These days he says he’s “a photographer moonlighting as a singer,” but before that came decades of making high-grade classic rock – and one of the biggest-selling records ever.
MID-MORNING IN SAN Diego, and Bryan Adams is in his hotel room taking his breakfast. It’s a simple affair of toast and a pot of coffee, and a side of fruit. Before tucking in, he asks deferentially: “You don’t mind if I eat while we talk?” So far, so very Bryan Adams. For most of a career in music spanning six decades, the now 63-year-old has been perceived as precisely this: unfussy, unshowy, plain normal. An everyman who just happens to have been vegan for 34 years and since before it was generally known what that even meant.
Adams has hardly ever troubled to tilt at this impression of him. Indeed, he professes not to mind it a bit. Yet it undermines him. Regular Joes don’t tend to sell upwards of 100 million records, as Adams has done. Much less score multiple Grammy (16), Oscar and Golden Globe (three apiece) nominations. In his native Canada he’s the recipient of 20 Juno Awards and an inductee into the Canadian Music Hall Of Fame. Some time very soon his best-loved song, Summer Of ’69, will rack up its billionth stream on Spotify.
Presently he’s on a tour of North American arenas in support of his fifteenth studio album, last year’s So Happy It Hurts. It’s going wonderfully well, he says. “The best tour we’ve done over here in twenty years. I’m very grateful. I’ve been able to carry on and my voice has held out. What more could you want?”
Since the late 90s, Adams has also forged a parallel career for himself as a professional photographer. He’s excelled at this other job too, having had many exhibitions of his work around the world and numerous books of his portraiture published. He shot the 2021 edition of the prestigious Pirelli calendar, and his Golden Jubilee commission of Queen Elizabeth II and consort Prince Phillip hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Among his other subjects are Hillary Clinton, Mick Jagger, Serena Williams, Muhammad Ali, and Kate Moss.
BRYAN GUY ADAMS was born on November 5, 1959 in Kingston, Ontario, to Conrad and Elizabeth Adams, recent English migrants to Canada from Plymouth. His father was a military man, a Sandhurst officer who went on to serve in the UN Peacekeeping Force and as a foreignservice diplomat for his adopted country. The family moved around with his father’s job, Adams and his younger brother Bruce being schooled variously in Vienna, Lisbon and Tel Aviv. When in 1972 his parents separated, Adams and his brother went to live with their mother in Vancouver, on Canada’s northwest tip.
