Bruce Springsteen announces Australian tour dates for 2017

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are coming back to Australia for a national tour in January.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform in Philadelphia last week.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band are coming back to Australia for a national tour in January.

The singer, who releases a new album, Chapter and Verse, and his autobiography Born to Run this month, will start the tour in Perth on January 25.

He will then move onto Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Hanging Rock in Victoria, Brisbane and Hunter Valley in NSW.

Melbourne rockers Jet are re-forming for the tour and will support Springsteen at selected shows, as will Australian singer Diesel.

Springsteen toured here most recently in 2014.

In his new autobiography, the singer reveals the extent of his battle with clinical depression, for which he began seeking help from a psychotherapist in the early 1980s.

The 500-page memoir was written without a ghostwriter over seven years and will be published on September 27 by Simon & Schuster.

Springsteen has spoken about his struggles with mental illness but never with such frankness.

“I was crushed between [the ages of] 60 and 62, good for a year and out again from 63 to 64,” he writes. “Not a good record.”

In the book Springsteen traces his depression to his blue-collar New Jersey childhood and his tense relationship with his hard-drinking labourer father, Doug, who came from an Irish-American family bursting with undiagnosed or undiscussed mental illnesses.

He calls touring his “trustiest form of self-medication”.

The tour new will no doubt thrill former Labor treasurer Wayne Swan, who famously revealed how Springsteen and his music inspired him in politics.

“Like Springsteen, I and many caucus members came from working-class families,’’ Swan wrote in 2012. “We are in many ways the Springsteen generation. And if our generation has an anthem, it is Born to Run.

“It was released as a single in August 1975, and it’s the song we listened to during the Whitlam dismissal in November of that year and the bitter election campaign that followed. The song has never left me. I still crank it up loud on budget night and after our family dinner parties. It’s about trying to stay young when the carefree days of youth are coming to an end. It’s a song about realising that big and daunting responsibilities are just around the corner. But it’s also a song about a way of life that was just starting to disappear.’’