Music interview '“ Little Steven

As the bandana-wearing guitarist in Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and an actor in the highly regarded TV mobster dramas The Sopranos and Lilyhammer, Steven Van Zandt has enjoyed the kind of career that many musicians would envy.

For all his success Van Zandt nonetheless belatedly realised he’d been neglecting an important aspect of his creative life – as a songwriter and frontman in his own right.

His new album, Soulfire, is the first to be released under his solo moniker ‘Little Steven’ in 18 years. A corresponding tour with his band, The Disciples of Soul, brings him to Leeds Academy in November.

“I had got busy acting, and the acting was a whole new craft to learn once I went from The Sopranos to Lilyhammer, I started co-writing, I started co-producing, I did the score and then I actually directed the final episode, and that combined with the E Street Band touring a bit more often before you know it 20 years went by and I didn’t really realise it,” says the 66-year-old. “And I wouldn’t have realised it if it wasn’t for this crazy promoter, Leo Green.

“At the end of European tour last summer he said, ‘When are you coming back to London?’ I said, ‘Maureen, my wife, and I are coming back for Bill Wyman’s 80th birthday’ and he said, ‘That’s the same week as my blues festival, why don’t you throw a band together and play it?’ And I said I hadn’t done that in 25 years, let’s give it a shot, it sounds like fun. So I threw a band together, we started rehearsing, we did like 20 songs. It was the first time I’d played my own music in literally 20 years and I thought, ‘Wow, there’s something fascinating about this that I hadn’t realised’.

“Through the years it sort of had become its own genre, this soul-meets-rock-thing that I started with Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes and I carried it into my first solo album, so I decided to return to that sound which I had basically abandoned and gone on to other things, that bigger sound with the horns.

“Last year I did an album with Darlene Love which was also a big-sounding record, with strings and background vocals and horns, so I had returned to that sound for her album and I just continued it with this album. I really found it to be satisfying, quite original and uniquely me. I had managed to find my own niche here, I’m going to stick with it now and see where it evolves because I never have pursued it all these years.

“It was the combination of the revelation of discovering that I had created my own genre and it was being neglected and I’m going to correct that over the next few years.”

Van Zandt sees Soulfire as a “reintroduction and in some ways an introduction” of himself to the listening public. “I was able to do covers – first of all covering myself, I covered songs I’d written for other people – but also it was a chance to show my roots which I’d never really done before. I put a blues song on a record for the first time, the Etta James song [Blues is My Business], I did the doo-wop song [The City Never Sleeps], some of the more cinematic influences of Ennio Morricone and blaxploitation. I’d never done a cover song before in my life, so doing a James Brown song and Etta James, it was a unique opportunity.”

The City Never Sleeps had been around in unfinished form for over three decades. “That song had just remained in my head,” says Van Zandt. “It was going to be on my first solo album when the concept was going to be the chronological history of rock ’n’ roll but instead my first record turned into a political lying-in-a-bed-of-fire, announcing my political work that was to come.”

He’s pleased he managed to finish it. “It’s a unique genre, doo-wop. There’s an innocence required. You’re only innocent once and it’s difficult to get one’s mind back into that era – which was before my era, it was actually before my consciousness. I’ve always loved that genre and I’ve studied it and I was able to get my head back into it to complete the song, which I’m quite proud of. Simple as it seems, it’s actually quite difficult to pull that off with authenticity.”

Unlike records such as Voice of America and his anti-apartheid anthem Sun City, Soulfire avoids politics almost altogether. Van Zandt says he felt that with politics omnipresent in recent times there was scope for him to do something different. “In the beginning, in the 80s, nobody was talking about politics in America and I really felt an obligation to do it. Everybody thought Ronald Reagan was God and I didn’t. I thought there was a lot of criminal activity going on internationally that nobody knew about and I felt obligated as a citizen to point it out but now I have no need whatsoever to explain Donald Trump, he explains himself every single day, so it was quite a liberating moment in time to make my first non-political album with no guilt whatsoever.”

It seems Van Zandt and Springsteen, whose band he first joined in 1975, now have an agreement that will allow him to do his own tours in alternate years while devoting winters to TV projects. “We did have a conversation and he assured me we were going to take the year off so I thought, ‘OK, I will trust you’,” the guitarist chuckles, adding: “By the way he said the same thing last year and we ended up doing a ten-month tour.

“But this year I felt he really did mean it so I figured let’s take advantage of that and not only put the record out but tour as much as we can and I’m going to keep going until that phone call comes.

“I knew he was going to do a solo thing on Broadway so I figured that is safe, he’s going to commit to that, he can’t drop that in the middle so it was a safe moment.”

Many Springsteen fans may believe the song Bobby Jean to be about his longtime friendship with Van Zandt. The guitarist is unsure. “I don’t know, I never asked him,” he says. Nevertheless he agrees they’ve had an innate understanding from an early age. “We bonded immediately by having rock ’n’ roll basically as our religion and we felt totally saved by it.

“I think we both were complete misfits, outcasts, freaks, that did not fit in anywhere. If it hadn’t been for rock ’n’ roll I don’t know what would have become of us. Everybody else in the neighbourhood who had a choice took it, whether to go to college or get a job, go work with your father’s job or the military or join sports or something, but we really had nowhere to go. Luckily rock ’n’ roll came along just in time to save our lives and we felt that way right from the beginning, even though it was a real long shot to make a living doing it – it’s even harder now but even then it wasn’t easy – so we immediately became very close.”

Van Zandt was touched by Springsteen’s compliments in his autobiography. “It was very good, very well done, very well written. It was really quite a nice surprise, he sort of surprised everybody with it. I guess he’d been working on it for several years but nobody really knew, so it was nice.”

Van Zandt’s appearance as Silvio Dante in the HBO drama The Sopranos was his first ever acting role.

He says he relished bringing the character to life. “The challenge of learning a new craft was nothing but fun for me,” he says. “Of course you never stop learning but that one craft turned into multiple crafts on Lilyhammer. I was able to co-write it, co-produce it, do the score and even direct the final episode so suddenly a whole new world opened up on multiple levels.

“I couldn’t have gone to a better school than The Sopranos as far as David Chase, the greatest writer and producer in history – or one of them – and the cast. It was just a wonderful opportunity and I was very lucky.”

Van Zandt has also branched out into radio broadcasting, and now runs two internet stations. He sees himself in a kind of conservator’s role. “It was preservation. I turned on the radio one day and I couldn’t relate to it any more and I was like ‘What happened to the greatest music ever made? It’s no longer accessible, it has to be accessible to future generations’, so I started the radio show which is still on in 140 countries and that turned into two different channels on Sirius Satellite – one of which is the rock’n’roll station The Underground Garage and the other is the country station called Outlaw Country. Both of the formats basically play things that nobody else plays, which happens to be the greatest music ever made. I felt it was very important for future generations to be able to hear the British Invasion, to hear album tracks from The Yardbirds and The Kinks, and to hear the Ramones and The Clash, The Chiffons and The Shirelles, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. All these things need to be accessible at all times, so they’re on 24-hour rotation on my rock station. In my two-hour weekly syndicated show, which I’ve been trying to get on the BBC for 15 years, one of these days I hope we’ll get there.”

Little Steven and The Disciples of Soul play at O2 Academy Leeds on November 8. littlesteven.com