SOUND OUT No-one applauds when you finish writing a book T

HERE are celebrities who strive to look different when not on stage. Perhaps a disguise is needed if they’re to have anything like a normal life.

For Bruce Springsteen his look of jeans, workman’s boots and a T-shirt, sometimes with a checked shirt, has remained a constant. It’s not particularly showy stage wear, and it’s pretty easy to replicate every day. The crucial thing with New Jersey’s favourite son (sorry Jon Bon Jovi) is that his de facto uniform gives away more than a desire to be comfortable.

His outfit of choice, between construction-site foreman and docker, goes hand in hand with the subject matter that occupies much of his work; the plight of the American working class, blue collar workers – the man and woman on the street in ‘real America’, and the struggle to find something meaningful in an otherwise humdrum existence.

A-listers often merely strive to look normal. Bruce IS normal, and has made it one of his career’s defining traits.

He’s in the UK to promote his autobiography, Born To Run, which shares a name with one of his most famous songs and biggest-selling albums.

There’s plenty to be learned, but it’s no warts-and-all account, out of respect for those involved, he says, and he’s typically selfdeprecating about his prose, as he is his songwriting.

“A hard-working journeyman,” he says of his ability, his voice perfectly grizzled.

Hard-working journeymen don’t sell 120 million albums over five decades. They don’t pull in millions of fans around the world with famously long, communal concerts. Put any of his accolades to the man himself, and he clams up.

Coming hot on the heels of the news that Bob Dylan had been awarded a Nobel Prize for literature, ‘The Boss’, as he hates being called, is under no illusions that the Swedish organisation will knock on his door any time soon.

“Bob is certainly a poet,” he offers. “We came from a lot of different influences, but in the book I call him the father of my country, and that’s how I feel about him.”

Despite his own success and accolades, Bruce talks about the likes of Dylan, The Beatles and Van Morrison with reverence, both in person and in the book. The 67-year-old is seven or eight years younger than those titans, and It’s a typically modest Bruce Springsteen that greets as they discuss his best-selling autobiography, depression and why he made sure his wife and kids got to read his memoir first when they were blazing a trail and write about. I tried to write about it received, so I miss that crowning he was home with his parents, somewhat humorously. But a lot glory, I think.” dreaming of playing guitar for a of people have to deal with it, and Bruce admits he needed a bit of living, that age-gap mattered. I’ve had a long history of it in my nagging to get on with the job – Perfectly illustrating the point is family. until something finally clicked how he recounts the time he met “(Depression) kind of came and he got into more of a routine Dylan, not just roughly, but down down, and picked off certain with it. to the particular date, after a show people here and there, cousins Whatever that motivation, it on Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. and aunts and uncles and my wasn’t a desire to set the record There is one area Bruce touches father very particularly. It did get straight. on for the first time, which is the passed on to me, although not as “The record is whatever it is,” he depression that seems to have extremely as he had to deal with.” says. “It is a combination of all the dogged him since his youth, most Bruce says writing the book gave things that people have written seriously after worldwide smash him a similar feeling to one of his about you, good and bad, you hit Born In The USA in 1984. gigs, although “no one is applauding know? I didn’t have a bone to pick “My depression was spewing when you finish writing, like or anything, it was just setting like an oil spill over the beautiful they are when you finish a song”. down my experience. turquoise green gulf of my “But it is satisfying,” he adds. “Initially, I didn’t even think I carefully planned existence,” “The entire thing I did over a was writing a book, it was he writes in the book. period of seven years, and I miss something that maybe my kids “If you’re writing a book like getting to perform something, I would enjoy referring to at some this, one of the agreements with just have to wait to see how it’s point. Then I thought it had more insight about me, so that if you were a fan, you might find it informative too. Then I wanted it to be entertaining, of course, I wanted it to be kind of funny and something that was enjoyable to read. Those were my only goals.” He talks about the difficult relationship with his father, his tough upbringing, the relative failure of his early career and his first wife, Julianne Phillips. But the hardest bit to write was about the present – parts that include his wife Patti Scialfa, whom he married in 1991, their children and friends. “I read my kids the things I wrote about them so they would feel comfortable with it. Patti and I, of course, discussed that section, I wanted to make sure she was comfortable with everything. “She didn’t change anything,” he adds. “She wasn’t necessarily comfortable with everything, and some of the things I wasn’t comfortable with myself... but she gave me a lot of room to express myself and I appreciate it. “I was trying to write as insightfully as I could, and deliver, on the page, what I feel we’ve tried to deliver at my shows for 40-plus years.” Born To Run by Bruce Springsteen, is published by Simon & Schuster, priced £20. Bruce Springsteen on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs is available on iPlayer now. your reader is you’re going to open up your life,” he says today.

“I don’t talk about all of myself, or everything I’ve done, you know, but you do have to show the reader your mind.

“And so, that’s been a big part of my life, since I was very, very young. It was a very natural thing to