The Boss Class

Tomorrow night Bruce Springsteen plays Crystal Palace National Sports Stadium. Like thousands of other fans I will be there, but unlike lots of fans I am going to start queuing this afternoon to ensure a front-row position.

This isn't the first time I've queued for Bruce. I've queued for him every time he has come to London since I became a fan in 1996. I know that people must think I am mad for doing so but I know crazier people. A friend from Sweden is flying to 16 of his shows over a four-month stretch; a young fan from Delhi flew across Europe and the United States to catch shows after saving up for months; another devotee paid £200 to go and see just one of his concerts because she knew she'd regret it for the rest of her life if she didn't.

So what is it about Bruce? Being a British Asian woman, I meet with curious looks when I mention my Springsteen obsession. 'You don't look like a Bruce Springsteen fan,' I'm told. What does a typical Bruce fan look like? If I were to generalize, I'd say a typical fan would be a middle-aged man wearing jeans, a white T-shirt and cowboy boots, who lives in Nebraska or some such place in the USA and still pumps his fist to the beat of 'Born in the USA'.

My friends just don't see what a 53-year-old white, Catholic rock'n'roller from New Jersey offers a 23-year-old Sikh girl from east London. I grew up in a narrow-minded, claustrophobic culture which dictated I would get married to an accountant/lawyer/doctor, and live in a nice house with lots of children. Listening to Springsteen gave me an insight into the possibilities life could have. It was Bruce himself who said: 'My education was listening to records and that taught me that there's more to life than what you see around.

'And that was something they couldn't teach me in school, you couldn't learn it in the house, and you couldn't learn it from people you were hanging with on the street or anything. That was the most important lesson of my life.'

Listening to Bruce did the same for me.

Maybe as a British Asian, torn between two sets of values - East and West - I am also attracted to his music for its portrayal of lost and broken heroes, the John Wayne outsiders who don't quite know where they belong. After all, America is a land full of immigrants still struggling with their identity and their contradictions. Springsteen is just one of the artists who has documented this struggle through his music.

He has also accomplished something amazing in appealing to both right-wing conservatives and left-wing liberals.

Springsteen's music is multilayered and has an intelligent, universal lesson at its heart, one of the reasons, I believe, that it appeals to such a wide cross-section of the population.

I may have been into Bruce for seven years, listened to all his albums countless times, been to nearly a dozen shows and am now writing a book about him, but when I put on a one of his CDs I can always find something new. For this reason, the music will be around forever, and it is this which drives me to queue overnight for the privilege of watching one of his passion-fueled shows from the front row. It is also why he'll always be the best traveling companion who ever accompanies me on my journeys.