With excitement in her voice, Chadha details the first time she met Springsteen in 2010, saying, " were on the red carpet, like proper fans and as Bruce came in, everyone was cheering.
Who wrote blinded by the light movie#
The movie (enthusiastically) nods to the dedicated Springsteen fanbase, which Chadha is also a part of. The movie is based on the 2007 memoir Greetings From Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock 'n' Roll by Sarfraz Manzoor, who is the film's co-writer and a bonafide Bruce superfan.
As director Gurinder Chadha explains, yes, Blinded By The Light is a Bruce Springsteen movie, but it's so much more than that it's about wanting a better world.īlinded By The Light takes the universal themes of Springsteen's music - a prisoner of his hometown, the son of a disapproving father, a dream chaser - and weaves them into Javed's specific story. Transcending location and time, Springsteen's songs charge the film, but it's a bigger message that takes center stage. Springsteen's lyrics hit home for the aspiring writer, serving as a soundtrack to his inner-most feelings and prompting him to confront his fears. Javed Khan (Viveik Kalra), a teenage Pakistani Muslim living in Luton, England, in the late '80s, becomes transfixed on The Boss.
But it's also possible the perception of a lyric deemed too risque for radio did the trick."If dreams came true, oh wouldn't that be nice." Bruce Springsteen's 1978 lyric quickly resonated with Blinded By The Light's protagonist. By then, Springsteen had his breakthrough with Born to Run, and the connection probably helped its commercial prospects.
This time he took a Springsteen song all the way to No. It, too, flopped, as a single, but Mann tried again with "Blinded by the Light" a year later for The Roaring Silence. In 2018, Mann told Louder Sound that a DJ in Philadelphia recommended Greetings, which led to him and his Earth Band to record "Spirit in the Night" on 1975's Nightingales & Bombers. Still, the verbosity of "Blinded by the Light" and much of Greetings drew comparisons to Bob Dylan at a time when every talented wordsmith with an acoustic guitar, including such luminaries as John Prine and Loudon Wainwright III, was hailed as a "New Dylan." While that tag was an albatross around the neck for many up-and-coming singer-songwriters, including Springsteen, it also proved somewhat fortuitous in the form of Manfred Mann, who had a few big hits in the U.K. 23, 1973, more than a month after the album came out, "Blinded by the Light" failed to chart. Even though it was deemed commercial enough to be released as a single on Feb. In his autobiography Born to Run, Springsteen wrote that he composed "Blinded by the Light" late in the process, after Columbia Records head Clive Davis heard nothing on Greetings that would work on the radio ("Spirit in the Night" was also penned at this time). Watch Bruce Springsteen Break Down 'Blinded by the Light' "I wanted to do things I hadn't done and see things i hadn't seen." "I wanted to get blinded by the light," he said. The chorus, Springsteen added, presaged the escapist themes that would launch him to stardom a few years later on Born to Run. As for the rest, "Don't overthink the whole thing." His scope is expanded in the next verse, where he described how New Jersey was still stuck in the late '60s, with a cat-and mouse game played between campus radicals (" Some hazard from Harvard") and FBI agents (" Scotland Yard was trying hard"). Hope arrived in the bridge, where playing music in bars put him in contact with a "silicone sister" - which Springsteen believed could be the first reference to breast implants in pop music history - and then " little Early-Pearly came by in her curly-wurly and asked me if I needed a ride." "That's self-explanatory," Springsteen deadpanned. The second and third verses were about sexual frustration, not being liked by girlfriends' fathers and dances at the YMCA where the chaperone would make sure nothing remotely sexual happened. He set the song on the boardwalks of the Jersey Shore by referencing a merry-go-round and calliope. Springsteen then broke down the track, the opener and first single from his 1973 debut Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. The "madman drummer" mentioned in the opening line was drummer Vini "Mad Dog" Lopez the Indians were Springsteen's Little League team.