An artist who doesn't take the E(asy) Street

IF THERE'S one constant in this particular corner of The Ticket, it's the by now annual Discotheque column on Bruce Springsteen. It's a chance for the cynical eejit who normally resides here to take a break to recharge his batteries and the fanboy with a laptop to emerge for an airing.

I could offer a defence. I could point out that every columnist turns into a fan once in a while with dealing with certain subjects. I could argue that at least it happens in this instance with someone good (it's not bloody Morrissey, you know). I could spend another paragraph justifying it all, but that would be a complete waste of space. No, best that you just deal with it.

At the end of Springsteen's latest one-night stand in Dublin city, people streamed away from The Point in a very good mood. All sported grins from ear to ear and exhilarated babble about the show filled the air. These are people who had just had a glimpse of the promised land and realised there was an 18-piece band standing by the gates, playing the wildest kind of folk music imaginable and having a whale of a time.

Springsteen was in town with this band of mischief-makers, rogues and scoundrels to plug The Seeger Sessions, his album of old-time traditional folk tunes popularised by Pete Seeger. Songs about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances have long been Springsteen's bread and butter, so it's perhaps inevitable that he would turn to these tales about dustbowl devastation and crippled war veterans at some stage of his career.

If the record is good, the live show is something else entirely. It's as though Springsteen has been waiting all his life to put on a raucous, slightly wobbly and intoxicating hootenanny of this ilk. The circus has come to town and you really don't want to miss it as it swings, skip, rocks and rolls down the road with accordions, fiddles, trumpets, tubas, pianos, drums, banjos and a rake of guitars. It's a hoot from start to finish, an experience which started out on Bruce's farm and then took on a life of its own.

What makes Springsteen traipsing into folk fields so interesting is the timing of it all. There's a finely-tuned synchronicity to his retelling of these traditional songs just as Americans are immersed in so much confusion home and away.

Springsteen could have penned new songs to reflect how, for example, New Orleans has been left to become a city in ruins, or the human toll from the continuing mire in Iraq. Indeed, he may well in time go down these paths and see where they lead him. But for now, he turned to ancient, hoary, well-worn standards like My Oklahoma Home, How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live? and Mrs McGrath and gave them a new lease of life.

It works on every front. For instance, there's a punch to tonight's version of Mrs McGrath which would knock you sideways. Rather than using reams of polemic to make his point about the futility of his country's involvement in yet another foreign skirmish, Springsteen lets a 19th-century ballad do all the talking. As if you needed telling about what you're hearing, the power and anger of the performance does the rest.

There are many who would prefer to see him in cahoots with The E-Street Band, just as there are many who favoured the close-up intensity of his solo live shows from last year on the Devils and Dust tour. However, it's impossible not to enjoy this show, every musician on the stage blowing and sawing and thumping away without a care in the world.

Possibly the one who's getting the biggest kick out of this session is the fellow standing centrestage, holding his guitar as if it were a machine-gun. No matter what happens after The Seeger Sessions jaunt comes to a close, Bruce Springsteen knows he can always turn to his roots.