Bryan Adams: 'I don’t have the clout that Taylor Swift does but in my own way it’s really satisfying to have control over things'

Talking to The Yorkshire Post from New York, the 64-year-old explains the shows are not only part of the touring cycle for his most recent album So Happy It Hurts but will also be a chance to celebrate a significant career milestone. “This year is the 40th anniversary of Reckless (his breakthrough album in 1984) so we’re going to bust it out big time,” he says.

Adams hints that a new album might already be near completion for next year, but while he’s travelling the world, he says he still “occasionally” finds the time and inclination to write. “I sort of collect ideas on the backs of airplane napkins and betting slips and that sort of thing and put them together on my phone sometimes. More often lately I’ve been just writing words and they turn into songs.”

There’s also an ongoing project to reclaim some of his early songs from the giant music corporation Universal. Back in 2022, he re-recorded the likes of Run To You, Summer of ’69 and (Everything I Do) I Do It For You for a pair of albums he called Classic. He intends that there will be a third part. The idea, he says, was inspired by Taylor Swift’s revisions of her back catalogue and also Jeff Lynne of ELO. “I’d been working with Jeff Lynne back in 2018 and Jeff was like, ‘You should just re-record your masters’ and I said yeah, maybe I will, but when I saw Taylor go through with it, I thought, you know what, I’m going to do it. Obviously I don’t have the clout that Taylor does but in my own way it’s really satisfying to have control over certain things, so I’m really pleased that I did it and I’m still doing it – in fact we’re going to release Classic III sometime.”

Amid everything else two years ago, Adams released his versions of the songs he wrote with his long-time musical partner Jim Vallance for Pretty Woman – The Musical, a touring producion of which lands at Leeds Grand Theatre next month. Being involved with the show was, he says “exciting”, adding that he’d originally contemplated a stage version of the 1990 film that starred Richard Gere and Julia Roberts back in 2008 “but there wasn’t any interest to make the musical back then”.

“Then I got introduced to the producer, they’d suddenly managed to corral the different rights together and they decided to make it and I put myself up for it. Basically, I auditioned. It was really cool, actually, because I’d never done anything quite like it before. It kind of needed to be the way it was because Broadway is quite a different kettle of fish to rock ’n’ roll album writing, so when the meeting was scheduled I said to Jim, who I wrote the musical with, we should go in there with two or three ideas for segments of the musical, even though we didn’t know what segments they were going to use, we presumed they’d need this and they’d need that and an opening number, so we sat down and scrambled together a few ideas and all of them made it into the musical.”

Composing for a musical was, he found, “much more songwriting by committee”. “You’d go into the room and go, ‘Everyone, demo disclaimer, here’s an idea’. Sometimes you’d knock it out of the park and everyone would go, ‘Woah, great, perfect’ and other times it would be just, ‘Could you just maybe do this’. Mostly it was a lyrical thing, it was much more lyrical than it was musical. I’d had some experience because I’d done a film back in the 2000s called Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, which was a DreamWorks production, and I was working with Hans Zimmer on that and it was basically telling the story of a horse in the Wild West and they’d finished the production of the film but they hadn’t narrated it or told the story with music so it was up to me to come up with ideas. It was a really great project.”

Adams first met Vallance in an instrument store in Vancouver in 1978. Then 18 years old, Adams had already been in a couple of bands while Vallance was a comparative musical veteran, having played drums and been the principal songwriter in the Canadian rock group Prism. Together they would go on to write scores of songs over a 45-year period. Adams believes their partnership works so well because Vallance has “great ideas and he’s really fun to work with”, adding: “We have similar musical backgrounds, we come from a similar part of the world and for some reason or another it worked, and let’s just put it at that. It’s difficult to explain but my goodness it worked.”

He says that when they met they had “instant rapport”. “We met in a music shop and the next day we had a cup of tea together and wrote a song just like that.”

Back in those days Adams says his ambition was simply to keep a roof over his head. “All I cared about was just to pay my rent. I didn’t have two pennies to scrub together, I was so broke. I used to borrow bus fare off Jim so I could get to his house. It was really tough.”

His big international breakthrough occured with his fourth album, Reckless. Containing hits such as Run To You, Summer of ’69, Somebody and Heaven, it would go on to sell 12 million copies around the world. Adams cannot recall any particular eureka moment while they were working in the studio but does remember: “There was a lot of momentum because we’d toured America quite extensively and had quite good success – I managed to pay everybody back, basically. Cuts Like a Knife (his third album) put me at zero, and luckily I had a few more songs in me.

“In terms of eureka moments I don’t know, but it was just trying to make a better record than Cuts Like a Knife. We sort of challenged ourselves to do better and better work. We spent an awful lot of time writing and rewriting.

“For example, Summer of ’69, that song was demo-ed three times and two full recordings were done of it, so I guess I was never pleased with it. Even to the last minute when we were putting the fader down, I didn’t know because I’d spent so much time thinking about how to make that record, the nuances of intro and how to build the song and everything, it was so crafted. Every time I would go into a rehearsal I would go, maybe it needs to do that. There was a lot of thought that went into it, but it doesn’t sound like it, when you hear it now you think, oh, just a tune, that’s how it went, but it was a huge undertaking.

“The song actually came together quite quickly, the record took for ever. I knew what I wanted it to do and the first full recording of it just didn’t do it. I remember what turned the tide because I’d gone out that night and gone into a local club and was watching this ska band and the drummer was a young fellow called Pat Steward and I thought, man, he’s got such good energy. I think he was just a little bit younger than me and I was 24 at the time and went up to him at the break and said have you ever been in the studio? He said no and I said do you want to come in tomorrow and try something? He said ‘sure’, so I brought him into the studio and we recorded three songs with him – Kids Wanna Rock, One Night Love Affair and Summer of ’69 – and he was exactly the missing ingredient that was needed to take the song to an explosive level.”

The icing on the cake with that album was the duet with Tina Turner on It’s Only Love. As a huge fan of Turner’s who’d been to see her performing in clubs, it was a dream come true for Adams. “I’d written a song for her in ’81 that she didn’t record but in ’84 when she was making her solo album Private Dancer I got a call from John Carter, who was producing the record and he said, ‘We’d love you to write a song for the record’. I said, ‘I’m making this album called Reckless right now. Do you think she’d come and sit in on one of the songs?’ and I never heard back.

“We were just wrapping up the album and I realised that Tina was coming through to play in Vancouver, she was the opening act for Lionel Richie, so I called her manager in LA and said, ‘I’ll send you this cassette, we’d love to have Tina sing on the album’, so I sent the song down and then I got a call back saying ‘Tina would like to meet you’. By this time I had Cuts Like a Knife out, so I wasn’t exactly an unknown, but nowhere near the mega status of Tina. Anyway, we met backstage and she said, ‘I love this song’, I said, ‘Great, can you come in tomorrow?’ and she said ‘I can’ and that’s the story.”

Adams’ career went into overdrive in 1991 with the power ballad (Everything I Do) I Do It For You that was featured in the film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. It spent a record-breaking 16 weeks at number one in the UK, eventually selling 15 million copies worldwide. Adams says he had never expected it to blow up in the way it did. “It was just a sweet song, I thought,” he says. Nevertheless Mutt Lange, his co-writer, “knew something I didn’t, he really knew that song had potential”. “I remember him driving up to the studio one day and he goes, ‘Badams – because that’s what he calls me – I think this song has an international sound’. I’ll never forget those words and he was dead right.”

Adams has gone on to rack up 100 million record sales but today he is also well regarded for his photographs of celebrities – indeed he recently joked that these days he is a “photographer moonlighting as a singer”. Photography has long been a passion, he says.

“Because it’s the 40th anniversary of Reckless this year I had to pull all my negatives out from the days when I was shooting in the studio, documenting our work, and I kind of wish that I had done more upmarket photography back in the day. I wish that those photographs had gone on the album sleeve because I like them better than what actually made it on the record – although I do love the cover.”

In 2002 Adams was invited to photograph the Queen. One of the images he took was used as a Canadian postage stamp in 2004 while another, of the Queen with Prince Philip, now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. “I was the Canadian representative for the Commonwealth,” he recalls. Despite having little more than 10 minutes in which to conduct the session, it was, he says, a “really special” assignment and an experience that he “really cherish(es)”.

As for what he’s looking for when setting up photographs, he quips that he’s “making sure that it’s in focus mostly”, but beyond that there’s little preamble. “I get an idea of what’s going to happen and just go for it. So much of it with a thing like comes down to how much the other person is going to enjoy the experience, so you just want to keep it as casual and fun as possible. I hate getting myself in front of a camera, so I can appreciate how they feel. But the last person I worked with lately was Iggy Pop, and it was one of the most fun days ever.”

After nearly half a century in music, the excitement for Adams comes from having full control over his own career. “I’m an independent artist now, I’m not signed to a label,” he says, “so the whole advent of getting control of things and putting things in place for the future is really exciting. Learning about so much of the business that I was never doing before. I don’t have a manager, I don’t have a record company, all I have is a booking agent and that’s it.”

Bryan Adams plays at the Utilita Arena, Sheffield on May 18, Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod on June 18, Dalby Forest, North Yorkshire on June 21, and the Piece Hall, Halifax on June 23. www.bryanadams.com