Lange returned to help Adams work on his 15th studio album, So Happy It Hurts, albeit Covid meant he had to record everything himself.
People start looking at you different, talking to you different.
Because he can take my little idea and turn it into something quite epic.” I have to say that I have the same infinite awe of his talent. He only works with certain people because he sees something in himself that he can add to it. Because he wants to get the best out of you. That’s why you hear stories about him working really hard and pushing people hard. “If he’s going to get involved in you, and in your work, he wants it to be at a certain level. Is it possible to write a song so universal deliberately? He says yes, but only because he was working with the legendarily meticulous songwriter/producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, the man responsible for huge hit albums such as AC/DC’s Back in Black, Def Leppard’s Hysteria and Shania Twain’s Come On Over. And how the first thing he said after he was released as a hostage was, ‘Is Bryan Adams still No 1?’” And I remember, there was a joke at the time about Terry Waite. I don’t suppose I ever really got to enjoy the surreal aspect of being No 1 for four months. So the way it changed was suddenly, I was playing a lot more places, to much bigger crowds. I was on tour, literally, for four years. People were always saying, ‘You’re Number One in England,’ but I wasn’t around to witness it. If you go to see him live, the crowd really does span all ages, from older people who bought Reckless first time around, to their grandkids, via twenty- and thirtysomethings to whom his songs have always been part of the cultural ether. To this day, lots of people want him hanging up in their kitchen (“I did not know that. You will find scores of Bryan Adams 2022 calendars. Even now – he is 62 – if you search for books about him on Amazon, you will not find muckraking biographies. And I was a big Mott the Hoople fan, so I was like, ‘Wow, Ian Hunter!’ Bob says, ‘Ian, this is… what’s your name again?’” But Clearmountain did work with Adams right through the Eighties, even if A&M rejected Adams’s plea to call his second album Bryan Adams Hasn’t Heard of You Either.Īdams’s Eighties and Nineties stardom was the kind that builds the foundations for a long career. And he said, ‘Well, look, I really gotta go, I got stuff to do, but I’ll walk you downstairs.’ As we were going downstairs in the lift in walked Ian Hunter, who he was working with. He said, ‘I’m just about to start a session, but come on up and let’s talk.’ So I went up there, played a couple songs for him. ‘Hi Bob, I’m Bryan.’ He looked at me, perplexed. “I walked into the studio and I was waiting around and this guy pitched up on his bicycle. One gets an idea of his determination when he talks about deciding he wanted to work with the producer Bob Clearmountain after his first album did nothing. Tony Visconti: ‘Spotify is disgusting – it does nothing to support the culture of music’.
Even when he was No 1 in the UK for 16 weeks with “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You”, the clip that Top of the Pops showed over and over again featured Adams looking less like a rock star than a man who’s realised he has to pop back to B&Q for some more creosote. Bryan Adams rose to fame and success as a rock everyman.