From up in the stands we watch them punching the air, arms flung towards the stage, like salmon leaping upstream. Manchester, Old Trafford, about 60,000 people crammed into a football stadium on a drizzly Wednesday evening to watch Bruce Springsteen. I have smuggled in a small bottle of brandy, concealed in my brassiere, and my friend and I are numb-lipped and giddy surveying the scene below: a family of three dancing to No Surrender with fists aloft and jumpers tied round their waists, and a man in a leather jacket twirling around and around and around on the wet ground.
Later, standing down before the stage with the sky a greenish-blue and the rain freckling our faces and Springsteen skimming from Born to Run to Rosalita to Dancing in the Dark, my friend turns to me and says: "I have never been happier than right now this minute." From the stage, the Boss is yelling out at the crowd: "Meet the house-rockin', pants-droppin', earth-shakin', hard-rockin', booty-shakin', love-makin', heart-breakin', soul-cryin' and, yes, death-defyin' legendary E Street Band!" And the distant slopes of the stadium echo back: "E Street Band!" He is a man shouting at mountains.
Springsteen has the curious power to make an arena seem no bigger than the back room of a pub; he is a bottle labelled Drink Me. And though the gestures he makes are larger than life, they can seem surprisingly intimate. You know, of course, that this is performance, spectacle, impeccable showmanship - that the written requests from the front row, so nonchalantly shoved in his jeans' back pocket, pay homage to the cover of Born in the USA; and that the seemingly spontaneous sprints across the length of the stage are largely contrived for the cameras that beam his every move up on to ginormous screens behind him - but the thing about Springsteen is that you still believe him, for he is the god of small things.
This is a strangely rare trait in live music, be it played in stadium or scrotty bar. It can be hard, sometimes, to escape the nagging suspicion that the performer up there on the great stage before you is 80ft tall and revelling in his grandness, in being the biggest person in the room. On those occasions it is easy to believe that bands are merely making grand gestures, delivering the same broad-stroked set, the same banter, the same well-rehearsed crowd-surfing, beer-spitting, blood-spurting enormous rock-out that they presented last night in Nottingham and tomorrow in Brighton. And as you stand in the audience feeling somewhat disorientated by scale, the performers cavorting about so hugely, the Brobdingnags of rock'n'roll, gurning and aw-shucksing and telling the crowd how very grateful they are to be there, how much they love this city, and what a truly amazing crowd you are, the room about you seems to balloon to twice its size.
In the last year I have seen venues reduced to the size of a teaspoon: I think about AA Bondy, third on the bill at the Luminaire last December, stomping the floor in an electrifying rendition of John the Revelator. I think of the Felice Brothers howling and hollering through Frankie's Gun at the 100 Club two weeks ago, of Bon Iver stilling the room at the Social with The Wolves; I think about Laura Marling, her voice falling cool and crisp and clear on the audience of the Soho Revue Bar. They rendered those rooms "so infinitesimally scaled" as Seamus Heaney says, "we could stream through the eye of a needle".
And I think that this is what truly great performance is really about: the process of condensation. With so many bands, so much of their act is mere flouncy evaporation, pale vapour rising worthlessly into the night air. But when Springsteen takes to the stage, somehow he succeeds in distilling the venue, the audience, the music itself - he boils an entire stadium down to its very essence.
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