Bruce Springsteen’s marathon concerts are a treat for his fans, but Sir Paul McCartney has joked that they are maddening for fellow musicians.
“The Boss”, as Springsteen is known, set such a precedent by performing gigs that last for up to four hours that audiences now expect all music legends to do the same, Sir Paul has suggested.
He recalled that the Beatles would often do a half-hour set in their early days, sharing a bill with various artists.
“These days, pretty much there’s a main act and there might be a warm-up act. Then [the 1960s] it was a lot of people on the bill because nobody did long.
“Now people will do three or four hours. I blame Bruce Springsteen. I’ve told him so. I said, ‘It’s your fault, man!’”
Asked on Conan O’Brien’s Needs A Friend podcast if Springsteen had “ruined it” for everybody, Sir Paul joked: “He did!”
When Sir Paul headlined Glastonbury last year - the oldest artist to do so, at 80 - his set lasted nearly three hours, featuring 36 of his hits.
But that pales next to Springsteen’s longest ever concert. The US star and his E Street Band performed for four hours and six minutes in Helsinki in 2012 as part of The River Tour.
Speaking to O’Brien, Sir Paul said: “You can’t now do an hour. We used to do a half-hour, that was the Beatles’ thing. Half an hour, and we got paid for it.
“I tried to work out, why was it so short? Well, because there were a lot of people on the bill. I think, if you were a comedian, the promoter would say, ‘How long can you do? Four minutes?’ The guy would say yes, so they would do four, and so we thought, ‘Well, half an hour - that’s epic.’
“That was it. A big Beatles show, we were on and off like that. It didn’t seem strange.”
In 2020, Springsteen appeared on O’Brien’s podcast and spoke about the brevity of the Beatles’ sets. Discussing the fact that they often played half-hour shows, Springsteen laughed: “That wasn’t so bad. We screwed the whole thing up by playing too f---ing long. Now I have to do it.”
O’Brien told him: “If you do three hours and 50 minutes and then leave, people want their money back.”