Mick Clifford: Complacency is threatening our future

Mark Little and Carla O’Brien present Tomorrow Tonight, an imaginary news broadcast set in the year 2050.

Sometimes the future can be writ large. So it was for music journalist Jon Landeau one evening in 1974, when he went to a gig in Cambridge, Massachusetts and was blown away. “I saw my rock and roll past flash before my eyes,” he wrote. “I saw something else. I saw rock and roll’s future and its name is Bruce Springsteen.” 

Landeau was so taken he hung up his pen and became Bruce’s manager. Even he couldn’t have seen how prescient his words would look half a century on. Bruce is no longer a skinny, bright eyed 25-year-old but onstage he’d give King Canute a run for his money in holding back the tide of time.