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Stevie Van Zandt: ‘My religion switched right over to rock’n’roll’
The rock star turned activist turned Sopranos actor talks about his revealing new documentary, Disciple, his unlikely career and his fears over the state of the world
The film is a hefty 147 minutes long because this man contains multitudes: Van Zandt rose from the clubs of Asbury Park, New Jersey, to Springsteen’s E Street Band and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame; he galvanised 50 of the biggest names in music to create the Sun City track in protest of apartheid South Africa; he is a music educator, record producer and TV actor, most notably playing mob consigliere and strip club owner Silvio Dante in The Sopranos. Van Zandt spearheaded a cultural boycott of South Africa, forming Artists United Against Apartheid in the mid-1980s and writing the anti-apartheid anthem Sun City, which featured Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Lou Reed and many others. The song and video Sun City challenged western musicians to turn down invitations from South Africa’s racist regime to play lucrative gigs at the resort, the country’s equivalent of Las Vegas, while Black people lacked freedom and struggle leader Nelson Mandela languished in jail.
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