Springsteen: I rarely see my bandmates – we’ve seen each other enough

“The louder you can talk, the better, because I’ve played rock and roll for 50 years.”

Bruce Springsteen has just E Street Shuffled into the room. Uncannily charismatic, he carries the practised ease of someone who knows the destabilising effect their presence can have on regular people.

He takes time to greet every member of the BBC’s film crew individually, then breaks the ice with a joke about a journalist who mistakenly called him “Springstein”. That reminds me of a local radio DJ in Belfast who always used to introduce him as “Bruce Springsprong”.

“Really?” he laughs. “Well, I’ve been called worse.”

In fact, we’ve been pre-warned that he doesn’t like being called The Boss – the nickname coined in the early days of his career with The E Street Band, when he’d be responsible for collecting and distributing the takings after a show.

“I hate being called ‘Boss’,” he told Creem magazine in 1980. “Always did, from the beginning. I hate bosses. I hate being called the boss.”

The term is conspicuously absent from his new Disney+ documentary, Road Diary, which charts the process of putting together Springsteen’s first tour since the pandemic – from handwritten notebooks to footage of his band “shaking off the cobwebs” after six years apart.

At times, the preparations lack the rigour you might expect.

“It’s all a little bit casual,” frets Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen’s guitarist and one of his oldest friends, after the star calls time on rehearsals.

“There’s a certain percentage [of songs] that we’re gonna [screw] up anyway,” Springsteen retorts.

“That’s what they’re paying for. They want to see it live. That means a few mistakes!”

If you’ve caught any of the star’s recent shows, you’ll know the stakes are never that high. The band are tighter than a tourniquet. Mistakes are noticeably absent.

The documentary comes exactly 60 years after Springsteen’s first gig, playing an $18 guitar with a band called The Rogues.

He’s never let anyone film the inner workings of his shows before, so why do it on this tour?

“Well, because I could be dead by the next one,” he laughs.

“I’m 75 years old now. I’ve decided that the waiting-to-do-things part of my life is over.”

“We’re closer to the end than we are to the beginning,” agrees Van Zandt, “but the point of this tour was that we’re not going out quietly, man.

“We’re going to balance that mortality with vitality.

That philosophy was fully on display at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light in May, when Springsteen braved torrential rain to play for three hours to 50,000 drenched fans.

The weather was so brutal that Springsteen lost his voice. Doctors ordered him not to sing for a week, forcing him to postpone several shows.

What made him continue?

“Well, I’m there to have a good time,” he says. “I’m going to insist on it, whether it’s raining or the sun is shining – because I’m there for the people that are there.

“I look out and I go, ‘These are my people. These are the people who’ve listened to my music for the past 30 or 40 years. I’m going to do the best show I possibly can’, you know?

“It sounds corny, but you have to love your audience and, for the most part, I’ve never found that hard to do.”