Bruce Springsteen: From My Home to Yours Radio 2
Pick of the Week; Sean Cooney: Radio 4
HE had me at: “Greetings E Street nation, friends, family and listeners from coast to coast. Today we are celebrating the working man and woman, all the folks that keep our world spinning round and round.”
I had been moments from retuning my radio to escape an exceedingly long jingle which turned out to be Aaron Copland’s `Fanfare for the Common Man’.
He lost me seconds later by immediately following up with Roy Orbison’s `Working for the Man’, segueing into `Working on the Highway’ by Joe Ely – the `singer-songwriter-rocker’ part of his CV drowned out to my ears by his “outta Texas” tempo.
And, despite its title, the honky-tonk strains of “Working Woman” failed to win me over.
When I settled down to a night with rock legend Bruce Springsteen from his New Jersey home, the last thing I was expecting was a playlist from a Fermanagh wedding.
So I was unprepared for the thumping bass of Public Enemy exhorting us to `Fight the Power’ or the insistent disco beat of Donna Summer’s `She Works Hard for the Money’.
Once I got over the initially jarring, I was glad to have stuck with what turned into actually a perfect hour of radio.
These are polarised times when everyone is competing so hard to be heard they don’t take the time to listen.
Outside Springsteen’s clearly eclectic record collection I doubt any other music lover owns records by all the bands he featured and to the casual listener there is nothing linking them.
And yet they had everything in common as songs which tell of the graft of the worker to eke out a life for themselves and their families.
Some were a celebration, some a denunciation. Bitter frustration and idealisation to the point of caricature butted up against each other but ultimately found common ground.
No mean feat considering they had been handpicked by the most famous Boss of them all.
Working in 2020 has yet to be immortalised in song as far as I am aware.
It has presented challenges, not least for many maintaining some semblance of professionalism while juggling childcare and home schooling.
So of course Pick of the Week had to include the valiant but ultimately doomed efforts of a radio newscaster to finish a bulletin while his toddler shouted into the microphone.
