Van Zandt himself came from the New Jersey town of Middletown. It was here, sitting with his family on the living room sofa, that Little Steven, as he likes to be called, discovered his first true love. It was 9 February 1964 and they were watching the Ed Sullivan variety show when the Beatles went on air. The connection was immediate, and electric. “If a spaceship landed in Central Park today I don’t think it would have as much impact as the Beatles that day,” he says.

He had already been playing acoustic guitar for a year; his grandfather had been teaching him folk songs from Calabria. He formed his first band, The Source, in 1966, and by then bands like this were springing up all over. Springsteen was in Freehold Boro to the west, Van Zandt in Middleton to the north, Southside Johnny and others in Asbury Park to the south.

Van Zandt portrays it as inevitable that he and Springsteen became close within this tightly knit world of rock obsessives. “If you were in a band you were friends because it was not very usual; by ‘67 if you had long hair you were friends; and if you had long hair and were in a band then you were best friends. So yeah, we got to be quite friendly.” They used to play as equals in each other’s bands, but at some point in the late 60s, he says, he decided that Springsteen was the more talented of the two of them. He started calling his friend the Boss, which turned heads because “in my own world I was the boss. So when a boss starts calling someone else the boss people are taken aback.”

Since then he has played the role of faithful sidekick. They had an emotional separation in the 1980s when Van Zandt walked away from the E Street Band - just as it was reaching the peak of its success - to pursue a political passion. He organised high-profile protest movements against South African apartheid and interference in Latin America by Ronald Reagan’s administration. But the two men rebuilt bridges when Springsteen invited him to rejoin the band in 1999.

It was at about the same time that Chase hit on Van Zandt to be his Silvio Dante. It was an inspired choice, as Van Zandt had never acted and was freaked out by the offer. “Stevie Van Zandt could not walk on to a set and act,” he says, gunning that giggle at me again. “I don’t know how actors do that! It’s the scariest thing in the world. That’s when I changed myself completely, when I looked in the mirror I didn’t see myself, and that worked very well.”

He put on 70lb, ordered natty claret-coloured suits from the tailor to the mafia don John Gotti, and conceived the wild beehive toupee that gives Silvio his distinctive Addams Family look. The character was gunned down in the final episode but we left him in intensive care and if there is ever a movie “Silvio will be there, don’t worry,” he says.
Would he like a Sopranos-the-movie? “Yeah, I would, I love that character. I miss David Chase, Jimmy [Gandolfini who played Tony Soprano], Tony Sirico [who played Paulie Gualtieri].”

What he hadn’t anticipated as he grew into Silvio was how similar his relationship to Tony Soprano would become to his real-life standing with Bruce Springsteen. Silvio was Tony’s consigliere; Steve was Bruce’s. Or to put it another way, in front of the camera he acted as loyal henchman to a boss; in real life he acted as loyal henchman to the Boss. “I’m not sure it was foremost on my mind or David Chase’s at first, other than I was going to be a lifelong friend of Tony Soprano. But then I started to shape the character emotionally in a way I knew I understood: he was the loyal guy, the one guy in the organisation who wasn’t looking to take over, who was comfortable being number two, who had to deliver the bad news occasionally as he was the only one who was not afraid of him. All that was familiar to me.”

It’s not immediately clear how Van Zandt settles for being number two. He is self-deprecating, calling himself a “pretty sloppy rock’n'roll guitar player” and an actor who had only just begun to get the hang of it when The Sopranos ended. But he doesn’t come across as a natural supplicant: he is far too energetic and passionate for that.

The explanation, perhaps, is that he has, in his overflowing life, found space for a third calling, a mission to save rock’n'roll. He has become a crusader for the art form, which he believes has been dying on the vine for lack of watering by the record labels and radio networks. After years of fruitless effort - interesting, given that his love of music started with the British Invasion that day in 1964 - he has finally persuaded a UK radio channel to broadcast his syndicated rock show, in which he plays old and new rock bands for a modern audience.

So he has become his own boss at last, I suggest. “You’re the boss, but you’re not controlling everything. It’s not all you. You’re encouraging, hopefully able to share some of your experiences.”

A measured answer. Steve Van Zandt, consigliere to the last.

Ed Pilkington: The Guardian: Taken From G2: Monday Feb 16th 09’