Home on the range - Bruce Springsteen's Western Stars

The Boss has been in a reflective mood of late. Since his last studio album, five years ago, he’s released his excellent autobiography, Born To Run, and ran his one-man stage show Springsteen On Broadway for the better part of 14 months (despite it being only meant to last for a single month), in both, drawing on his blue collar childhood in Freehold, New Jersey, the thunderclap moments of seeing Elvis and, later, The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and his becoming America's most earnest rock star, journeying from Asbury Park pubs to the world's biggest stadia.

Looked at from some angles, Springsteen has always been something of a caricature: the denim, the absence of some of the personality accoutrements of other rock stars, the relentless earnestness and singular attachment to his working class roots but also the musical roots of America, be it folk, country, blues, rockabilly, rock and roll, even straight up pop. It's a guise as distinct as any of the costumes that Bowie adopted, but with The Dame they were always theatrical masks. With The Boss, the blue collar look, the worker boots and workshirts have been a uniform. He has, himself, confessed to some fraudulence, that when he was writing about cars, of riding through "mansions of glory in suicide machines" and being "sprung from cages out on Highway 9" he didn't even own a driving licence. Others have circled his stylistic orbit, be it the late Tom Petty or Gary US Bonds, as well as his associates and band members, like Stevie van Zandt or Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes. Only Bruce has been and remains as distinct a brand, an American brand, if you will, as Levi Strauss, Budweiser or Cadillac.

As he approaches his 70th birthday this September, the nostalgic glances over the shoulder have become more profound, but it’s hard to tell whether Western Stars, his 19th studio album and the first collection of new material since 2014’s High Hopes, casts a winsome gaze over the cowboy culture of Roy Rogers and the early 1950s television the young Bruce Frederick Joseph Springsteen may have been exposed to in that South Street, Freehold, house, or something else. Because, obviously, over the last five years, the America Springsteen has, in one way, shape or another, eulogised throughout his career, has undergone it’s most dramatic, some might even say disturbing schism in several generations.

Not that Western Stars wavers far from the classic Springsteen narrative. Laid over a painted backdrop of gentle, Bachach strings with infusions of brass and melodies redolent of Glen Campbell, it is a glorious continuation of his American romanticisation, choosing the nation’s western reaches as, perhaps, a symbol of the hope and ambition it once presented when the early pioneers and their wagon trains headed out that way. The irony of this, of course, is that one never got the impression from his book that Springsteen enjoyed his time living in Los Angeles, moving himself and his family there at the start of the 1990s, only to move back to New Jersey at the end of that decade. “I didn’t do a lot of work,” he once told Rolling Stone of his time living in California. “Some people would say I didn’t do my best work.” Poignantly, significantly, he was back living in eastern New Jersey when 9/11 happened, giving Springsteen a sickening view of his America being attacked in Lower Manhattan that Tuesday morning from beyond the Jersey Shore and Sandy Hook Bay. It resulted in The Rising, arguably his best work for a long time.

Picture: Bruce Springsteen

Western Stars can, rightfully, fit into that same bracket. It’s as satisfying a Bruce Springsteen record as he’s committed to tape, a lavish comfort meal, if you will, at a time when there’s so much about the United States that we need comforting about. It contextualises life in the deserts and vast scrublands west of the Mississippi for the challenges they present now, and would have done so for those wagon trains on their quest for the promised land. Some of this is probably more than metaphorical: Springsteen has written and spoken of his struggles with depression, and how family life has provided the perfect counter balance. Chasin’ Wild Horses, for example, may well be one such song that evokes the Wild West’s expanse while bringing it home to Colts Neck, the ranch barely six miles from Freehold where the Springsteen family is now based, and which provided the platform for his daughter Jessica to become an internationally competitive show jumping champion.

Despite this return to almost where it all began ("Born to come back," he joked in the On Broadway show. "Who'd have bought that? Nobody."), throughout Western Stars there’s a longing for freedom, still the core of most culture about the American West. Hitch Hikin’ is the folkiest of the album’s material, a song that builds from acoustic simplicity to one as sweeping as the scenic landscape the itinerant traveller heading west will encounter, telling the story through the eyes of three individuals, each with their own ambitions and dreams. Similarly, The Wayfarer recounts a wanderlust spirit that is, perhaps, as representative of Springsteen’s own displacement in his own land as that of a good yarn about the freedom of the road. There’s a similar sense of adventure in Ulysees, potentially the most personal of all the songs on this album, as it tells of an ageing traveller confronted by his dotage, reflecting on a life lived on the road and concluding that he’s not done yet. I think you can see where the author is going.

Get me to the church on time!

© Simon Poulter 2019

As I was compelled to mention in my recent post about Sarah-Jane Morris's John Martyn project, I hold a fascination - some might say obsession - for the meagre musical connections of the south-west London suburbs in which I grew up. This partly stems from the discovery that Martyn himself was born only a thirty minute walk from the New Malden house where I later sprang to life, a revelation akin to discovering royal blood in my veins.

That discovery gave no indication that there would be more intersections to come. The first - and clearly foremost - came when I met my other half and learned that she not only lived in New Malden (in a house more or less backing on to that in which my grandfather and his siblings were born), but also worked at my first junior school. Bizarrely, too, she grew up in south-east London, where I currently base myself. Then came the revelation that my local Greenwich MP, Matthew Pennycook, also hails from the area and even went to my secondary school, some years behind me, before going up to Oxford (a rare event for Beverley Boys, I can assure you). The next connection in this uncanny sequence, however, was another musical one: via an intimate basement gig one Saturday night in Tufnell Park, over there in that North London, my mate Sean introduced me to the music of singer-songwriter Peter Bruntnell. And, guess what? I discovered that Bruntnell was at Beverley too, albeit a few years ahead of me.

Readers, I will not bore you further (and again) with the other remarkable collection of rock connections to my home area (Clapton, Page, Beck, et al), because Bruntnell is one of two pressing local musical matters to address here. Once described by Rolling Stone, no less, as "one of England's best kept musical secrets", demonstrating customary American understanding of the United Kingdom construct, Bruntnell has, since 1995, delivered a stunning canon of Americana-tinged, bittersweet brilliance. And he's now added to it with a sumptuous new album, King Of Madrid. Incredibly, it's his 13th, which means that the previous 12 have probably passed under your radar over the last 25 years since he released his debut. But if that is so, then you will have missed out on a body of work redolent of one of my favourite periods of musical history, when the canyons of Los Angeles were a vital source of earnest musicianship and hippy ideals, and produced the likes of Jackson Brown, the Eagles, the Flying Burrito Brothers, Gram Parsons and more.

King Of Madrid continues in that rich Americana vein and should, with the right visibility elevate Bruntnell to an entirely different altitude, possessing the kind of hooks, lyrical richness, lusciously strummable guitar work and Bruntnell's gently urgent vocals that wouldn’t be out of place on anything emanating from Laurel Canyon in the late '60s. I’d even go as far as comparing Bruntnell with Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, perhaps not for their denim earnestness, but more for the subtlety of lyrical observation attached to his rooted music. On this release, Bruntnell targets the utter mess Britain is right now, peaking with National Library taking shots at the legacy left behind by David Cameron (including soundbites from the former prime minister), while Memory Hood, London Hood and the album's title track, take clever potshots at the febrile state of the nation.

We stay in the KT postcodes, sort of, and add a very strong touch of Sheffield for the next musical revelation, also brought to me by the aforementioned Sean, whose appreciation of Americana goes unmatched. One spring Sunday morning, seven years ago, Sean sent me a link to a free stream of Richard Hawley's then new album, Standing At The Sky's Edge. Hawley had, like Bruntnell, hitherto passed me by, despite his early Britpop work in the Longpigs and later collaborations with fellow Sheffielder Jarvis Cocker. And yet here, on this particular lazy Sunday morning, lying in bed in my apartment in Paris, I became engulfed completely by Hawley's collection of songs about three families living in Skye Edge, a housing estate in Sheffield's Park Hill district, one of many Hawley has embraced in song. Sky's Edge subsequently turned out to be a new direction, leaving behind the gentle country croons of its predecessors and instead embracing a reverb and distortion-drenched set of psychedelic epics. I listened to nothing else for what seemed like weeks after hearing it. Two weeks after the awful Bataclan attack in Paris, Hawley was the first gig I went to, itself an emotional rollercoaster for everyone inside the Alhambra theatre, barely a fifteen-minute walk away from the terrorist atrocity in November 2015. Hawley's gentle humour and mellifluous songs were, that night, just what Paris needed. A musical arm around the shoulder. Soothing reassurance.

And so it is with a gentler context that the bequiffed and typically double denim-clad Hawley comes to a church in Kingston-upon-Thames, New Malden's 'parent' town, to launch his delicious new record, Further. Noting the "Holy! Holy! Holy!" banner behind him on the apse wall of St. John The Baptist Church (a change of venue from the All Saints Church, which was recently - and surreally - the location of a gig by Jack Bauer himself, Keifer Sutherland), Hawley is soon riffing in his dry South Yorkshire humour, suggesting "Hawley! Hawley! Hawley" as a more suitable slogan.

Even with one semi-accidental F-bomb, he is never disrespectful of the environment, making ample use of the ecclesiastic ambience to enhance the acoustic guitar work of Hawley and his ever-present sidekick Shez Sheridan, as they make their way through an eight-song set that includes new music such as the Beatle-esque Doors, the dreamily shimmering Emilina Says, Galley Girl and its tale of highwayman derring-do, and the utterly winsome My Little Treasures, a song which took Hawley 12 years to write, about two of his late father's drinking buddies. From previous albums Hawley and Sheridan combine wonderfully to produce all-acoustic versions of Sky's Edge and even the glitterball romance of Tonight The Streets Are Ours, returning after the briefest of discreet beer breaks to end with the absolutely mellifluent For Your Lover Give Some Time from the Truelove's Gutter album, a song that, via its bittersweet lyrics, shines the spotlight on Hawley's delicious barrtione.

The set is short and sweet, a promotional opportunity for Kingston's fine emporium Banquet Records as much as a Richard Hawley Gig, but in the church setting, before a largely white middle aged and middle class congregation - Kingston captured in its essence - Hawley wraps yet another soothing arm around the shoulder. The last time was in the tragic aftermath of Paris, almost four years ago. This time, we're in the innocent, perennially untroubling London suburbs, in a residential parish church. The circumstances and location couldn't be more contrasting.

Glad it's all over?

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

So that's it. Barring the Women's World Cup and the UEFA Nations League (no, me neither...), the European Under-21 Championship and the Africa Cup Of Nations, that's football over for another season. Two months off, for those of us who worship at the altar of The Beautiful Game™. For the players not involved in such meagre summer nibbles, it's a few weeks on the beach before pre-season and the whole circus gets going again.

However, before Season 2018-19 turns to dust, some reflection. The general assessment of the Premier League is that the right team - Manchester City - won it. Wherever you stand on clubs funded by bottomless riches, Pep Guardiola's side presented a brand of football that came as close to perfection as you could hope to see. I take some pride in that Chelsea were one of the few teams to beat City in the league (2-0 at Stamford Bridge in December), and that they took the Mancunians to a penalty shootout in the League Cup final. We'll gloss over the 6-0 spanking City gave us in February at the Etihad.

City's awesomeness notwithstanding, this has not been a vintage domestic season. Liverpool, bless them, did a decent job keeping up with their north-western rivals, but the chasing pack - in final order,  Chelsea, Tottenham, Arsenal and Manchester United - appeared at times to be competing with all the dedication of two bald men fighting over a comb. Just imagine if all six teams had really made a go of it? Perhaps there was mitigation: Spurs yet to establish a winning rhythm with their impressive new stadium (or, alternatively, it all went Spursy again); Arsenal still adjusting to life after Arsène Wenger; Manchester United readjusting to life after their frustrating flirtation with José Mourinho, and then finding that turning to a favoured son may not be the answer, either.

Which brings me to Chelsea. Towards the end of the previous season, as it was clear things were turning sour between the club and Antonio Conte, and that yet another managerial departure was inevitable, few knew what lay in store with Napoli's Maurizio Sarri touted as the next Italian in the hotseat at the Bridge. Those plugged into the Italian football jungle drums were hearing exciting things about the unprepossessing Neopolitan, who'd gone from commercial banker to football manager in the lower leagues of Tuscan football, to all of a sudden bringing a brand of football to Napoli that, while not successfully tipping Juventus off the top of Serie A, ran the Turinese giants close. So, building on a tradition of managerial gambles (Villas-Boas, Scolari and even the premature appointments of Vialli and di Matteo come to mind) Chelsea, with their owner somewhat preoccupied with visa wrangles in the UK, punted for the 60-year-old Sarri. If I skip forward a year, on paper you can't argue with third place behind City and Liverpool in the league, a Wembley final and, now, winners of the Europa League. By any token of success, Chelsea have done well this season. It's just that there's not a lot of celebration going on.

Something about Sarri just hasn't connected with the fanbase. Even Conte, when he was starting to sulk, was still routinely serenaded by the faithful singing "Antonio! Antonio! Antonio!". Notably, no such thing with "Maurizio!", a name with an identical syllabic scan. I've never been a fan of fan power: just because we have an elevated view from our seat doesn't give us any authority over a coach who works with his players every single day. What arrogance do we have to suggest that a professional manager knows less than us? On Callum Hudson-Odoi, Sarri was, in principle, quite correct in his assessment that, pre-injury, the teenager had a lot to learn about his game, especially in the defensive phase. Similarly, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, whose muscularly elegant attacking play is the kind that every football fan wants to see, especially from homegrown player, but whose physical rigour over the course of 90 minutes has been guilty of fading too soon. Surely, though, these are things you work on? Surely, there is more upside than down that these players can offer you? By the time they did start to play regularly, it was clear that Sarri was playing them reluctantly and in response to fan power. Sadly, their seasons ended too soon to injury. I hope Sarri didn't feel vindicated.

And then there were the infuriating, zero-sum substitutions: Berkley on for Kovaacic, Kovacic on for Berkley; Jorginho played regardless, the world's best holding midfielder, N'Golo Kante, pushed out to the right of the diamond; Gonzalo Higuain played up front on a Sunday in spite of Olivier Giroud's Thursday night prowess; worse, still, Eden Hazard pushed into the False 9 position in spite of both Higuain and Giroud being available recognised centre forwards. Again, Sarri knew best, or at least professed to knowing best. At risk of sounding a tad mercenary, however, that's not what we fork out hundreds of pounds a season to watch. We want to see the best being the best at what they do. Perhaps if we'd seen fewer of the results like the 6-0 defeat by City or 4-0 away drubbing by Bournemouth, not to mention the niggly two-goal defeats at Liverpool and Everton respectively, attitudes may have been better. Actually, when you look at Chelsea's Premier League performance in totality this season, the results aren't all that bad: Won 21, Drawn 9, Lost 8, Goals for 63, Goals against 39, and 72 points in total. But then compare that with the gulf between Chelsea and Liverpool and City above them - goal differences of +67 for Liverpool and a final points total of 97, and +78 and 98 points for City.

All of which means next season is going to be a tough fight for Chelsea to get back on level terms with their more successful rivals this term. Which begs two questions: how will they fare without Sarri, to be confirmed any day now as the new boss at Juventus (following an "amicable" agreement with the Chelsea hierarchy to move on)? And how will they fare without Eden Hazard, surely to finally get his move to Real Madrid this month, one that most Chelsea fans, I would contest, are respectfully at peace with after seven seasons at the club.

To the first question, I'm sure Chelsea will do fine after Sarri, just as they've been fine following each of the last fifteen managers who've gone after relatively short tenures during the Roman Abramovich era. Of course, there is the almost certain likelihood that whomever takes over will have to contend with the FIFA transfer ban, but then if that means that the club relies on its own resources for a bit, and bloods in some of the myriad youth players scattered throughout the lands as loanees, then maybe the club will get to see what fan loyalty really is about. Sometimes crowd pleasing starts at home. The big question, however, is who gets to manage them, and here's where stomachs begin to cramp up. The appointment of Frank Lampard to run a squad containing homegrown youth would be very attractive to the romantic at heart. But just as no Chelsea fan - and I mean, no Chelsea fan - would ever want to see Gianfranco Zola take the top job, in case he screws up and sullies his legend status at the club, there's a similar squeamishness about Lamps taking on a historically risky job just a single season into his managerial career. No one will deny that Frank is one of the brightest players ever to have graced the game, and will have been applying himself as Derby County manager with customary maturity, but do we want to see one of the greatest players in the blue shirt chewed up and spat out by Chelsea so soon in his managerial career?

Picture: Twitter/Chelsea FC

And, then, Hazard. Resistance to hype might prevent the diminutive Belgian from being favourably compared to Lionel Messi and that ageing showboater Cristiano Ronaldo, but Hazard sometimes does defy the eyes. Sure, there have been plenty of games when he has been demonstrably below par, as if he gets to pick and choose when he turns it up to 11 and when he just ticks over, but just as it has been a privilege to have seen the aforementioned Zola play football, the same applies to Hazard. If he does move on - and who would begrudge him if he did at the age of 28 - we will have seen the sort of mercurial talent that, normally, only gets to play for European club royalty. So the next Chelsea manager will have the inconsiderable challenge of filling an unfillable void. 20-year-old American, Christian Pulisic, might well be that stopgap, though little, really, is known of him, apart from what can be gleaned from his unveiling at Chelsea, in which few believed that he was, actually, 20. Remarkable maturity off the pitch, so let's see what he offers on it.

Every new season brings hope, adventure and expectation, and even with Chelsea's challenges due to the two-window transfer ban (which, despite ongoing appeals, seems unlikely to be revoked) and yet another change of manager, the prospect of young players coming into the squad, and a few dead weeds disappearing, means that when that first August weekend of the new season comes around, there will be a wholesale sense of change at Stamford Bridge that hasn't been there for many an opening weekend. The coming days will, I suspect, be key to that. But perhaps, though, a little holiday from football might do us all some good.