(Credits: Far Out / Bent Rej / Alamy)
Tue 3 March 2026 5:00, UK
There isn’t a better student of rock and roll than Bruce Springsteen still working today.
There are many musicians who have tried to match what their favourite artists have done before them, but a lot of what Springsteen does involves him trying to make the kind of songs that his idols would have been proud to have made on their own. And while a lot of what ‘The Boss’ does is indebted to what the British invasion brought over back in the 1960s, he knew that some bands could give the heavy hitters a run for their money when they wanted to.
That said, it’s not like Springsteen could have ever made that kind of noise on his own, either. A lot of what makes the E Street Band work so well is how they sound like one big rock and roll orchestra whenever they play, and even in those moments when they are only playing three chords, the emotional catharsis onstage whenever they sing tunes like ‘Badlands’ is enough to make the Earth shake whenever they hit the right nerve with the audience.
Not everything they played was all that complicated, but a lot of what Springsteen listened to growing up wasn’t exactly Beethoven or anything. Rock and roll had already been about taking the most basic blues chords and putting a bit more energy and swagger into everything, and it was hard to really deny the kind of energy that was radiating off of Little Richard and Chuck Berry records when they first came out. But those were all learned secondhand by Springsteen when he heard bands like The Rolling Stones.
Keith Richards was every bit the rock star that kids wanted to be when they grew up, and their back-and-forth with The Beatles turned into some of the greatest rock and roll that anyone had ever heard. But in a world where rock and rollers seemed like superheroes, Springsteen was still rooting for the underdog whenever he delved a little bit further into what England had to offer back in the day.
He felt that The Animals opened up a whole new world for outsiders like him on ‘We Gotta Get Out Of This Place’, but the Dave Clark Five was a lot more gruff than anyone else in the rock and roll scene. It was strange enough to have a drummer as the bandleader, but even for an era that could tolerate Bob Dylan’s nasal croon, hearing Mike Smith’s voice leap out of the speakers was wildly exciting for Springsteen when he first got started.
Even later on in his career, ‘The Boss’ felt that the Dave Clark Five sounded bigger than even the biggest rock stars at the time, saying, “The thing that a lot of people missed about the Dave Clark Five was that those were big, powerful, nasty sounding records. Much bigger than the Stones or The Beatles. And there was always a debate over whether it was The Beatles or the Dave Clark Five. ‘Glad All Over’ came out, which was their first hit in America, and it sounded like it was ripped out of the radio.”
While the band didn’t have the same staying power as the Fab Four, you can definitely hear where Springsteen got a lot of his vocal chops. ‘The Boss’ never claimed to have the best voice in the world, but if ‘Glad All Over’ could become a hit with that kind of delivery, there was certainly room for a kid like him who had a more limited range to blow someone out of the water when the radio came on.
It may have been a mixed blessing for accidentally giving the world the same kind of gruff singing that made bands like Creed so popular later on, but you can hardly hold it against them, either. This was the beginning of rock and roll branching out into different directions, and the Dave Clark Five was the first time that people truly got to hear music that had a bit more of an edge to it like The Stones.
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