The 8 000-strong congregation has its hands up in the air, waving them rhythmically in unison, hallelujah style. Enchanted. Enthralled. Enraptured. This is Sunday night in Bellville, north of Cape Town. Here in the Church of Bruce Springsteen you come for rock 'n roll redemption. And even if it is temporary, it is real at this very moment.
"Good evenin', good evenin'! Good evenin' Cape Town! Good evenin' South Africa!" the little showman/priest cranks up the Holy Roller – the holy rock 'n roller – shtick. Going Southern Baptist one word short of "y'all" and soundin' like Jesse Jackson at the famous Wattstax soul festival back in 1972.
He pauses dramatically. This church is loud – the cymbals are getting a beating, the flurry of jazzy organ notes echoes him, the crowd's mouths are 8 000 little circles as they roar back to the five foot nine (about 1.75m) centre of their attention.
Clad in black denim, a charcoal shirt, loosely knotted skinny grey tie and off-black waistcoat, he stands in the middle of the massive stage, his head slightly cocked as he listens approvingly and resumes: "We've come thouuuusands of miiiii-les …just to be here tonight! The mighty EStreet Band has come thousands of miiii-les, 8 000 I think, to be exact" – he pauses and I can almost see the naughty glint in his eyes from where I sit high up in the stands – "to play some place that is just like Asbury Park's Convention Hall [in his home in New Jersey]! This is the same place, I'm tellin' you … !!!"
Tonight the communion wine comes in a big plastic glass from an ecstatic fan and the sweating priest downs it one long gulp. He's refreshed.
"The question is, can you feel the spi-riiiiit?" he sing-pleads. "Can you feel the spirit, nowwwww?" even more urgently. He extols, cajoles, channelling the spirit of his hero, James Brown.
His three backing singers, who clearly learned to sing in similar Southern choir stands where Aretha, Etta and the Reverend Al Green were taught, sound like a 100-voice choir as they respond to his repeated calls: "Yeah, yeah, ye-aaahhhh!"
It is exhilarating stuff.
In his book Hungry for Heaven, published back in 1988, author Steve Turner said that the former Catholic altar boy was the first rock 'n roller "to show he fully understood the redemptive theme" of religion by taking "the premise of alienation and deliverance and embellishing it with biblical language".
Sopranos star recalls his Mandela moments
Little Steven van Zandt, Bruce Springsteen's friend of 50 years, his wingman on guitar in the E Street Band, a musician in his own right, a successful radio DJ and an effective decades-long campaigner for progressive causes, is talking seriously to three South African journalists about the effectiveness of the cultural boycott against the apartheid regime.
But all I'm seeing in this small dressing room at the Velodrome in Bellville before the Springsteen show on Sunday night is Silvio Dante, the consigliere to Tony Soprano in the brilliant The Sopranos television series, that Van Zandt inhabited to such chilling effect.
Unlike his toupee in the series, he is wearing a black bandana – but the expressions, mannerisms and inflections are pure "Sil Dante".
If the Boere knew they were messing with the Sopranos they would have succumbed much earlier, I chuckle quietly to myself.
It was exactly 40 years ago that American Van Zandt came to South Africa "to educate myself" on one of 40 international political issues he was examining, he tells us.
As part of Springsteen and the E Street Band, who had just had success with the album The River, "I thought now that I can make a living doing this rock 'n roll stuff, why don't I see what I have been missing for the last number of years … I didn't pay any attention at school so I just decided to educate myself.
"I started with my country's foreign policy since World War II, seeing what we're doing – all these issues, growing up thinking we're always on the right side, we're the heroes of the world [and] finding out that it's quite the contrary. At least half of the situations we're on the wrong side."
There were many "bad, bad people" his country was supporting, but South Africa came up as a sort of "in-between one", with newspapers claiming there were all these great reforms happening in mid-1980s South Africa.
After two trips to the country and after speaking to many people, Van Zandt decided that "apartheid could not be reformed; it must be eliminated". He chose Sun City as the symbol because of the resort's involvement with sanctions busters, created Artists United Against Apartheid and convened 49 artists across a wide range of genres, including Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Miles Davis, Run-DMC, Jimmy Cliff and Gil Scott-Heron, to record Sun City.
The song was not played on radio, but the video got heavy rotation on MTV, conscientising a whole young generation about the evils of apartheid and its homeland policy.
Congressmen's children started asking their parents why they didn't do something – and eventually anti-apartheid legislation was introduced, even with Ronald Reagan in charge.
Van Zandt does not claim that Sun City led to the fall of apartheid – he is way too humble and intelligent a person for that – but believes the groundswell the song caused did have an impact.
"It's a mixed feeling, coming back to South Africa," he says, even though we are 20 years into democracy. "I'm embarrassed [by] what we had to do. I'm not going to stand and be some fucking hero because of my country's bad policies that I helped fix … I'm not the hero – they're the heroes; [Nelson] Mandela is the hero. The biggest thrill of my life was watching him come out of jail."
Van Zandt met Madiba twice, once at Wembley in London and again when Mandela was doing a fundraiser in the United States.
"I never met anybody like him. It was not like meeting a politician, a revolutionary … He was like a religious leader, like old-time religious leaders, like the Buddha, John the Baptist, with the inner strength and warmth. He was powerful!" – Charles Leonard