Bryan Adams at Scandinavium – Review

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CONCERT For someone who has seen stage performer Bryan Adams multiple times over three decades – and I know there are many of us here tonight – one thing keeps coming back.

A sincere warmth.

Place: Scandinavium, Gothenburg. Audience: 10,584. Length: 2 hours and 20 minutes. Best: “Somebody”, “This time”, outro to “(Everything I do) I do it for you” and “Run to you”. Worst: The Mel C hit “When you’re gone” becomes a bit of a bracket.

Bryan Adams was my first idol. The early 90s worship culminated in me singing a song with the rock star on stage. However, my sister calls just before tonight’s concert to inform me that this unlikely event took place at the Globe – not here in Gothenburg – as I wrote in a column yesterday.

After the most passionate support of childhood and early adolescence faded, I have followed Adams from a distance. Seen an artist age with dignity; an award-winning photographer, a vegan and animal rights activist, finally a father.

I still have a hard time seeing Bryan Adams through adult pop journalist glasses. But his musical idea: to move the rock he himself heard on the radio as a youth (50s, 60s and 70s ditto) two notches forward (to the 80s and 90s) is still overlooked.

Before the concert, when an inflatable car flies over the audience, is played The 1975 and The War On Drugs and I think about how Adam’s legacy is heard a little everywhere today (the latter, by the way, would kill for a song like “Run to you”).

– My name is Bryan, I’m your singer for tonight”, the Canadian introduces himself at tonight’s European premiere. He is flanked by a band that has largely followed him since the 80s. The tour shares a name with the latest album “So happy it hurts”, his fifteenth.

Rock has taken so many paths during the roughly 40 years that the Vancouver singer has been active that he feels strangely relevant again – even if tonight he adapts to the spirit of the times by cutting a verse in “Can’t stop this thing we started” (90s rock songs were insanely long). During “Somebody”, however, it is like being in an ice rink in Toronto in the early 80s, but at the same time only very much here and now.

In the 90s, Bryan Adams was sometimes called a “butter singer”. Does the expression even exist today? His soft rock, on the contrary, feels modern in the light of the current pop regent Taylor Swiftwho also understood that the best music is not necessarily made by whoever tries to play the coolest in class.

Adams is today 64 years old. What distinguishes him from, say, Niall Horan, is that he is an artist with a very long history. His audience tonight consists of 10,000 people who have danced their first tapper and perhaps had their hearts broken for the last time to his music. Somehow you can feel it in the room, especially in the almost unbearably sad ballad “Heaven”.

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Maybe I still like Bryan Adams so much because he personifies the last time in life when everything was still uncomplicated, untouched. We can’t rewind time, but we can hear music through our eleven-year-old ears again. And during the thunder ballad “(Everything I do) I do it for you” I am transported in a second to the boy’s room, the silver Pioneer stereo and Kaj Kindvalls voice.

For someone who has seen Bryan Adams on stage multiple times over three decades – and I know there are many of us here tonight – one thing keeps coming back. A sincere warmth.

When “Summer of ’69” has fallen silent, the audience starts the song again with a sing-along. Bryan and the band just hang on. I don’t know if I’ve seen such a seamless interplay between artist and audience in any other context. Adams & Co perform their best-loved number – and the rest of the evening’s string of classics – with professional pride. I can’t really think of a better word.

At the end of the concert, Bryan dedicates one of the first songs he ever wrote to his 96-year-old mother who took the $1,000 she had put aside for her college education and bought a piano instead. The song’s title really sums it all up: “Straight from the heart”.

Bryan Adams plays at Hovet in Stockholm tonight, April 26.

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