On the afternoon of November 18, 1975, Bruce Springsteen was being driven across West London. As he gazed out of the car window, his mood was as bleak and unsettled as the gun-grey sky shrouding the city. He was enduring an attack of nerves: that night, he was due to play his first ever show to an audience outside of America. Back home, his third album, Born To Run, released three months earlier, had been his breakthrough and was on its way to selling a million copies by the end of that year. But Springsteen’s American strongholds were still confined to his native East Coast, on down into Texas and at a last outpost in Phoenix, Arizona. Everywhere else – and most of all in his own mind – he still had it all to prove.
Prior to Born To Run achieving lift-off, he had endured six, seven years of hard labour, flogging the club and bar circuit up and down the New Jersey shoreline. He’d had periods of being penniless and destitute, and his first two albums for Columbia Records had sunk without trace. No doubt Springsteen’s iron will had been a contributory factor to the recent upswing in his fortunes, but more than that, it was the sweat-forged reputation he had made for himself as a formidable, transfixing live performer that had marked him out.
