On entering Steven Van Zandt's hotel suite, the thought that springs to mind is that the singer has just been visited by the Changing Rooms team. It is difficult to believe that any member of the Langham staff is responsible for the psychedelic throws that cover every available surface.
Or for the cinnamon-scented candles that sit on the coffee table just down from a pair of crucifixes. "I like to take a little bit of the homestead with me," Van Zandt explains, after setting fire to a Marlboro Light. "You've got to when you travel as much as I do." The 49-year-old has spent a good deal of his adult life living out of a suitcase, either as a member of Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, or as a politically minded solo artist, whose itinerary could easily feature playing a gig one day and addressing the US Senate the next.
This year finds him busier than ever, thanks to an E Street reunion tour and his recent solo record, Born Again Savage. This is not to mention his role as a nightclub owner in the acclaimed TV gangster series The Sopranos, which returns for a second series on Channel 4 next week. Van Zandt's portrayal of the roguish, Al Pacino-impersonating Silvio Dante is one of the show's highlights, even if the singer-turned-thespian himself is happy to give most of the credit to the lush hairpiece that he wears on screen.
"Yeah, I always say that the hair's doing most of the acting. But I did a lot of research. I re-read all the books, re-watched all the movies back to Public Enemy. I found out where the Mob guys shopped for clothes." And has he received any feedback from real-life Mobsters? "Well, not directly, luckily." No horses' heads in the Van Zandt bed, then? "No. You hear things. I read that the FBI ran a wire tap on Mob guys talking about The Sopranos. They gave it good reviews, fortunately."
Van Zandt is a native of New Jersey, where The Sopranos is set. As a music-loving teenager, he was expelled from high school because of his long hair. "I got thrown out of the house, too. My parents' attitude was, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna be the Beatles? Are you gonna be the Rolling Stones? And, if you thought about it, it was a long shot."
Despite such doubts, he kept on playing the New Jersey live circuit, often in cahoots with a young singer-songwriter named Bruce Springsteen. "Sometimes I'd be the guitar-player in his band," he says. "Sometimes he'd be the rhythm guitar-player in mine." In 1975, Springsteen asked Van Zandt, known then as Little Steven, to become a fully fledged member of his backing band. For the next half decade they toured and recorded with increasing success.
Bearing in mind the egomaniacal nature of rock 'n' roll, it seems strange that Van Zandt was happy working as a sideman for so long. "Yeah, but that shouldn't be confused with a lack of egomania," he grins. "I'm very much an egomaniac - let's get that straight right now. I'm egotistical in the sense that I have high standards. But I don't like being in the spotlight. That's just the way my ego functions."
The event that persuaded the singer to move stage centre occurred during the E Street Band's first proper tour of Europe, in 1981. "This kid in Germany came up to me and said, 'Why are you putting missiles in our country?' I said, 'I'm a guitar-player. Last time I looked I'm not putting missiles anywhere.'
"But the thought stayed in my mind. I realised, once you leave America, you're no longer a Republican or a Democrat or a guitar-player. You're an American. Believe it or not, this had never occurred to me before. And I realised, maybe that does carry some responsibilities, and I wonder what else I'm doing besides putting missiles in this guy's country.
"You know, we're brought up thinking we're the kings of democracy, and it was all bullshit. We were supporting every military fascist dictator in the world. So that's when I left the group and decided to get into politics." Van Zandt spent most of the Eighties campaigning for a variety of causes, most memorably leading an anti-apartheid "Sun City" project. He also set about recording five thematic solo albums, which covered such subjects as economics, the state and the family (Born Again Savage is the belated final part of that quintet).
Presumably, there were people in the music business who suggested that these idiosyncratic career moves might not be such a good idea. "How about everybody!" he laughs. "But I just had to do it." By the start of the Nineties, Van Zandt found himself a musician very much out of time. "My record company said, rock's really dead. It's over. I said, well, this is what I do, man. I don't care what's fashionable. So I started producing other people's records.
"And that's when [Sopranos creator] David Chase called and asked me all of a sudden to be an actor. And I thought, well, maybe that's destiny."
