Redemption through rock and roll

‘I’m the President, but he’s the Boss’, Barack Obama declared a couple of years ago, and most Spectator readers will know Bruce Springsteen as the President’s celebrity pop star friend. (One of the first of the many pleasures Peter Ames Carlin’s book affords is the story of how Springsteen came byhis nickname: he was a ruthless player of ‘Cut-throat’ Monopoly.)

Bruce Springsteen is much more than a celebrity, and Carlin’s book far from a dispiriting celebrity hagiography. Although written with the full co-operation of Springsteen himself, it pulls no punches in describing the singer’s faults and weaknesses, cruelties and mistakes. To his fans he can do no wrong (other than that awful video for Dancing in the Dark), but so driven a performer requires a robust ego. His temper is short and his judgment swift, and before his marriages he was a disagreeably jealous lover.

He admits to too much self-analysis, and yet his songs are invariably narrated either by a fictionalised first person or are about others.