Blinded By The Light/ English film

By Narendra Kusnur

Album: Blinded By The Light OST
Artistes: Bruce Springsteen, A.R. Rahman, others
Genre: Film soundtrack
Label: Sony Music/ Columbia
Rating: ***

Back in 1973, ‘Blinded By The Light’ was the first single Bruce Springsteen released. Part of his debut album Greetings From Ashbury Park, NJ, it had a lukewarm response, but was revived after Manfred Mann's Earth Band did a cover version in 1977.

Cut to 2019, and Blinded By The Light is the title of Gurinder Chadha’s new film, which talks of how the life of a London-based teenager with Pakistani origins changes after he listens to Springsteen’s music.

The film’s soundtrack this has 12 Springsteen songs, which the famed singer readily gave after hearing the story. While it almost sounds like the artiste’s Greatest Hits compilation, it also has some fresh work by A.R. Rahman and one older hit each by a-ha (‘The Sun Always Shines on TV’) and Pet Shop Boys (‘It’s A Sin’).

Rahman opens the album with ‘Ode To Javed’, which is basically a short dialogue-driven piece with hardly any musical content. But he's really impressive on the concluding song ‘For You My Love’, a hummable ballad that alternates smoothly between English and Punjabi, and boasts of vibrant percussion. The English lines are sung by Hriday Gattani and the Punjabi ones by Parag Chabbra.

In the past few years, Rahman hasn’t done any great work in Hindi cinema, and his recent Avengers Endgame Hindi anthem was a disaster. Hopefully, the refreshing ‘For You My Love’ will herald a comeback.

The Springsteen fare includes hits like ‘Dancing In The Dark’, ‘Born To Run’, ‘Badlands’ and ‘Hungry Heart’, and the songs are taken from albums released between 1973 and 1984, with the film being set in 1987. A previously-unreleased live version of the classic ‘The River’ and an acoustic rendition of ‘The Promised Land’ are outstanding.

While fans would be familiar with these songs, the actual highlight is ‘I’ll Stand By You’, which wasn’t released when it was recorded for the film Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone.

A few months ago, Springsteen had released the folk-influenced record Western Stars, which impressed those favouring his more toned-down, intense work (see review in an earlier blog). In comparison, the Blinded By The Light soundtrack is more like a refresher package of his past achievements.

Sadly, a few things go awfully wrong with the compilation. The main thing is the sequencing. We have two songs – the cacophonous ‘Get Out Of My Way, Fascists (Pigs)’ by Amer Chadha-Patel and Heera’s Punjabi number ‘Maar Chadapa’ – that are randomly dumped in the middle of the Springsteen gems. Though they may be situational in the film’s context, they just mess up the mood and flow on the audio soundtrack.

Finally, where was the need to thrust snatches of the film’s dialogues into the album? They add no value whatsoever, act like awkward bumps on a smooth highway, and seem nothing more than a hotch-potch collection of sub-continent-influenced British accents.

The net result is that of the 24 tracks, one finds something new in only five. Most of the album works as a Best Of Springsteen compilation which somehow seems to have forgotten his biggest anthem ‘Born In The USA’. Fans of The Boss may latch on, of course, so why complain?