Jersey Roar

The Bruce Springsteen & E Street Band invasion of Dublin commences on Monday July 16 with Steve Van Zandt clearing airport immigration at 5pm and then Usain Bolting it to Tower Records in the city-centre for a special live edition of his Underground Garage radio how.

Cheered on by 300 adoring fans who’ve managed to blag themselves the necessary wristbands, Steve starts – appropriately enough given Saturday’s Hyde Park shenanigans – with The Beatles’ ‘I Saw Her Standing There’. 
“Can you believe they pulled the plug on Paul McCartney?” he rues with a shake of his bandana-d head. “I thought Sirs, being down with the Queen and everything, were allowed to rip it up pretty much when and where they want. We were just thinking ‘what song next?’ when, pow, the mics were killed! That ain’t gonna happen in Ireland. Curfews are there to be broken!”
This time there are no unseemly interruptions, just some quality dad dancing from Mr. V Z who also has some Them – “the greatest garage band of all time” – The Who, The Nazz, The Beach Boys and The Raspberries in his record bag. Underlining the fact that the show has featured 500 bands in its decade-long history, there’s also time for ‘Bolloxology’, a charming little ditty by Dubliners-living-in-Stockholm Sir Reg and stay at home reprobates The Urges’ ‘Fire Burning’, which was released Stateside on Steve’s Wicked Cool label.

Fast forward 16 hours to D2’s Merrion Hotel, where the pavement is overflowing with fans wanting to press Bruce & the E Street Band flesh ahead of tonight’s RDS opener. Hot Press is here to grab some more quality one-on-one time with Steve who’s especially keen to talk about the Underground Garage reaching double digits; the other acts besides Sir Reg and The Urges that Wicked Cool are championing and the success of Lilyhammer, the Norwegian/American ‘dramedy’ which finds him playing a Mafiosi, who looks and talks suspiciously like Sil from The Sopranos. Hell, his character, Giovanni Hendriksen, even has the same bouffant wig! First though, what song options were being discussed when the Westminster City Council killjoys did their Hyde Park worst?
“I was about to suggest ‘I’m Down’, which is one of my Beatles favourites, or maybe ‘Long Tall Sally’,” he reveals. “We had been ending with ‘10th Avenue Freeze Out’ so that was a consideration as well – would Paul play along with that or prefer to do one of his? Unfortunately it was a debate we didn’t get to push forward.”
Hot Press’ last meeting with Steve was shortly after The Sopranos had ended its six-season run – perhaps Hyde Park was Journey’s karmic revenge for the final episode’s premature curtailment of ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ – at which time he seemed to think his acting career was over. What happened between then and landing his Lilyhammer role?
“I’m in Bergen, Norway producing one of the bands on my label at the time, an all-girl outfit called The Cocktail Slippers from Oslo, and I get word that there’s a husband and wife writing team in the lobby who want to see me. I go, ‘Yeah, okay, I’ll have a word with them’. They say, ‘Listen, we have an idea. American gangster goes into witness relocation programme in Lillehammer, Norway’. I thought, ‘Terrific idea, I’m not sure I can resist that!’ I sat down and had a talk with myself: ‘What’s important to you? Showing what a versatile actor you are? No, I really couldn’t care less! What matters is the quality of the work and having fun while I do it’. I became one of the writers in order to keep it authentic and then one of the producers, so there was enough protection there to guarantee the quality.”
Actors sometimes talk of grieving for the characters they’ve played. Was Steve missing Silvio Dante to the point where he wanted to exhume him?
“Yeah,” he laughs, “I miss his clarity and sense of purpose, which is so consistent. Giovanni is quite different though – Silvio was literally the only guy in the show who didn’t want to be the boss. He was Tony Soprano’s best friend and his job was to keep him alive, as well as the business functioning. Sil was fairly conservative whereas Giovanni really is a boss and quite a bit wilder, more calculating and outwardly risk-taking. He doesn’t care about anything and the circumstances he’s in sets the show apart from The Sopranos, although if you like one you’ll probably like the other.”
998,000 people watched the first episode when it aired on NRK1 in January, making Lilyhammer the highest rated show in Norwegian TV history.
“Yeah, 20% of the population of Norway and 1.5 viewers too in America,” he enthuses, “which is what a successful homegrown cable show gets and with subtitles absolutely unprecedented. We knew the premise of Giovanni speaking Norwegian but not understanding it would work in Norway, but we weren’t so sure about the States. Anyway, Netflix – the first digital network and a very important player in the new market who have all the cable channels chasing them – chose Lilyhammer to be their first original programme. I said to the guy, ‘Are you sure you don’t want anything dubbed?’ but, no, they were happy to have it as is, which historically was a very big statement.”