. Especially the many among them – like me – who had retired by then. My Tweet asked Bruce if he really believed that his desire to add to the multi millions he’d amassed by then, outweighed any sense of loyalty he might owe to fans who were just about getting by on their pensions?

I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t answer my Tweet; aside from the obvious excuse that it would have been lost among millions of others, the truth is there was nothing whatsoever he could have said to defend his obscene acquisitiveness. And just like that, I arrived at the end of a 45 year love affair. Later when I read that he was using ‘dynamic pricing’ for his concert tickets – i.e. screwing whatever he could out of punters according to the level of demand – he was already a billionaire, so by the time I saw recently that Amazon would be selling his forthcoming 9 record box set for £279.99 (which works out to over 30 quid a disc FFS) any previous affection had long since dissolved into a contempt that made it difficult for me to hear him with quite the same ears.

He’d never been the sort of hero to me that piss-taking friends liked to pretend he was whenever I felt obliged to defend him, so I was hardly left despondent like all those Smiths fans who’d been convinced Morrissey was a demigod right up until he showed himself up as fascist tosspot; but Bruce’s grasping attitude – which ironically displays a feeble grasp of the old truism that you can’t take it with you – left me questioning whether he’d ever been worth standing up for.

Then I saw Trump’s apoplectic, childish, spoilt brat response to a statement Springsteen had made to a Manchester audience on the first night of his latest tour and I was reminded just how much I had loved him when we were both so much younger and life was so much more straightforward; before the gap between our relative solvency mushroomed into a monumental, apparently insurmountable chasm. Here he was, once again, identifying the most immediate problem confronting the USA – if not the world – today and skewering it precisely in front of a massive crowd. No wonder the Orange Ogre was spitting nails and lashing out like an uncoordinated toddler having a temper tantrum.

For the record this is what Bruce said:

“In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about, that has been a beacon of hope and liberty for 250 years, is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration. Tonight, we ask all who believe in democracy and the best of our American experiment to rise with us, raise your voices against authoritarianism and let freedom ring!”

“The last check, the last check on power after the checks and balances of government have failed are the people, you and me. It’s in the union of people around a common set of values now that’s all that stands between a democracy and authoritarianism. So at the end of the day, all we’ve got is each other. There’s some very weird, strange and dangerous shit going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.”

And later in the set he added:

“In America, the richest men are taking satisfaction in abandoning the world’s poorest children to sickness and death. This is happening now.

In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict on loyal American workers.

They’re rolling back historic civil rights legislation that led to a more just and plural society.

They are abandoning our great allies and siding with dictators against those struggling for their freedom. They are defunding American universities that won’t bow down to their ideological demands.

They are removing residents off American streets and, without due process of law, are deporting them to foreign detention centres and prisons. This is all happening now.

A majority of our elected representatives have failed to protect the American people from the abuses of an unfit president and a rogue government. They have no concern or idea of what it means to be deeply American.

The America l’ve sung to you about for 50 years is real and regardless of its faults is a great country with a great people. So we’ll survive this moment. Now, I have hope, because I believe in the truth of what the great American writer James Baldwin said. He said, ‘In this world, there isn’t as much humanity as one would like, but there’s enough.”

I have honestly never understood and I guess I never will, how any grown-up possessed of even a modicum of insight could possibly look at Trump and they way he behaves, particularly his more childish, petulant outbursts on Twitter and Truth Social, and fail to see him for exactly what he is? I realise that there are at least 77 million American voters who would be willing to argue the toss; but seriously what the fuck could they possibly they know about anything?

Even if Bruce’s statement achieves nothing else, it was well worth it to witness Trump so thoroughly pissed off and to see memes like this appearing all over social media.

Parenthetically, just to illustrate that Donny really doesn’t grasp how ridiculous he looks to everyone outside of his most braindead, red MAGA capped, diehards, he went on to have a pop at the current queen of pop: