Interview vom 19.04.2001 / BBC Radio 2
Neue Springsteen CD "Live in New York City

Bruce Springsteen Talks to Radio 2 BBC

By Mark Hagen
Executive Producer BBC Music Entertainment

When was the last time you popped into your local record shop, and found one of the world's biggest rock stars serving behind the counter? Well that's what happened last week in Red Bank, New Jersey when Bruce Springsteen decided to check out the midnight opening of Jack's, kitted out for the first sales of his new album Live In New York City. Arriving alone & unannounced, Springsteen spent a couple of hours chatting, signing autographs, and making mobile phone calls to disbelieving recipients before slipping away as quietly and unfussily as he had arrived. 

"Yeah, it was fun, it was a good time" he recalls with a broad smile. "You're not having extended conversations with these people, but it was a chance to say hi and to thank them for all their support over the years". 

It's hard to imagine, says, Rod Stewart doing the same thing, but then Springsteen has always worked by his own rules, building an unique community of trust between himself and his audience. That reached some sort of peak over the last two years during a global tour with the much beloved E Street Band. Bruce hadn't worked with them for the best part of two decades, but it was a triumphant return, culminating in a ten night stand at Madison Square Garden from which the live album - and an stunning concert film - is taken. And it's this that's brought him into New York City for a single European Radio interview. A tanned & muscular 51, two gold hoops glinting in his left ear, Springsteen is in cheerful and expansive mood, chuckling at the hapless producer who has just asked him if he wouldn't mind making his answers a little shorter - "Man! That was hard..." - drinking cold beer, gossiping about The Sopranos and explaining why he finally decided to bring the E Street Band back together. 

"It's very unusual to be working with the same people that you were working with when you were 19. Most people don't have that experience, to still be working with people that you grew up with, that you had so many basic and big experiences with. And I was turning 50 and I wanted to see where we could take it, what we could do with it". 

Those experiences included making one of the biggest selling albums of all time in 1984's Born In The USA, a record that spawned innumerable hit singles and turned Springsteen, for a while at least, into the most recognisable rock star on the planet. He acknowledges that this latest tour could simply have been an exercise in easy nostalgia, but is at pains to point out that it wasn't. 

And there were, of course, new songs to sing. Of the two that crop up on Live In New York City, the classic is the haunting American Skin (41 Shots). It's based on the accidental killing in 1999 of Armadou Diallo, a West African immigrant, shot 41 times by New York police officers, who later claimed in their defence that they mistook the wallet he was holding for a gun. It's also a song that got Springsteen into a lot of trouble, with police organisations calling for boycotts of his concerts and one in particular going so far as to call him "some type of dirtbag" and a "floating fag". 

Other aspects of the tour were less controversial. Springsteen and his wife Patti Scialfa - who sings & plays guitar with her husband - have three children under 10 and this was their first opportunity to really see what Dad does for a living. 

"My kids are young, so they're just starting to get a feeling for it . It's a combination really - sometimes it's exciting, sometimes it's an intrusion, sometimes it just looks to them like you're showing off!"

With a new studio album in progress, Bruce is looking to the future, but he's still in touch with those youthful feelings & fantasies that drove him on as a teenager and it's that spirit which still gives his work a tremendous vitality today.