Bryan Adams
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
The band drops out and Keith Scott, Bryan Adams’s guitar man since 1976, plays that four-chord riff at the centre of Run to You, instantly transporting his audience back to stonewashed denim, school dances and early amorous fumbles. Reckless, the album Adams released on his 25th birthday, in 1984, is a stone-cold classic, impervious to the passing of time. The crowd punch the air with a collective “Yes!” to welcome the immortal Somebody, a song so dependable you’d let it date your daughter.
We’re only three numbers in on Tuesday night, but already a packed 3Arena is commandeering the chorus and grinning as if they’ve been given an unexpected bank holiday. So good are Adams and his tighter-than-a-mountain-bend band that you can even forgive them for speeding up the tempo of Heaven, a perfect power ballad.
Lean, fit, in miraculously fine voice at 65, and sporting his regulation serial-killer haircut, Adams then recalls recording with Tina Turner, who took him on a European tour. Without her, he reckons, he might still be playing the National Stadium, where he made his Irish debut in 1987. The band explode into It’s Only Love and Scott swings his Stratocaster all the way around his body – because that’s always a class move.
At this point you might think the groover from Vancouver has carelessly front-loaded the show, but the man has more hits than a wedding disco. What about the daft but great Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? or the wah-wah chug of the superbly titled The Only Thing That Looks Good on Me Is You or even the admirable determination of Go Down Rockin’, where he and the great Scott reprise the harmonica-guitar duel at the heart of The Rolling Stones’ Midnight Rambler?
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All right, the selections from his forthcoming Roll with the Punches album pale in comparison, but they’re quickly forgotten when Adams detonates the building by recalling the purchase of his first real six-string at the five and dime. Summer of ’69. Had I been wearing a tie, I would have wrapped it around my head and run up and down the aisle screaming.
The lothario from Ontario even manages to breathe renewed life into (Everything I Do) I Do It for You, a song that held the number-one spot for so long in the early 1990s that it made lockdown look like a brief sojourn. But that’s Adams’s secret. Everything, as he sings in the encore, is coming straight from the heart. He holds nothing back and there are no misplaced attempts at irony or cool.
You want to hear Frankie Valli’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You played as if it were the B-side to Please Please Me? Here you go. You want to take your shirt off and wave it in the air, as Adams encourages the audience to do during his You Belong to Me/Blue Suede Shoes medley? Step right up.
Cynics may mock him, but what’s wrong with writing anthems that people take to their hearts? Every Adams show is a celebration where the audience are as much a part of the proceedings as the performer, and each time he turns the camera towards them it captures joyous faces having the night of their lives. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it,” Adams says with a smile. Now that’s cool.
Bryan Adams plays SSE Arena, Belfast, on Wednesday, May 21st, and then 3Arena, Dublin, again on Friday, May 23rd
