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Rocker and actor Steve Van Zandt has made two careers as sidekick to the Boss - with Bruce Springsteen in the 70s, then with TV mobster Tony Soprano. But now, finds Ed Pilkington, he’s calling the shots.

New Jersey is famously the armpit of the new world. It’s that stubble of factories and chimneys that visitors hurry through, eyes averted, on their way from Newark airport to New York city. This is the backstage storeroom where the props and detritus are stored to allow Manhattan’s front of house to remain uncluttered and gleaming.

And yet, twice in the past 40 years it has been the crucible of extraordinary creativity. In the late 60s and early 70s it was a hotbed of American rock’n'roll, bursting with four-piece bands trying to make it big. In 1973, Bruce Springsteen’s Greetings from Asbury Park NJ took a cast of New Jersey characters - no hopers, dock workers, lovers in the sand - and turned them into urban antiheroes: Crazy Janey, Jimmy the Saint, Wild Billy. He sang about the small, alcohol-sodden, car-obsessed, petty violent lives of Eighth Avenue sailors and silicone sisters and made them mean something.

Then, a quarter of a century later, a screenwriter by the name of David Chase started hawking around an idea for an original TV series. It would do for the Italian-American mob what Springsteen had done for teenage rebels. It would elevate a second-rank outfit of mobsters and extortionists and render them human. The setting would be the strip clubs, pitted streets and disused warehouses of New Jersey, Chase’s childhood home, which he would portray with such affection that he would make this suburban afterthought seem almost beautiful. The Sopranos was born.

For all the bad press, New Jersey has enjoyed far more than its fair share of the artistic limelight. The same might be said of Steve Van Zandt, the New Jersey born-and-bred guitarist. Uniquely, he has been at the centre of both of the state’s moments of glory. He was there at the birth of the Jersey Shore rock sound, at Bruce Springsteen’s side. He was there too at the birth of The Sopranos, in the role of Silvio Dante, consigliere to the head of the DiMeo crime family, Tony Soprano. “I think I’m one of the few people who have experienced New Jersey becoming fashionable twice in a lifetime,” he says, with a rapid-fire laugh. “I mean, once is unlikely …”

Rock star, actor in one of TV’s seminal dramas: Van Zandt has sustained a remarkable double life for most of the past decade. He was in the first episode of The Sopranos, and in the last, the legendary Made in America. With his E Street Band hat, or rather bandana, on he played with Springsteen at this month’s Super Bowl and is soon to embark on a tour of the US and Europe that will take in Manchester and London in June.

Such is the split persona that Van Zandt has worn for so long, I can’t help wondering which one I will be meeting. Will it be the hard-living rocker of E Street? Or will it be the ever dangerous Silvio, shoulders hunched, hair slicked back, rippling with silent menace? Silvio, of course, is pure fiction. There is an element of fiction too in the hard-living rocker who appears for our interview. He is dressed in a Blackpool Bombers jacket, faded jeans with designer tears, and snakeskin boots in a pastiche of the rock’n'roll uniform. The bandana is dutifully in place - he is never without it now, following a car crash in the 60s that damaged his scalp.

It is paradoxical, given the importance of New Jersey, that we meet in an Italian restaurant in the West Village that Van Zandt uses as his casual office. He lives around the corner, a Manhattanite now, traitor to the cause. He says he barely keeps in touch with his old manor, other than to visit his mother and sister and to rehearse with Springsteen, which they still habitually do in Asbury Park.