Keith Richards wrote what I think is the most entertaining of all rock memoirs; his Life is spelled out in a way, in such detail, that you could be forgiven for thinking that he made most of it up. Given what is detailed within the pages, it’s an easy assumption to make that it’s significantly unlikely that he’d remember much of what happened in the late 60s and early 70s. Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run, is a different beast – an insightful piece of writing which reveals much about the man, perhaps at times too much; at others, not enough.

The real insight comes from how he describes both his motivations for, and his continuing devotion to touring and live shows. He’s a man at his best when he’s performing, and a life spent doing it renders a significant void in its absence; nature abhors a vacuum, so when the gap appears, it is filled with self-doubt, bleak notions and sadness. Darkness on the Edge of Town, indeed. That could have perhaps been a more apt title for this memoir, given Springsteen’s long battles with depression, stemming from a troubled childhood and mostly absent father. On sex, he’s restrained. Nobody’s going to think that one of the biggest names in rock was a saint in the 1980s, and as Bruce succinctly puts it, ‘Wilt Chamberlain would not have to start looking over his shoulder any time soon but at the beginning of the USA tour I decided to…see. So… I saw.’

The man has a turn of phrase. But we all knew that.

There’s insight given to the way his albums are mapped out, thematically. How Greetings From Asbury Park and The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle covered certain terrain; the genesis of the song ‘Born to Run’, and what brought about the album Born to Run, which then propelled him from being ‘the new Dylan’ to a creature in his own right. It’s interesting to read about what would then motivate the likes of Nebraska, and The River, and how the wildly popular and unmistakably mainstream Born in the USA was recorded as the B-side to Nebraska, when the two records could not be more thematically and stylistically different.

It’s also reassuring to see what appears to be his relative indifference to his own back catalogue. His early works get a lot of coverage. The volume and impact of his live shows, too. But his double album release of 1992 (Human Touch and Lucky Town) barely register; the latter is not even name-checked. Devils and Dust gets some lip service, and Working on a Dream is mentioned more in relation to the tour he and the band undertook to support it, rather than the contents of the record itself. Which makes sense, given that they’re just not very good albums. Everybody’s got chinks in their armour; thankfully he rebounded with Wrecking Ball.

Also, not for nothing, but the book needed a bit of an edit and fact check. Just one of many blurred moments from history has Springsteen saying that Jonathan Demme approached him to write a song for Philadelphia in 1994, when the film (and with it, the song) came out in 1993. Small detail, but given its apparent significance in his life (the trophy itself was a major milestone in his dynamic with his father; countering this is a passage later in the book where he says all gold records and trophies are out of view for his children in their family home), you’d think that it’d have been proof-read.

You don’t buy a record for the quality of the liner notes, nor would you expect a great author to be a world class musician. Born to Run, as a book, is a must have for the fans, and shows some, if not the full gamut of what makes the man on stage tick.