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Bruce Springsteen has hailed the impact of Sir Van Morrison on his career, saying his seminal Astral Weeks album "made me trust in beauty".

The American icon selected Madame George from the 1968 album as one of his eight picks on the BBC's Desert Island Discs.

The Boss said: “Astral Weeks was an extremely important record for me. It made me trust in beauty, it gave me a sense of the divine.

"The divine just seems to run through the veins of that entire album.

"Of course there was incredible singing and the playing of Richard Davis on the bass. It was trance music. It was repetitive. It was the same chord progression over and over again.

"But it showed how expansive something with very basic underpinning could be. There’d be no New York City Serenade if there hadn’t been Astral Weeks.”

(Image: BBC)

Springsteen also picked Hound Dog by Elvis Presley, It's All Over Now from The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan's iconic Like A Rolling Stone.

“This could be at the top of the list," he explained.

“The first time I heard it, it came out of the radio. I didn’t know anything about Dylan’s acoustic music. I was a creature of top 40, so the first time I really heard him with this song, it just instantly started to change my life.”

“When I inducted Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I said ‘the snare drum that opens this song feels like someone kicked open the door to your mind'.

"Like a Rolling Stone feels like a torrent that comes rushing towards you. Floods your soul, floods your mind. Alerts and wakes you up instantaneously to other worlds, other lives. Other ways of being.

"It’s perhaps one of the most powerful records ever made and it still means a great deal to me along with all of Dylan’s work.”