When theartsdesk asked Simply Red’s PR company for some pictures of the band to accompany this review, the images sent were of Mick Hucknall – alone. Which is probably all you need to know about who Simply Red are. Last night’s audience at this, Simply Red’s final ever live show, needed no reminding that it was all about Hucknall, however he’s billed. For them, his arrival on stage after the band had set the groove drew more applause than the music.

A startling one in 10 British adults apparently went to a music festival this year. Given that I’m a music journalist and I didn’t, maybe I’m some kind of astronomically unlikely anomaly. I’d like to think so. But those familiar aerial shots of Glastonbury – not just a few fields but a sizeable expanse of Britain’s patchwork-quilt landscape, completely overrun by an infestation of teeming humanity - is enough to make me feel smugly sane to have decided, as usual, to just remain cosily at home watching whatever the BBC had decreed were the best bits.

Miss Frankie Rose is the veteran of scads of über-trendy bands. In desperately hip, always stewing Brooklyn, she's a one-woman music scene. Inspired by the mid/late-Eighties UK indie sound, The Cramps, Phil Spector and Sixties girl groups, she's landed in north London with her new band Frankie Rose and the Outs. Their debut album is a wonderful fuzz-pop confection, but could it work live?

If you stick the phrase "Britpop Revival" into Google, the first page of results suggests that there has been one in 2009, 2008, 2007, 2005 and even 1998, barely a handful of months after Britpop was the epitome of Cool Britannia. It looks as if there will also be one in 2011, with Pulp primed to play again, Damon Albarn talking about releasing a new Blur single in January and, judging by Suede's storming reunion last night, more from Brett Anderson's gang, who, in theartsdesk's humble opinion, never got the full credit they deserved during the heady Blur vs Oasis years.

It’s often assumed that people who write about music just sit around listening to achingly hip bands and rare grooves. Not true. You’ll often catch me listening to such Jeremy Clarkson-endorsed combos as Genesis or ZZ Top. Meat Loaf? Certainly. Guilty pleasure? As charged. Phil Spector may have had his pocket symphonies for the kids, but Meat Loaf and Jim Steinman gave them six-minute operas. To my mind there hasn’t been a song written that conjures up the glorious tragedy of being 16 quite like “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad”. The thing is though, the Loaf, he ain’t 16 anymore.He’s in his sixties. Or as he insisted tonight, his sexties.

Anyone who has ever spent even a little time in a recording studio will be aware that the process of making an album lies somewhere between “watching paint dry” and “ripping out your own toenails” on the scale of interesting and enjoyable activities. It rarely makes for great television. The first image we saw in last night’s Imagine was of a youthful Bruce Springsteen holed up in New York’s Record Plant studio in 1977. He yawned; then he yawned again. Here we go, I thought.

What elevated the film to more than just muso musing about “sound pictures”, “dead rooms” and “snare sounds”, all of which reaffirmed the truism that making records is generally about as much fun as dental extraction, were the uniquely dramatic circumstances it documented. This programme was an edited version of the Thom Zimny documentary The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, which accompanies the boxed version of The Promise, the recently released double album comprising 21 songs recorded in 1977 and 1978 by Springsteen during the making of his fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Recalled through a mixture of archive footage and new interviews with all those involved, these epic sessions held a significance beyond their immediate context. They soundtracked an artist in a state of personal, professional and creative flux. Specifically, the Darkness... sessions took place beneath two hovering storm clouds – one was fame, the other was a lawsuit. It was obvious that Springsteen found the former by far the more troublesome.

Having roared to stardom in 1975 with Born to Run, he was battling what he called in the film “the separation of success”. On his guard against accusations of frivolity and hype, Springsteen resolved that his next album would be “a reaction to my own good fortune, reflecting a sense of accountability to the people I grew up with”. His first three records had been wild, boisterous, theatrical affairs filled with carnival music, urban gypsies and romanticised street characters. With Darkness... he wanted to drain all that colour away, leaving only what he described as “an austere, apocalyptic grandeur”. Or as his manager and producer Jon Landau put it: “We wanted the coffee black.” 

His new songs were a reckoning with the adult world of work, compromise and disappointment. Interviewed in 2010 for the film, Springsteen said he asked himself: how do we honour our own lives? What can and cannot be compromised without losing yourself? These questions were especially pertinent given the fact that at the time he was embroiled in legal action with his manager, Mike Appel, which boiled down to the question of who had creative control over Springsteen's career.

While the lawsuit was ongoing, he was prevented from going into the studio with any producer not approved by Appel. So at first he simply didn’t go in at all. We saw some fantastic footage shot in 1977 at his New Jersey farm, when he was effectively under the recording equivalent of house arrest. Stripped to the waist, sporting a hairstyle apparently modelled on Bob Dylan’s dog, he looked like some creative outlaw on the lam. Interestingly, he seemed to positively embrace the lawsuit. It made him an outsider again at a time of bewildering success, and steeled his resolve to follow his vision without compromise.

In June 1977 the suit was settled in Springsteen’s favour and he entered Record Plant in New York to begin recording. We saw that process evolve through old black-and-white film (pictured above) depicting long hours, days and weeks of frustration, mechanical drudgery and confusion, punctuated by some brief, electrifying moments of pure musical connection - none more so than the joyous run through of “Sherry Darling”, with Springsteen bashing out the chords on the piano and his guitarist Steve Van Zandt hammering out a rhythm with a pair of drum sticks on what looked like a rolled up carpet.

• Bruce Springsteen: In His Own Words reviewed on theartsdesk

Overleaf: watch "Sherry Darling" performed on The Promise: The Making of Darkness On the Edge of Town