Bruce shows he’s got soul... but picks the wrong songs
The rich are different from you and me, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote – prompting Ernest Hemingway to add: ‘Yes, they have more money.’ The famous are different too: they have more energy.
Mick Jagger, now 79, is still racing across stadium stages. Elton John, 75, is on a farewell tour that began four years ago. Bruce Springsteen, 73, has spent his 70s not just making albums but reprising a one-man show (Springsteen On Broadway), planning a world tour (next year, with the E Street Band), doing a podcast with a president (Obama) and selling his back catalogue (for a cool $500million).
Now he has decided to reinvent himself as a soul singer. Only The Strong Survive comprises 15 covers of soul songs Springsteen has loved, mainly from the 1960s.
A rock god paying tribute to a golden age of black music sounds like a treat. But even the gods have to play by the rules. When making covers, you need to track down great songs and make them your own. The rules ought to be named after Bryan Ferry, the past master of the remake, all the way from the classic These Foolish Things (1973) to the beguiling Love Letters EP (this summer) via the underrated Taxi (1993, about to be reissued).
When Springsteen released his first covers album, We Shall Overcome, in 2006, he brought a barnstorming warmth to some of Pete Seeger’s favourite folk songs. This time, alas, the results are patchier.
With endless classics to choose from, The Boss makes some surprising selections. I Wish It Would Rain is hardly The Temptations at their peak, and, refreshing as it is to find Springsteen covering Diana Ross, there are surely better options than Someday We’ll Be Together.
He alights on only three gems: the Walker Brothers’ The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, Jimmy Ruffin’s What Becomes Of The Brokenhearted, and the Commodores’ Nightshift.
The first two fail to bring out the best in Springsteen, who puts them in the photocopier. But Nightshift is magical, one loving homage (to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson) overlaid with another.
The other 12 tracks are merely amiable, albeit with two redeeming features. The horns are glorious, glowing like the autumn sun, and Springsteen’s vocals are terrific – rich, burnished and properly soulful.
Michael Ball and Alfie Boe are covers specialists. After four hit albums in six years, they have their own rules: the title must include the word Together, and no track should be considered too obvious. Christmas is coming! Time for some old chestnuts!
They duly trot out Viva Las Vegas, Luck Be A Lady, Just A Gigolo and Sway.
Only on American Trilogy do sparks fly, as Boe’s tenor rises to the challenge of matching Elvis’s glitzy grandeur.
The stream of cliches is interrupted by a pair of medleys, celebrating the very different styles of Frankie Valli and Tom Jones. If only Ball and Boe had mixed the two, they could have given us The Green Green Grease Of Home.