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There are bands, there are stars, there are singers, there are songwriters. And there's Bruce Springsteen.

This tireless bundle of feverish energy is still head and shoulders above anyone else in the world of popular music. Whenever I see him on stage, everyone else fades into the background; all those so-called globe conquering acts are thrown into sharp relief by the glorious wall of sound and waves of emotion that pulse from the man and his band.

He has a heart as big as a planet, he makes music that's pure joy, and he does it for hour after hour. Here in Dublin, on the Irish leg of his first world tour with the E Street Band since 2003 - he comes to Britain next week - Springsteen started as he meant to go on: wearing a black shirt, sleeves rolled up in a lets-get-to-work manner.
He put a harmonica to his lips, blew a sweet refrain, and threw down his arm to launch the opening song, Promised Land, which encapsulated everything that's great about him as a live performer.

His face was twisted with passion, and the band rolled along like an express train. It was epic, it was glorious, and it had only just begun. Radio Nowhere, from last year's Magic album, swiftly followed, and we were well and truly on the way.

And the thing about Bruce Springsteen concerts, as I began to remember as this one unfolded, is that just when you think a peak has been reached, it just gets better. With each song, as Springsteen shouted: "One, two, three, four!", the sound became warmer and richer, the crowd of 35,000 threw away their inhibitions, and Springsteen summoned up hidden reserves of energy and emotion.
Perhaps he doesn't throw himself around quite as vigorously as he used to. Perhaps his voice is losing a bit of range, becoming rougher. But hell - the man is 58 years old.

And it wasn't all about joy. Darkness On The Edge Of Town taps into the despairing streak in Springsteen's music, but even then, it was a glorious sort of desperation.

Then another peak was reached with Because The Night, the song co-written by Springsteen and Patti Smith, and illuminated here by a sensational guitar solo from Nils Lofgren. Brilliant.

So it went on, as a dull Dublin sky turned dark and the drama intensified with The River, The Rising, and Born To Run.

He's still the Boss. No question.

Bruce bounds on stage, unfairly energetic for a man a year short of his seventh decade, and says something about being "here in the victorious city of Manchester!" An imperceptible murmur of ambivalence rises up from the audience at Old Trafford, but before it might register, he's off into "No Surrender", the opening salvo of a set whose momentum is sustained through deft segues linking songs into batches of three or four, and any local rivalries are swept away in the surge of goodwill.

It's a good choice of opener, a declaration of sustained principle that chimes well with an audience mostly on the grey side of 50, but still young enough to believe; and, if anything, lines like "There's a war outside raging/ It ain't ours any more to win" have a greater resonance today than they did when the song was written a quarter-century ago.

As the song builds to its climax, Springsteen and his guitarist cohorts, Miami Steve and Nils Lofgren, come together at the front of stage to ring out the unison hook, the warhead of a musical missile powered by one of rock's most explosive rhythm sections. Then, before the crowd has time to applaud, the dying chords slip into the opening figure of the rabble-rousing "Radio Nowhere", and we're off again.

That's the agenda for the next two hours, a series of two- or three-song broadsides occasionally punctuated by the assured patter of a consummate showman who seems effortlessly to bridge the gulf between himself and his fans. No other stadium-filling stars of Springsteen's magnitude – not U2, not Radiohead, certainly not Prince or Madonna – would take the kind of risks Springsteen does tonight, as he lopes along the stage's runways into the crowd, shaking hands as if with old mates, and even falling to his knees as their hands paw over his body and guitar.

As he sets out for the first of many such jaunts, the big screens at the side of the stage suddenly switch from landscape orientation to double-sized portrait to show two colossal Bruces ambling along, a startling trick of magnification that brings home just how massive a blue-collar presence this man wields.

"Hold up your signs, and we'll try and do some requests," he says, then during "Darlington County", as the drizzle lays a fine mist over the stage-front audience, he walks about collecting the soggy posters, stuffing some into his back pocket as he delivers them to the drum riser. It's a perfectly judged pose: with his blond Telecaster slung at his side, and the people's papers sticking out of his jeans, the twin giant images are irresistibly reminiscent of the sleeves of both Born to Run and Born in the USA.

As the song draws to a close, he picks up a poster reading "Hard to be a Saint" and brandishes it at his band, who slip smoothly into the song from his debut album. If the sign is a plant, it is slickly devised; if it's genuine, it enables a stunning demonstration of the E Street Band's lock-tight ability to turn on a dime and change direction at a moment's notice, an impressive combination of spontaneity and solidity. The song climaxes with the singer and Miami Steve getting into a contest, swapping bursts of ever-more frantic lead guitar; both, however, are trumped during the ensuing "Because the Night" by dapper little Lofgren, who winds up the song with a dazzling, show-stopping demonstration of six-string gymnastics, which ends appropriately enough with him spinning around on one foot like some electrified whirling dervish.

Save for a "Devils and Dust" that retains its moving intimacy even at stadium-size, it's one long string of crowd-pleasing rockers from then on, reminding one of just how many infectious anthems Springsteen has written. At one point, he accepts a proferred Man Utd shirt – his son, he reveals, is a little Red Devil, and so he realises he's playing on "hallowed ground" tonight – and waves it to the audience.

But his energy and commitment are unrivalled in rock: to develop the football theme, if one were to apply to pop performers the now-familiar tracking technology that tells us how many kilometres a player has run during a game, Springsteen would be out there on his own, a real box-to-box dynamo whose legwork is made possible only by the size of his heart. Man of the match, again.

IT took Bruce Springsteen 30 seconds to get every soul in Manchester United's stadium soaring last night.

He ambled onto the stage in front of 60,000 and screamed 'Is there anybody alive out there?'... followed by his legendary call to arms - 'One two three four'. Then the E Street Band propelled by the wallop of Max Weinberg's drumming tore into No Surrender. Next in a relentless four-song opening was classic driving song Radio Nowhere and then a rare airing for Night - another tune about escaping mind-numbing work via the highway. But Night from the Born To Run album contains the scalp-tingling lyric: 'You're in love with all the wonder it brings, and every muscle in your body sings'. It was a declaration of intent to rev-up Manchester and have a good time.

Bruce's pursuit of rock 'n' roll joy transcends all generations. Most of those there were in their 40s and 50s but a kid next to me was 18 - and dancing. Being the crowd-pleasing showman is part of Bruce's repertoire and he paused to tell us his eldest son - now 18 - doesn't like baseball or American football - but soccer. Gazing at the stadium he then declared: "And these are his boys."

The band played with awesome power and, when required, impeccable beauty. The night was a magical mix of old rarities, crowd-pleasing hits and soon-to-be classics from the new album. Covers of others songs are always well chosen by the band. So it was with Jimmy Cliff's Trapped. A searing desperate vocal evoked the torment of a loveless relationship and - with the band behind him delivering layers of tense reflection and thunder - it was top-notch.

He may no longer be the fresh-faced rake in a black bomber that graced the cover of Born to Run in 1975, but he still knows how to strut and tease a crowd - and has Olympian energy for a man of 58.
The fact is, he put in a performance at the Theatre of Dreams brimming with enough passion, brilliance and zip to impress Sir Alex Ferguson.

For one night only at Old Trafford, The Boss wasn't a gum-chewing Scotsman pondering how to get the best out of Wayne Rooney.
Nevertheless, Bruce Springsteen was quick to confide his own emotional ties to Manchester United. Before the show his soccer-mad 18-year-old son had filled his dad in on the triumphant climax of United's season. What he perhaps failed to grasp was that an Old Trafford full of Springsteen fans didn't necessarily double up as one full of United fans. Hence the mixed reaction when the screens revealed one fan giving him a United shirt with “The Boss” written on the back.

Still, some way though a marathon show, it offered a reminder that Springsteen was fallible. That we needed reminding was beyond doubt. Far from playing down the effect he has on fans within his immediate proximity, Springsteen seems to derive immense amusement from putting himself among them and drinking up the love. He walked down from the stage to meet them with the bow-legged gait of an old farmer striding out to check on his cattle, and returned with a fistful of written requests. After a Lonesome Day high on audience participation, Springsteen apologised for the absence of his wife, Patti Scialfa - “at home making sure the kids don't burn the house down and sell my favourite clothes on eBay”.

Deliberately or otherwise, it all fed into the image of a consummate everyman. That shouldn't detract from the fact that, in his way, Springsteen is a sophisticated showman. With the “Let it rain” refrain from Mary's Place resounding into the persistent Mancunian spray, he ran across the stage, sank to his knees and continued to slide at a velocity that belied his 58 years. Aware that, right at the back, the big screens were people's best chance of getting any sense of his actions, Livin' in the Future was one of several songs that saw him striding from camera to camera, effectively eyeballing 50,000 fans as he sang.
Like almost everything else on last year's Magic album, a compendium of big-hearted rock'n'roll tunes, it already sounded like an old favourite.

This, you suspect, is why Springsteen keeps returning to the E Street Band - in particular the dissonant harmonising of Steve Van Zandt and the affirmative honking of the veteran saxophonist Clarence Clemons (though, sadly, not Danny Federico, the keyboard player who finally succumbed to cancer last month). Present amid this synergy of imperfections were all the things that captured the collective imagination when these musicians first came to Britain 33 years ago.

Far from dissipating with the decades, the old hunger was tempered with an increasing, inevitable knowledge that this really doesn't last for ever. By the time the nine musicians on stage encored with a version of Born to Run, that more than mitigated for not knowing that Manchester was home to another football team.

At the first show of Springsteen's European tour, anticipation was at fever pitch for the return of the man they still call the Boss.And rightly so. From the first song, the Promised Land, he turned the 35,000- capacity stadium into a small club.Roaming the stage, he blew harmonica towards a sea of outstretched hands.

Springsteen remains the consummate rock and roll performer. In the two hour-plus show with the E Street Band he delivered a grand slam all-thrills no-frills display.With last year's album Magic receiving some of his best reviews, his renewed confidence and energy was pervasive. "Here's to the end of eight years of bad, bad magic," he told the Dublin crowd introducing the title track.

Although showing little signs of ageing, maturity suits Springsteen. His voice richer and stronger, he is able to combine knockabout rock with political concerns about the erosion of US freedoms in a sprightly Livin' in the Future. And despite the death from cancer of founding E Street member Danny Federici, the band is still one of the seven wonders of rock.

Easily living up to their boast the pianopounding Prove It All Night, they also provided guitar fireworks with Sopranos star Steve Van Zandt and classy Nils Lofgren. And the continuity that runs through his songwriting was made clear with new songs beside the old favourites. Reason to Believe, Born to Run and Thunder Road sound better than ever.
By staying true to original principles he still inspires uncommon devotion.
Next week thousands will gather in London, Manchester and Cardiff. A master class in stadium rock awaits.

The Emirates Stadium in north London is normally home to the elegant and debonair Arsenal football team, rather than the more blue-collar delights of Bruce Springsteen. But on Friday and Saturday night, for the first-ever gig to be staged at the architecturally sophisticated new stadium, the Boss was not 58-year-old club manager Arsène Wenger but the 58-year-old rocker.

Rolling back the years on Friday, he played for almost fully 90 minutes twice over, producing a performance of blood, sweat and tears. The last time this reviewer saw someone making the rictus face that for Springsteen represents anguished passion, they were passing a kidney stone. In fact he didn't actually blub, unlike some London footballers, but for the 60,000 faithful - Nick Hornby must have pissed his pants - hysteria was the order of the day from the 7.45pm kick-off right through to the barnstorming end.

Springsteen has never been a fancy dan - that's the whole point of him - and he strode on stage in dark blue denims and a shiny slick black shirt looking like he meant business. Before he'd even sung a note, he'd dropped to his knees in front of the mic, like he'd won a trophy, and the band blew into 'Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out' - a song more than three decades old but sounding fresher than Theo Walcott.

It was followed by 'Radio Nowhere' from last year's sterling album Magic, and from thereon in, the intensity seldom let up.
The band in this instance was of course the E Street Band, the Crazy Horse to Springsteen's Neil Young, on their first tour together for five years, and there was no little pleasure to be had in watching the sparring between guitarists Nils Lofgren and Steve Van Zandt (more familiar to some as Silvio Dante from The Sopranos). Clarence Clemons, looking fine in his gold braided suit, blew a mean sax.

It felt like a family reunion, with the crowd invited, too, although keyboard player Danny Federici, who died of cancer recently, was missed. Part of Springsteen's genius lies in his rare ability to turn a gig into something more akin to an act of communion - at this level really only U2 remain real rivals.

If anything, while there was all the huffing as well as puffing to be expected at a Springsteen concert, the tone was darker than in the past: no 'Born In The USA', for instance, but rather five songs mined from the despondent 1978 album Darkness on the Edge of Town. Even so, the passion pouring from the original blue-collar rocker was something that any foreign football manager would want to bottle; exhilaration rippled around the stadium like a Mexican wave as he tore into classics like 'Born To Run.' Not to disparage Arsenal fans, but rivals dubbed their old stadium 'the Library', and it doesn't feel likely that the new place will ever be rocked quite as loudly as it was on this occasion.

A third of a century has passed since a young Bruce Springsteen came to London to play his debut UK gig at what was then the Hammersmith Odeon. Horrified to arrive at the venue and find his record label billing him as "the future of rock'n'roll", he famously ran around the streets before the show tearing down the offending posters.

Springsteen's modesty was laudable, even if the over-enthusiastic marketing hype was to prove unusually prescient, and more than three decades on, his performance and persona have hardly changed. He still strides on stage, a rugged everyman in blue jeans, work shirt and suspiciously jet-black hair, and fires out a never-ending series of dynamic, insatiable, big-hearted rock songs.
It would be forgivable, at 58, if he took his foot off the gas, and he has described his recent dates as "victory laps" at the twilight of a formidable career. But tonight Springsteen shows no signs of slowing down. The opening Tenth Avenue and Radio Nowhere set the tone for the evening, being heartfelt, yearning songs, rich in observational detail, performed with an energy and brio that verge on the pathological.

Springsteen's legendary charisma is so winning that he performs the miraculous feat of making a stadium show appear intimate. He has no shortage of crowdpleasing tricks, regularly ambling into the throng and returning with a sheaf of song requests. But tonight is free of showbiz schmaltz: the vivacious Atlantic City and Because the Night sound like earnest declarations of his eternal faith in the healing, redemptive powers of rock'n'roll.

The material from last year's thoughtful Magic album is so immediate that it sounds as familiar as his peerless back catalogue. Before Livin' in the Future, awash with sepia nostalgia for pre-Bush liberal America, he mumbles incredulity at what is going down in his land: "Rendition, illegal wire-tapping and the rolling back of basic civil liberties." The album's title track is described as "about the troops" and is sung in a monotone as low and wearied as a soldier returning from war broken by having seen too much, too clearly.

Yet the E Street Band's raw, raucous rock is too vibrant for spirits to dip for long, and a lengthy encore including Born To Run, Glory Days and Dancing in the Dark has 50,000 delirious fists punching the Emirates' night air.

Bruce Springsteen has been on stage for three hours, and it doesn't seem a minute too long.

Piczo