Bossing it in the UK
Bruce Springsteen has become something of a national treasure in Britain — but it wasn’t always the case, says David Hepworth
David Hepworth
- David Hepworth
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I first met Bruce Springsteen one September night in 1984, in a backstage room in Philadelphia. He was delivered to a 20-minute meeting with me and a camera crew from the BBC music show The Old Grey Whistle Test with all the caution of a spy swap in East Berlin. He and his people were determined that this had to be a low-key reintroduction to the UK.
At the time he viewed England as the land of missed opportunity. He had visited London in 1975 and had been so bruised by the way he had been over-sold with the line “at last London is ready for Bruce Springsteen” that he could barely bring himself to think about a return.
The Whistle Test documentary, Born in the USA, which came out of our chat that night aired on 22 December 1984 and by February the following year the album of the same name was number one in the UK, from which you may deduce that the re-introduction worked.
While it might be an exaggeration to say that I made Bruce Springsteen a star, I don’t think it would be too much to claim that I played a significant role in making him a star in the UK. His management certainly thought so.
Impetuosity may be the mark of other rock stars, but Bruce Springsteen is essentially a cautious man. He even wrote a song with that title. His UK tour in 1985 was the first time he played outdoors. It had to be if it was to accommodate a dramatically expanded following in which his original zealots were soon outnumbered by the people who had been attracted by the video in which he danced with Courteney Cox. Brits punched the air, sang of baseball and the county line; in a few particularly distressing cases they even wore bandanas.
When I interviewed him again in New York in 1986 he was in no doubt that he now had what you might call a special relationship with his British audience. He had found that British fans, with their long record of having put in the hard yards with the music papers, were more likely to appreciate his determination to reach for all the erogenous zones of rock and roll, past as well as present. On that occasion he repaid the compliment by facing the camera in a T-shirt advertising a legendary British motorcycle.
I played a significant role in making him a star here’
At that time he was briefly in the cross-hairs of the celebrity magazines, having married the model Julianne Phillips. Six years later, when I interviewed him in Los Angeles, which was now his home, he had started a family with fellow musician Patti Scialfa and in answer to the obvious question said yes, he had undergone therapy. Here he had presumably discovered that it was good to talk. On that occasion he talked at such length that I had to tell him that I had enough, which would have been inconceivable ten years earlier. His manager asked afterwards if I was sure I’d got enough as Bruce had planned to take me for a drive. The fact that this didn’t happen remains one of my professional regrets.
Three years after that, when I visited him at the Brixton Academy, he said that nowadays his visits to London were as likely to be filled with trips with the kids to the Natural History Museum as the standard nightspots.
I never dreamed that 40 years later, those Whistle Test interviews would remain readily accessible in a million fragments on something called YouTube, or that in 2025 I would be interviewed in a moodily-lit Dalston warehouse for a BBC documentary in which he reflected on that apparently doomed first visit and his special relationship with the UK.
Being a member of the American generation whose whole life was turned around by seeing the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show 60 years earlier and just one of the thousands of teenagers who formed themselves into bands after the inspiring example of the Rolling Stones and the Animals, Springsteen has always felt he owed a special debt to the idiosyncratic island across the great ocean.
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When Bruce Springsteen Came to Britain is the story of how he came to repay it.
Authors
David Hepworth
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