When Bruce Springsteen reconvened The E Street Band in the summer of 1999, ten years after he had first broken up the party, there was much rejoicing but also certain nagging doubts as to what the future might hold.

With virtually no new material at their disposal, were they about to turn into a heritage rock’n’roll act like The Who or the Stones, always a blast to catch live on stage, but essentially trading on past glories?

The release of The Rising earlier this year, an impassioned and articulate response to September 11, has emphatically saved them from such a fate. Having topped the charts in both Britain and America, the album has sold well over a million copies in Europe, and this was the last of seven shows, one in each of seven European countries, all of which sold out in minutes.

Not only has The Rising revitalised Springsteen’s career but, from the moment The E Street Band burst into the title track at Wembley Arena last night, it was clear that it has also galvanised this extraordinary group to new heights of industry and achievement.

While the rhythm section and keyboard players have turned into mellow, middle-age fellows, the frontline musicians, guitarists Nils Lofgren and Steven van Zandt, singer and guitarist Patti Scialfa and saxophonist Clarence Clemons, exhibited plenty of the old buccaneering spirit as they powered through a typically anthemic sequence of Lonesome Day and No Surrender.

Springsteen looked lean and hungry in his dark jeans and sweat-soaked workshirt, his face a little more crumpled than before as he strained to imbue the notes with a sincerity sufficient to forestall any suspicion that he might be going through the motions.

A performance of Empty Sky, in which Springsteen’s keening falsetto was entwined in an eerie harmony by Scialfa, was followed by a sad, simple reading of You’re Missing, providing the show with a centrepiece that was the very antithesis of the bluster that these huge arena events usually tend to encourage.

But there is something of the huckster in Springsteen as well, and although we were spared the homespun monologues that were his stock-in-trade, there were times when he worked the audience as ruthlessly as Robbie Williams, skidding down on his knees and even achieving a somewhat arthritic leap on top of Roy Bittan’s piano during Mary’s Place.

There was a rather perfunctory version of The River and a tendency to play too many songs at a similar tempo and emotional pitch, which caused the show’s pacing to sag during the latter stages. But a string of encores including Dancing in the Dark and Born to Run, played with the houselights up, ended the proceedings on a suitably rousing note.

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