Bryan Adams

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1990, Bryan Adams sat down with two collaborators, Robert John "Mutt" Lange and Michael Kamen, and finished a song in a single 45-minute session. The song was "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You," and it went on to reach number one in at least 19 countries. Adams is a Canadian singer-songwriter, musician, record producer and photographer. Estimates of his record and single sales run from 75 million to well over 100 million.

  That career raises some odd questions. How does a teenager who left school at 15 end up with a catalogue like this one? Why would a star with worldwide hits find himself quarrelling with his own country's broadcast rules? Why does a rock singer from Canada have such a devoted following in India? And what draws a man with that many hits toward a camera and a long list of causes?

  The answers begin far from any stadium, in a family that rarely stayed in one place.

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• 2. Dropout In Vancouver

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  On the 5th of November 1959, Bryan Guy Adams was born in Kingston, Ontario. His parents, Elizabeth Jane and Conrad J. Adams, were an English couple who had emigrated from Plymouth in the 1950s. Conrad began as a British Army officer and then joined the Canadian Army. He later worked as a United Nations peacekeeping observer and as a Canadian foreign service diplomat. A posting to Lisbon sent young Bryan to St. Columban's School. At other points the family lived in Israel, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom. He was raised in Ottawa, where he attended Colonel By Secondary School in the Beacon Hill neighbourhood.

  At age 10, in Reading, England, Adams bought his first electric guitar, an Italian-made imitation Fender Stratocaster from the brand Gherson. A year later, at a five-and-dime store in Ottawa, he picked up an imitation Les Paul. He told Guitar World that he was a huge Ritchie Blackmore fan and was deep into Humble Pie's album Rockin' the Fillmore. Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan shaped him too, along with all the pop and rock on the radio during his boyhood.

  As a child, Adams was sent to a psychiatrist because he was not getting along with his parents. By his account, the doctor found nothing wrong with him and said his parents were the ones who needed help.

  In 1974, Adams, his mother and his younger brother Bruce moved to North Vancouver while his father was posted abroad. He attended Argyle Secondary School and Sutherland Secondary School, and he dropped out at 15. By his own telling, his worst stretch of drug and alcohol abuse came before his 16th birthday. After one arrest, a sergeant told him his mother had come to collect him and that he should look at her and see how unhappy he was making her. Adams says he walked outside, looked at her and thought, "Oh yeah, I can't do this to her anymore." He blames the pockmarks on his face on that period of drug use.

  Adams went 12 years without seeing his father after his parents divorced. The two later reconciled.

  With school behind him, Adams joined a group called Shock. He spent the money his parents had saved for his college education on an Estey grand piano to tinker with. To pay the rent he sold pet food at one point and washed dishes in a restaurant. He loved CCR and Deep Purple, and he went to concerts by Led Zeppelin, T. Rex, Elton John and Tina Turner. Soon he was working Vancouver's music scene, singing with bands and as a studio session singer.

  At 15, Adams became the vocalist for the glam rock band Sweeney Todd, replacing the original singer, Nick Gilder. With Adams, the band re-recorded "Roxy Roller," a Canadian hit from their first album, and it reached number 99 on the U.S. charts. Their second album, If Wishes Were Horses, came out in 1977 with Adams billed as "Bryan Guy Adams." He left the band at 16.

  In 1978, at 18, Adams met Jim Vallance through a mutual friend at a Long and McQuade musical instrument store in Vancouver. Vallance was the former drummer and main songwriter for the Vancouver band Prism. He had just quit to concentrate on work as a studio musician and songwriter. The two agreed to meet at his home studio a few days later. The partnership that began there was prolific through the 1980s. Together they wrote for Adams and for Kiss, Tina Turner, Joe Cocker, Johnny Hallyday, Bonnie Raitt, Rod Stewart, Bonnie Tyler, Loverboy, Carly Simon and Neil Diamond. It has continued, though not without gaps.

  One dollar was the price of Adams's first record contract. Later in 1978 he signed with A&M Records. The label remixed one of his demos as a disco track called "Let Me Take You Dancing," speeding up his vocals to fit a dance tempo of 122 BPM. Its melody began as a piano riff that Vallance wrote on his parents' piano over Christmas 1977, inspired by Robbie King. The song reached the Canadian RPM chart in March 1979, alongside its B-side "Don't Turn Me Away." That same year Adams agreed to terms with the Canadian manager Bruce Allen, who also worked with Bachman-Turner Overdrive and Loverboy.

  In 1982, the producer Michael James Jackson called Vallance and Adams to ask for songs for the next Kiss album. Neither writer was a fan of heavy metal. Still, it was a golden chance to put their songs in front of a world-class rock group. Working with Gene Simmons, they produced "War Machine" and a rewrite titled "Rock 'n Roll Hell," and Kiss recorded both for the album Creatures of the Night. Both titles would return in August 2024 on a double A-side single.

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• 3. Reckless Years

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  February 1980 brought Adams's self-titled debut, mostly co-written with Jim Vallance and recorded largely in October and November 1979 at Manta Studios. None of its singles reached the U.S. Billboard Hot 100. The most successful, "Hidin' from Love," reached number 64 on the Canadian RPM Current Hit Radio chart. The album did not earn a gold certification in Canada until 1986.

  The 1981 follow-up, You Want It You Got It, produced "Lonely Nights," which reached number three on the U.S. Album Rock Tracks chart. From January to May 1982 Adams toured behind the record. Within months the album was catching on across the United States, and he was opening for the Kinks and Foreigner.

  Cuts Like a Knife, released in January 1983, was the true breakout. Its first single, "Straight from the Heart," reached number 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number one on the Canadian Adult Contemporary chart. Bonnie Tyler released her own version that September. The album peaked at number eight on both the Billboard 200 and the Canadian chart. That year Adams opened for Journey, playing more than 100 dates in five months.

  Late in 1984 came Reckless, which reached number one on both the Billboard 200 and the Canadian album chart. All six of its singles landed in the top 15 of the Billboard Hot 100, a feat only two albums had managed before. "Run to You" reached number six in the U.S. "Heaven," written for the film A Night in Heaven, went all the way to number one. "Summer of '69" reached number five, and "It's Only Love," a duet with Tina Turner, reached number 14. In the UK, "Summer of '69" did poorly at first because radio rarely played it. It found its audience there later, along with listeners in the Netherlands and Belgium.

  Reckless became the first album by a Canadian artist to be certified diamond in Canada, and it has sold over 12 million copies worldwide. It won the 1985 Juno Award for Album of the Year. Adams took the Juno for Best Male Vocalist every year from 1983 to 1987. In December 1984 he began a two-year world tour, which included dates with Tina Turner on her Private Dancer Tour.

  In February 1985, Adams recorded the charity single "Tears Are Not Enough" as a member of The Northern Lights, an improvised supergroup that included Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot, Burton Cummings, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young. Adams wrote the lyrics, and the goal was to raise money for people affected by the 1983-85 famine in Ethiopia. The single reached number one in Canada and finished 1985 as the top song on the year-end Canadian charts. In July that year he performed it at Live Aid at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, in front of more than 100,000 people. His next album, Into the Fire, came out in 1987 and took on more serious subjects. Its single "Heat of the Night" reached the top ten in both Canada and the U.S.

  Adams was among the hundreds of artists whose material was destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire. In 2013, while preparing a remastered edition of Reckless, he asked Universal for the original master tapes and was told they could not be found. He eventually tracked down a safety copy and used that for the remaster. He only learned of the fire when the Times published its first report on the 1st of June.

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• 4. The Canadian Content Fight

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  Michael Kamen sent his score for Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves to a number of artists before Adams, and Kate Bush turned it down. The song that Adams, Kamen and Lange built from it was released internationally on the 12th of June, days after the film's premiere. The first shipment was 385,000 copies, the largest single shipment in the history of A&M Records. It spent a record 16 consecutive weeks at number one on the UK Singles Chart and seven weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. It also earned Adams his first Golden Globe nomination, and it has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide.

  The parent album, Waking Up the Neighbours, reached shops on the 24th of September 1991. Adams and Lange co-produced it, and it topped the charts in the UK, Canada, Australia and Germany. In the U.S. it reached number six on the Billboard 200. It sold 16 million copies worldwide and became his second diamond-certified album in Canada. No Canadian album had topped the UK charts since Neil Young's Harvest in 1972. Singles included "Can't Stop This Thing We Started," which reached number two in the U.S. and number one in Canada. The ballad "Do I Have to Say the Words?" also reached number one in Canada.

  The record's success in Canada came with an argument. Most of the album was recorded in England, and Lange was originally from Zambia. Under the Canadian content rules of the time, that meant the album did not count as Canadian. The regulation treated a collaboration between Canadians and non-Canadians as Canadian only when the lyricist and the composer worked separately and at least one of them was Canadian. Adams and Lange had each contributed to both lyrics and music.

  Adams complained, and the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission widened the rules. The amended regulation recognized collaborations in which two or more people each contributed to both lyrics and music. In protest, Adams briefly threatened to boycott the Juno Awards. When the ceremony came, the awards committee almost completely ignored his album.

  The Junos of 1992 handed him the International Achievement Award, Canadian Entertainer of the Year, which the public voted on, and Producer of the Year. The album also won the 1992 Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media. In July 1992, Adams played Wembley Stadium in front of 80,000 fans, his largest audience of the tour. Little Angels and Extreme opened the show.

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• 5. Songs For Screens

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  In 1993, Adams co-wrote "All for Love" for the soundtrack of the film The Three Musketeers and recorded it with Rod Stewart and Sting. The single topped charts around the world. That November he released the compilation So Far So Good, which was certified 6x platinum in the U.S., 3x platinum in the UK, 6x platinum in Canada and 11x platinum in Australia. Its new song, "Please Forgive Me," peaked at number two in the UK and number seven in the U.S.

  In 1995, "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?" reached number one in the U.S., Canada and Australia. It was nominated for the Oscar, the Grammy and the Golden Globe for Best Original Song. The album 18 til I Die followed in June 1996 and reached number one in the UK. It stalled at number 31 on the Billboard 200 but was still certified platinum in the United States. It also carried "Star," which appears on the soundtrack of the film Jack. In November 1996 came "I Finally Found Someone," recorded with Barbra Streisand for her self-directed film The Mirror Has Two Faces. It reached number eight on the Billboard Hot 100 and drew Oscar and Golden Globe nominations.

  For the 2002 DreamWorks animated film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, Adams co-wrote and performed the songs. The most successful single from the soundtrack, "Here I Am," was a British top five hit and a German top 20 hit. It brought him his fourth Golden Globe nomination for Best Song from a Motion Picture. In total he has been nominated for five Golden Globes and three Academy Awards for his film songwriting. He has won 20 Juno Awards and one Grammy from 16 Grammy nominations. In April 2006 he entered the Canadian Music Hall of Fame, and on the 1st of May 2010 he received the Governor General's Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.

  Aretha Franklin recorded one of his songs in 2006. Adams co-wrote the Grammy-winning gospel song "Never Gonna Break My Faith" for her. In the film Bobby it appears as a duet by Franklin and Mary J. Blige with the Boys Choir of Harlem, and it earned Adams a Golden Globe nomination in 2007. He had imagined something like a hymn, a song about faith and an inner light that guides you after a loss. When it was ready, he told the producers that Franklin would sing it, and she did. Her solo version sat on his computer for about 15 years. He sent it to Clive Davis, who was making a movie about his own life, and it was released on the 19th of June 2020.

  In 2009, Adams first approached Disney about writing music for a Broadway adaptation of Pretty Woman. In 2016 he learned the project was already in production, and he interviewed for the songwriter job with Jim Vallance. They got it. Working with the producer Paula Wagner and the director Jerry Mitchell, they spent two years on the score, finishing the songs in March 2018. Pretty Woman: The Musical opened on Broadway in August 2018 and in London's West End in February 2020.

  The cancellation of a sold-out 17-date U.S. arena tour with Bon Jovi marked 2020 for Adams, and the COVID-19 pandemic also paused his own Shine a Light tour. In July 2021 he signed a deal with Bertelsmann Music Group for his next album, So Happy It Hurts, which came out in March 2022. Its title single was nominated in the Best Rock Performance category at the 2023 Grammys. In July 2023 he was announced as a co-founder of the Scottish start-up SongBox, a web application for securely storing and sharing audio files. In December 2023 he split with Bruce Allen, his manager of 44 years, and chose to manage himself. In August 2024 he launched his own label, Bad Records. His album Roll with the Punches arrived in August 2025, and the tour that followed ran into 2026.

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• 6. Far-Flung Stages

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  Many people say the first English phrases that young Indians learn are "It was the summer of '69" and "Everything I do, I do it for you." Music industry executives have called Adams the best-known foreign music artist in India. He is a household name there across three generations. In the early 1990s he was one of the first foreigners to stage a large-scale concert in the country. Between 1994 and 2024 he toured India six times, and he has called himself an indophile.

  The September 2018 issue of Rolling Stone India put Adams on its cover. An article inside called him "one rock legend whose concerts have created mass frenzy every single time in every single city he's played." Reports also say "Summer of '69" has been popular for so long that it is "almost a Hindi song now." It is often the only western song that might be allowed at a traditional Indian wedding.

  In 1994, Adams became the first Western artist to perform in Vietnam since James Brown played there in 1971, at the end of the Vietnam War. On the 29th of January 2006, he became the first Western artist to perform in Karachi, Pakistan after the September 11th attacks. The show was part of a benefit concert by Shehzad Roy, raising money to send underprivileged children to school and to support victims of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake. On the 19th of February 2011, he and his band played in Kathmandu, a show that made him the first international artist to perform in Nepal.

  His largest crowd may have come in Rome. On the 31st of July 2006, Adams and Billy Joel played a free concert on Via dei Fori Imperiali with the Colosseum as the backdrop. The estimated crowd topped 500,000.

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• 7. Causes And Crusades

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  In June 1986, Adams joined the two-week Amnesty International tour A Conspiracy of Hope alongside Sting, U2 and Peter Gabriel. On the 11th of June 1988, he played the Nelson Mandela birthday concert at Wembley Stadium. In March 1989 he appeared on the Greenpeace album Rainbow Warriors, which was also released in the Soviet Union on the Melodiya label. According to Greenpeace, worldwide sales raised more than $8 million. That summer he sang backing vocals on a remake of Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water" to raise funds for victims of the 1988 Armenian earthquake.

  On the 21st of July 1990, Adams stood on the stage of Roger Waters's The Wall - Live in Berlin. He performed the Pink Floyd tracks "Young Lust" and "Empty Spaces" to mark the fall of the Berlin Wall eight months earlier. In December 1987 he had contributed "Run Rudolph Run" to the compilation A Very Special Christmas, which benefits the Special Olympics. The album is certified 4x platinum in the U.S., and over 25 years it generated $109 million in royalties for the Special Olympics. On the 2nd of March 1993, he played Rock for the Rainforest at Carnegie Hall, hosted by Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, which raised $800,000 for indigenous rights.

  A white Fender Stratocaster brought in $2.8 million. Adams organized the charity auction of the guitar, signed by himself and by guitarists including Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Brian May, Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Liam Gallagher and Noel Gallagher. The money went to the Reach Out To Asia fund, and the sale set a record as the world's costliest guitar. On the 29th of January 2005, he was one of 150 performers at Canada for Asia, a CBC benefit concert in Toronto for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, which raised $4 million. The Rock by the River concert on the 25th of May 2005 raised 1.3 million pounds for the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, organized with his cousin Johnny Armitage.

  Most of Adams's giving flows through The Bryan Adams Foundation, which is mostly funded by Adams himself and makes grants to specific projects that improve people's lives. In November 2019 the foundation gave Park Walk Primary School in Chelsea a new playground. Earlier it had built one for Ashburnham Community School in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. For his 2019 Shine a Light tour, he teamed up with the shipping company DHL to plant a tree for every ticket sold.

  On the 14th of September 2014, Adams was the first artist to sing at the Invictus Games, organized by Prince Harry in East London. Prince Harry returned the favor by attending Adams's exhibition on wounded soldiers in London. On the 30th of September 2017, he and Bruce Springsteen closed the Invictus Games in Toronto together. They finished with a duet of "Cuts Like a Knife" and "Badlands." In 2016, Adams cancelled an April 14 show at the Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi after the state passed the Religious Liberty Accommodations Act, following Springsteen's example of cancelling a show over a North Carolina law.

  During his tours of 1992-94, Adams campaigned with Greenpeace Chairman David McTaggart for the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. The International Whaling Commission created the sanctuary in 1994. On the 10th of November 2002, he played "Run to You" and "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" with Brian May at the Royal Opera House in London, a benefit for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. In April 2019, off the coast of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, he physically intervened to protect a whale when local whalers tried to harpoon it in a conservation zone. He also founded the St. Vincent and the Grenadines Environment Fund. Adams became a vegan in 1989, at 29, and his motto is "If you love animals, don't eat them."

  In May 2020, a profane social media post blaming the COVID-19 pandemic on wet-market animal sellers drew heavy criticism. Adams named no particular race, but the phrase "Bryan Adams racist" began trending. He apologized, saying he "just wanted to have a rant about the horrible animal cruelty in these wet-markets being the possible source of the virus, and promote veganism."

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• 8. Through The Lens

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  In 2002, Adams was invited, with other photographers from the Commonwealth, to photograph Queen Elizabeth II during her Golden Jubilee. One photograph from the session became a Canadian postage stamp in 2004 and again in 2005. A portrait of the Queen with Prince Philip hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

  Three Lead Awards in Germany recognize his fashion photography, the most recent in October 2015 for his story on Helmut Berger, with earlier wins in June 2012 and 2006. He founded the art fashion Zoo Magazine, based in Berlin, and shoots for it regularly. His work has run in British Vogue, American Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, British GQ and Esquire, and he has shot campaigns for Hugo Boss, Guess Jeans, Converse, Montblanc and Jaguar, among others. In the summer of 2021 he shot the 48th Pirelli Calendar in two working days in June in Los Angeles. A further day of work in Capri at the end of July completed it. His subjects included Iggy Pop, Rita Ora, Cher, Grimes and Jennifer Hudson.

  Two early books carried a charitable purpose. Made in Canada, published in 1999 for Flare Magazine, sent its proceeds to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. American Women, from 2005, was made for Calvin Klein, and its proceeds went to breast cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. Adams dedicated both books to his friend Donna, who died of the disease. His retrospective Exposed was published by Steidl in October 2012. In 2013 he followed it with Wounded - The Legacy of War, a book about the human consequences of war. On the 16th of September 2015, the Royal Photographic Society in London gave him an Honorary Fellowship. Album covers shot by Adams include Amy Winehouse's Lioness: Hidden Treasures and Rammstein's Zeit.

  His first listed exhibition was at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in 1999. Exposed began its long tour at the Multimedia Art Museum in Moscow in July 2012 and later reached Fotografiska in Stockholm. In 2024, a pairing of Exposed and Wounded went on view at the War Memorial of Korea in Seoul, from January to April. His latest listing is a group exhibition titled Photography in Power at Fotografiska in Tallinn, Estonia, scheduled for the 9th of May to the 13th of September 2026.

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