To get myself ‘in the mood’, I dug out some of my old American albums for a listen before I left for the States. There are some songs that immediately transport you back somewhere, and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born to Run’ is one of those for me. It was September 1976, in a new friend’s room in the Goodhart Building, Logic Lane. ‘Born to Run’ was on the turntable and, for the first time, I read the lyrics on the cover and realised that Springsteen was, like Dylan, singing poetry. I still think that, thirty-four years on. It’s a towering piece of work. Indeed, the whole album is magnificent; a brilliant flash of America’s rich seam of romanticism: ‘In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream/At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines/Sprung from cages out on highway 9,/Chrome wheeled, fuel injected/and steppin’ out over the line/Baby this town rips the bones from your back/It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap/We gotta get out while we’re young/’Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run…’