Skip to main content

Bruce Springsteen changed my life… and so did my best friend Amolak

Sarfraz Manzoor was a teenager in Luton when he met a friend for life and discovered his musical hero. Now that fateful encounter is the subject of a major film

We were just kids. The first time I met Amolak was in autumn 1987. I was 16 and starting my first week at Luton sixth form college. My father worked on the production line at the Vauxhall car factory, my mother was a seamstress working from home and I was expected to get a stable, sensible job, have an arranged marriage and lead a quietly respectful life in obscurity. That isn’t how life turned out.

When I first ran into Amolak he had his headphones on, and when I asked what he was listening to he told me it was Bruce Springsteen. When I queried his music taste he told me Bruce was a direct line to all that was true in this world. He then handed me some cassettes and instructed me to educate myself. The music I heard changed my life. It first turned me into a confirmed Springsteen fan and it then inspired me to follow my dreams and become a writer – a journey I described in my 2007 memoir Greetings from Bury Park – and now I am a screenwriter of a film adaptation of the book.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2SNwqPh

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Degrees of separation: what connects Seinfeld to Steve Bannon?

From the US sitcom to the far-right rabble rouser, we go down the rabbit hole, thanks to the arrival of Jerry’s show on Netflix Seinfeld All 180 episodes of the 90s’ most misanthropic sitcom have arrived on Netflix, but not everyone is happy. Some viewers have complained that the new transfer puts Jerry Seinfeld ’s show in a different aspect ratio: from an older square format to widescreen … yada-yada … now the picture crops out some sight gags and just seems slightly bizarro . Motion impossible: fallout It’s not the first time modern technology has caused problems. HD TVs can make even visually stunning films look like cheap soap operas, through motion smoothing – a process to reduce blurring (good for on-screen sport). But Tom Cruise was there to save the day: in a slightly awkward 2018 video , he explained how to adjust TV settings to undo this flat fiasco. Continue reading... from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3mr722c