Bruce Springsteen: What links 'The Boss' to Blaenau Gwent?

He famously sang about being Born In The USA, not life in Blaenau Gwent.

And you'd be excused for thinking there wasn't anything to link legendary New Jersey rocker Bruce Springsteen to a south Wales town like Ebbw Vale.

But a connection does exist - albeit one which even The Boss's most ardent fans would struggle to guess.

And, as devotees of the 74-year-old rock icon flood Cardiff to watch him perform this weekend, we are here to tell you what it is.

But first, a clue: it involves a bride and groom, a now defunct steel works and a famous photographer.

Still stumped?

Well, any fans from the South Wales Valleys who attended the singer's 1988 UK Tunnel of Love gigs in London and Birmingham might have had the answer under their noses all this time.

Especially if they had bought one of the glossy programmes for sale on the nearby merchandise stall.

Because if they had done they will have noticed something strangely familiar within.

Across two whole pages of that promotional booklet was a vintage black-and-white photo of a newlywed bride and groom.

The windswept couple were standing high on a hill above a backdrop of blast furnaces belching thick grey smoke.

Eagle-eyed fans will have recognised the scene as the lower end of Ebbw Vale's own former steel plant - or, at least, how it looked back in the 1960s when it was still owned by the firm Richard Thomas & Baldwins.

The shot had been captured in 1965 by a New York-based photographer called Bruce Davidson, who had been staying at the nearby Park Hotel.

It was part of a collection of poignant pics he had taken during a 10-day trip to South Wales to chronicle life in its towns and villages steeped in heavy industry.

Described as "probably the most distinctive photographic project on Wales in the post-war era", Davidson has gone on record to say he fell in love with what he saw there.

Now 90, he said in a previous interview: "I was there to find something beautiful in the people and their work, and there was a certain beauty in all that darkness."

In addition, overlying Davidson's image in the Springsteen tour programme were the lyrics to a 1979 studio outtake by The Boss entitled Roulette.

"Mister, I've been cheated," read the words. "I feel like I've been robbed/I'm the big expendable/My life just cancelled null and void."

Eerily, they would echo the feelings of many in south Wales as, over the years, they watched the heart of their industrial communities slowly being ripped out.

For example, that Ebbw Vale plant photographed by Davidson would have provided employment for more than 10,000 tinplate workers back in its production heyday.

However, having struggled to match the rise in cheap imports, that number had dwindled to barely 1,000 by the time its main gates shut for the final time in 2002.

What had been a cornerstone for its employees, both economically and socially, had been dismantled and lost forever.

But, like the stateside working classes that Springsteen grew up amongst and documented throughout his career, they refused to give up, soldiering on unbowed.

And, much like The Boss himself, they never lost sight of what made them who they are.