Bryan Adams
On November 5, 1959, the legendary Canadian singer, guitarist, songwriter, and photographer Bryan Adams was born!
(Photo: Mike Lewis)
He is considered one of the most rugged, recognizable and successful voices in the history of world rock, the undisputed symbol of blue-collar rock with the white T-shirt and jeans, who sold over a hundred million albums worldwide, created stadium anthems and huge ballads that broke historical chart records, while at the same time building a second and glorious career as an award-winning international fashion and portrait photographer. Here are 40 interesting facts about Bryan Adams...
1. He was born in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, with the full name Bryan Guy Adams, to parents Elizabeth Jane and Conrad J. Adams, a couple of English immigrants who left Britain and settled in Canada in the 1950s.
2. His parents gave him the middle name Guy because he was born on November 5, the day on which the historic Guy Fawkes Night is celebrated in Britain.
3. His father Conrad served in the British Army and then the Canadian Army before becoming a diplomat in the Canadian Foreign Service and the United Nations, making Adams' childhood a globe-trotting journey.
4. During the 1960s and 1970s, he traveled with his family and lived in Portugal, Austria, Japan, and even Israel, where his family lived for a period of time during his childhood as part of his father's diplomatic mission.
5. He purchased his first guitar, a simple Spanish acoustic guitar, at the age of ten while living in Portugal, and just two years later he bought himself his first electric guitar in the city of Reading, England, an Italian imitation of the Fender Stratocaster model.
6. In 1973, after his parents divorced when he was fourteen, he returned to Canada with his mother and younger brother Bruce, and they settled in North Vancouver, while the relationship with his strict father was severed for many years until they reconciled over a dinner in Tokyo in the mid-1990s.
7. As a young boy in Vancouver, he worked washing dishes in restaurants, selling pet food, and in record stores to save money to purchase musical equipment, and at the age of fifteen he decided to drop out of high school and devote the savings intended for his academic studies to buying a grand piano and forming rock bands.
8. At the age of fifteen, he was already performing in rough nightclubs across Canada with local bands like "Shock" and "Sweeney Todd," and in 1976, when he was only sixteen, he replaced vocalist Nick Gilder in the Canadian glam-rock band "Sweeney Todd" and recorded the album "If Wishes Were Horses" with them, which was released in 1977.
9. The fateful turning point in his life occurred in January 1978 at a musical instrument store in Vancouver, where he met by chance the former drummer of the band "Prism", composer and producer Jim Vallance, a meeting that gave birth to one of the most prolific and successful writing duos in the history of Canadian rock.
10. Before embarking on his solo career, Adams and Jim Vallance wrote songs for a number of other artists and bands, including BTO, Loverboy, Bonnie Tyler, and the legendary hard rock band Kiss, for whom they co-wrote the songs "War Machine" and "Rock and Roll Hell" for the 1982 album "Creatures of the Night."
11. In 1978, he signed his first recording contract as a solo singer with A&M Records for the nominal sum of just one dollar, the minimum amount required by Canadian law to make a contract legally binding, and Adams kept the original one-dollar check framed in his office for decades.
12. Much to the surprise of rock fans, the first single he released under his own name in 1979 was actually a distinctly disco track called "Let Me Take You Dancing", which was a success in dance clubs in the United States but soon led Adams to demand that the record company delete the song from his catalog and focus on pure rock 'n' roll.
13. In February 1980, his self-titled debut album, "Bryan Adams," was released, and a year later he recorded his second album, "You Want It, You Got It," in New York, produced by Bob Clearmountain, in which his energetic and rough rock style took shape and he gained first exposure on rock radio stations in the United States with the song "Lonely Nights".
14. In 1981, he recruited the virtuoso guitarist Keith Scott to join his regular backing band, who has since become his musical sidekick and is responsible for the most melodic and recognizable guitar solos in all of his biggest hits.
15. His big international breakthrough came in January 1983 with his third album, "Cuts Like a Knife," which soared into the top ten on the US Billboard charts thanks to the winning combination of the moving piano ballad "Straight from the Heart," the sweeping title song "Cuts Like a Knife" with its iconic "Na-na-na" chorus, and the hit "This Time."
16. Following the success of "Cuts Like a Knife," Adams embarked on a marathon tour that lasted thirteen consecutive months, during which he opened for giant North American stadiums for acts such as "Foreigner," "Journey," "Def Leppard," and "The Police," often stealing the show from the main act.
17. On his twenty-fifth birthday, November 5, 1984, he released his fourth album, "Reckless," which became the first Canadian album in history to sell over a million copies in Canada itself, topped the US Billboard charts, and sold over twelve million copies worldwide.
18. The album "Reckless" recorded an unprecedented achievement when all six singles released from it, "Run to You", "Somebody", "Heaven", "Summer of '69", "One Night Love Affair" and the stormy duet "It's Only Love" with the queen of rock and soul Tina Turner, entered the top fifteen on the American Billboard chart.
19. The electrifying opening single "Run to You" was originally written by Adams and Jim Vallance for the band "Blue Öyster Cult", and after the band rejected the song and the duo ".38 Special" also gave up on it, Adams decided to record it himself and turned it into one of the biggest rock hits of the decade.
20. The huge ballad "Heaven," which became Adams' first song to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100, was actually written a year earlier for the soundtrack to the scandalous and unsuccessful film "A Night in Heaven," and was inspired by the hit "Faithfully" by the band "Journey," which Adams was supporting at the time, with Journey drummer Steve Smith playing drums on the recording.
21. The song "Heaven" was almost left off the album "Reckless" because producer Bob Clearmountain felt it was too soft and did not fit the rock nature of the album, but Adams insisted at the last minute to include it in the final track list.
22. The timeless classic "Summer of '69" was originally titled "Best Days of My Life" and was the most difficult song to record on the "Reckless" album, after Adams and his team recorded it in three completely different arrangements and nearly scrapped it before finding the explosive energy it is known for today.
23. Although millions of listeners are certain that the song "Summer of '69" is about nostalgia for 1969, a year when Adams was just nine years old, Adams has revealed in interviews that the number 69 was chosen as a bold metaphor for sexual position and stormy summer love, as evidenced by the song's closing line in which he sings "Me and my baby in a 69."
24. The characters mentioned in the famous line "Jimmy quit, Jody got married" from "Summer of '69" are based on real people from Adams' life, with Jimmy being a drummer who left his boyhood band, while Jody is Jody Perpik, Adams' dedicated sound technician who got married at the same time and even appeared in the song's official music video in a car with a newlywed license plate.
25. On July 13, 1985, he performed at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia as part of the historic "Live Aid" charity show, where he performed an energetic four-song set that included "Kids Wanna Rock", "Summer of '69", "Tears Are Not Enough" and "Cuts Like a Knife" in front of more than a billion live viewers.
26. In 1987, he released his fifth and darker album, "Into the Fire", which dealt with more political, social and painful issues such as the rights of Native Americans in North America in the song "Native Son" and the trauma of soldiers returning from war in the song "Remembrance Day", alongside the rock hit "Heat of the Night".
27. In 1989, his permanent partnership with Jim Vallance ended, but in that same year he began collaborating with legendary super-producer Robert John "Mutt" Lange, the architect behind the giant albums of "AC/DC" and "Def Leppard", and together they created the masterpiece album "Waking Up the Neighbors" in 1991.
28. From the collaboration with Mutt Lange and film composer Michael Kamen was born the huge ballad (Everything I Do) I Do It for You" for the soundtrack of the film "Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves", a song whose lyrics were written by Adams and Lange in just forty-five minutes in a London studio after the film studios had previously approached Kate Bush, Annie Lennox and Peter Cetera.
29. The song (Everything I Do) I Do It for You" broke a historical record that has not been broken to this day in the British Singles Chart, when it stayed at number one for sixteen consecutive weeks, reached number one in nineteen countries and sold over fifteen million copies as a physical single.
30. On July 21, 1990, he participated in the historic grand show of the album "The Wall" by Roger Waters of the band "Pink Floyd" at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin to commemorate the fall of the Berlin Wall, where Adams gave an unforgettable performance of the songs "What Shall We Do Now?" and "Young Lust".
31. During the 1990s, he also established his status as the king of cinematic duets in the world of rock and pop, when he again conquered the top of the Billboard charts in 1993 with "All for Love" alongside Rod Stewart and Sting from the film The Three Musketeers, and in 1995 with the flamenco ballad "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?" accompanied by legendary flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucía for the film Don Juan de Marco.
32. In 1993, he released his first compilation album, "So Far So Good," which included only one new song, the powerful ballad "Please Forgive Me," which itself became a huge global hit with the opening acoustic guitar and electric solo by Keith Scott, and catapulted the collection to sales of over thirteen million copies.
33. In November 1998, he released one of the most surprising and beloved duets of his career, "When You're Gone" from the album "On a Day Like Today", in which he hosted Melanie C from the British pop group "Spice Girls", a collaboration that was born after the two met by chance in a London hotel lobby and became a huge hit in Europe and the UK.
34. In August 2001, he made history in Ireland when he performed in front of seventy thousand fans at the legendary Slane Castle, a performance documented in the masterful DVD "Live at Slane Castle." Only a week before the performance, his regular drummer Mickey Curry was called in to urgently replace another drummer who had been injured.
35. In 2002, he composed and performed the entire soundtrack for the successful DreamWorks animated film, "Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron," in collaboration with renowned film composer Hans Zimmer, with Adams recording all of the film's songs in both English and fluent French.
36. Adams has maintained a warm and special connection with Israel since his childhood, and in December 2017 he arrived in the country for an unforgettable concert tour that included two huge performances at the Menorah Mivtachim Hall in Tel Aviv and another performance at the Peace Arena in Jerusalem, where he rocked the halls with two and a half hours of consecutive hits.
37. Alongside his musical career, he developed a distinguished career as a professional fashion and portrait photographer, publishing prestigious photography books including the book "Exposed" from 2012, the book of portraits of wounded British soldiers "Wounded, The Legacy of War" from 2013, and the comprehensive book "#shotbyadams" released in November 2025.
38. Among his most famous subjects as a photographer are Britain's Queen Elizabeth II, whose photograph Adams took was chosen to appear on an official Canadian postage stamp to mark her Golden Jubilee, and the late singer Amy Winehouse, of whom Adams was a close friend and photographed the cover of her posthumous album "Lioness, Hidden Treasures."
39. Adams has been a devout vegan and passionate environmental activist for over three and a half decades. He has abstained from eating meat and animal products since 1989, and founded the Bryan Adams Foundation, a charity that supports education and assistance to disadvantaged populations around the world, an activity that earned him the prestigious Order of Canada.
40. Even in his seventh decade, he continues to create at full steam, founded his independent record label Bad Records after leaving his parent company, released his energetic sixteenth studio album "Roll with the Punches" in August 2025, which was nominated for a Juno Award for Rock Album of the Year, and in April 2026, he released the album "Tough Town," which includes new collaborations with his longtime partners Jim Vallance and Mutt Lange.
Whether he's tearing his vocal cords and guitar on stadium stages with timeless rock anthems or capturing rare human moments through the lens of the camera, Bryan Adam remains a symbol of hard work, authenticity and an unending passion for rock 'n' roll.
"Face/Off" - Israel's Rock Blog
Comments