1. Bryan Adams is estimated to have sold between 75 million and more than 100 million records and singles worldwide, placing him on the list of best-selling music artists.
120 Facts About Bryan Adams
1. 2.
Bryan Adams released his eponymous debut album when he was 20 years of age.
3.
Bryan Adams rose to fame in North America with the 1983 top ten album Cuts Like a Knife; the album featured its title track and the ballad "Straight From the Heart", which became his first US top ten hit.
4.
In 1991, Bryan Adams released " I Do It for You", which went to number one in at least 19 countries, including for 16 straight weeks in the UK.
5.
The song was included on Bryan Adams' Waking Up the Neighbours, a worldwide number one album that sold 16 million copies, including being certified diamond in Canada.
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Bryan Adams is ranked 48th on the list of all-time top artists on the Billboard Hot 100.
7.
Bryan Adams has won 20 Juno Awards and a Grammy Award for Best Song Written for Visual Media amongst 16 Grammy nominations, and has been nominated for five Golden Globe Awards and three Academy Awards for his songwriting for films.
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Bryan Adams has been inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Canada's Walk of Fame, the Canadian Broadcast Hall of Fame, the Canadian Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame.
9.
Bryan Guy Adams was born on November 5,1959, in Kingston, Ontario, the son of Elizabeth Jane and Conrad J Adams, an English couple who emigrated to Canada from Plymouth, South West England in the 1950s.
10.
Bryan Adams travelled with his parents to diplomatic postings in Lisbon, where he attended St Columban's School in Lisbon, Portugal, and Vienna, where he attended the American International School Vienna, in the 1960s, and a Scottish Missionary school, The Tabeetha School, in Jaffa, Israel.
11.
Bryan Adams bought his first electric guitar at the age of 10 in Reading, an Italian brand from Gherson, based on a Fender Stratocaster.
12.
Bryan Adams left school to play in a group called "Shock" and used the funds his parents had saved for his college education to buy an Estey grand piano to tinker with.
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Bryan Adams grew an interest in bands such as CCR and Deep Purple, and attended concerts by Led Zeppelin, T Rex, Elton John, and Tina Turner.
14.
Bryan Adams started working in the Vancouver music scene with bands and as a studio session singer.
15.
The band then recorded their second album If Wishes Were Horses with Adams billed as "Bryan Guy Adams" on vocals.
16.
In 1978, at age 18, Bryan Adams met Jim Vallance through a mutual friend in a Vancouver Long and McQuade musical instrument store.
17.
Bryan Adams's self-titled debut album, mostly co-written with Jim Vallance, was released in February 1980.
18.
From January to May 1982, Bryan Adams spent months traveling on his "You Want It You Got It Tour"; within a few months the album had been picked up across the United States and Bryan Adams was on tour opening for the Kinks and Foreigner.
19.
In 1983, Bryan Adams travelled to America, opening for Journey and performing on over 100 dates in five months.
20.
In December 1984, Bryan Adams embarked on a two-year world tour to launch the album.
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Bryan Adams won Juno Awards for Best Male Vocalist in each year from 1983 to 1987.
22.
In February 1985, Bryan Adams recorded the charity single "Tears Are Not Enough" as a member of The Northern Lights, an improvised supergroup that included Anne Murray, Gordon Lightfoot, Burton Cummings, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, and other Canadian musical artists.
23.
In July 1985, Bryan Adams performed the song at the Live Aid concert, at the JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, in front of over 100,000 people.
24.
In September 1985, Bryan Adams co-wrote two tracks for Roger Daltrey's sixth solo album Under a Raging Moon: "Let Me Down Easy", originally written for Stevie Nicks, and "Rebel".
25.
In January 1986, Bryan Adams provided the ending background vocals to the song "Don't Forget Me " by Canadian rock band Glass Tiger for their debut album The Thin Red Line.
26.
In December 1987, Bryan Adams contributed the song "Run Rudolph Run" to the compilation album A Very Special Christmas, a charity album to benefit the Special Olympics.
27.
Bryan Adams performed at "A Night for the Environment" to raise funds for environmental organizations.
28.
In November 1989, Bryan Adams attended Tina Turner's 50th birthday party at the Reform Club in London.
29.
On New Year's Eve 1990, Bryan Adams performed at the Tokyo Dome.
30.
Bryan Adams returned to London and recorded the backing vocals for "Feels Like Forever", a song written by Adams for Eric Carmen.
31.
Bryan Adams added vocal tracks on the melody of David Foster's "River Of Love" in his home studio in Vancouver.
32.
Kamen sent his score to a number of different artists before Bryan Adams, including Kate Bush who turned the score down.
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In protest, Bryan Adams briefly threatened to boycott Canada's annual Juno Awards, where his album was eventually almost completely ignored by the awards committee.
34.
In July 1992, Bryan Adams performed at Wembley Stadium in front of 80,000 fans, the largest audience on his tour, with Little Angels and Extreme serving as opening acts.
35.
In 1993, Bryan Adams collaborated with Rod Stewart and Sting for the single "All for Love" co-written by Bryan Adams for the soundtrack of the film The Three Musketeers.
36.
In June 1993, Bryan Adams attended a tribute to Sam Cooke in which he played "Bring It On Home to Me" in a duet with Smokey Robinson.
37.
In 1994, Bryan Adams became the first Western artist to perform in Vietnam since James Brown played there in 1971 at the end of the Vietnam War.
38.
In October 1994, Bryan Adams sang one of his favorite songs, "Hound Dog", at the Elvis Presley tribute concert in Memphis.
39.
In November 1997, Bryan Adams penned new lyrics to the Jean-Jacques Goldman song "Puisque tu pars" written that month, remade as Let's Talk About Love recorded by Celine Dion.
40.
In 1999, a demo version of Bryan Adams' translation appeared on the single CD "Cloud Number Nine" in 1999.
41.
Bryan Adams sang on the title track and the song "Without You" for Tina Turner's album Twenty Four Seven, released in October 1999.
42.
Bryan Adams attended Turner's 60th birthday party in London, at which they performed "It's Only Love".
43.
On New Year's Eve, December 31,2000, Bryan Adams performed with Celine Dion at the Bell Center in Montreal.
44.
Bryan Adams co-wrote and performed the songs for the DreamWorks animated film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron in 2002.
45.
Bryan Adams received his fourth Golden Globe Award nomination for Best Song from a Motion Picture from the song.
46.
In 2004, Bryan Adams was ranked 13th on the ARC Weekly chart of top pop artists of the last 25 years, with four number-one singles, ten top five hits and 17 Top-10 hits.
47.
From June to August 2005, Bryan Adams co-headlined a concert tour with Def Leppard that took place at minor league baseball stadiums.
48.
In 2006, Bryan Adams co-wrote and performed the theme music "Never Let Go" which was featured in the closing credits of the film The Guardian.
49.
Also in 2006, Bryan Adams co-wrote the Grammy Award-winning gospel song "Never Gonna Break My Faith" for Aretha Franklin.
50.
Also in 2007, Bryan Adams co-wrote two songs "A Place for Us" and "Another Layer" for the Disney film Bridge to Terabithia.
51.
Bryan Adams released his eleventh album, 11, internationally on March 17,2008.
52.
In March 2008, Bryan Adams played an 11-day, 11-country European acoustic tour to promote the album.
53.
Bryan Adams was one of four musicians who were pictured on the second series of the Canadian Recording Artist Series to be issued by Canada Post stamps on July 2,2009, with estimated one and one-half million Bryan Adams stamps printed.
54.
On February 12,2010, at the 2010 Winter Olympics opening ceremony at BC Place Stadium, Bryan Adams performed "Bang the Drum", a duet with Nelly Furtado co-written with Jim Vallance for the event.
55.
In May 2010, Bryan Adams was one of several Canadian musicians to visit Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper at his official residence.
56.
In November 2010, Bryan Adams released the acoustic album Bare Bones, a live project consisting of twenty songs, to celebrate thirty years of career.
57.
Bryan Adams then embarked on "The Bare Bones Tour", an acoustic tour, and integrated acoustic concerts into other tours.
58.
Bryan Adams performed at the opening ceremony of the 2011 Cricket World Cup on February 17,2011, in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
59.
In 2014, Bryan Adams signed a recording contract with Verve Records and in September, he released Tracks of My Years, an album of cover versions celebrating the 30th Anniversary of Reckless.
60.
Bryan Adams released his first album of all new material in seven years on October 16,2015.
61.
Bryan Adams performed at the 2015 AFL Grand Final, along with Ellie Goulding and Chris Isaak.
62.
On October 14,2016, Bryan Adams released the Wembley 1996 DVD, the recording of his concert, as part of the 18 Til I die tour, held on July 27,1996, at London's Wembley Stadium, in front of over 70,000 spectators.
63.
In 2018, Bryan Adams performed "the Ultimate tour", touring Australia, New Zealand, UK, Europe, India, the US, and Canada.
64.
Bryan Adams first approached Disney in 2009 to discuss writing the music for a possible Broadway theatre adaptation of Pretty Woman.
65.
Bryan Adams worked with producer Paula Wagner and director Jerry Mitchell, spending the next two years writing the music and lyrics, completing the songs in March 2018.
66.
Bryan Adams released his fourteenth album Shine a Light on March 1,2019.
67.
Bryan Adams, while writing this song, did not think it would be performed by Aretha.
68.
Bryan Adams was among hundreds of artists whose material was destroyed in the 2008 Universal fire.
69.
Bryan Adams told the Times that he had asked Universal for access to the master tapes for Reckless in 2013 while working on a remastered edition of the album, but had been told that the tapes could not be found.
70.
On November 15,2019, Bryan Adams released an EP dedicated to Christmas.
71.
On November 13,2020, Bryan Adams was featured on "Stop Crying Your Heart Out" as part of the BBC Radio 2's Allstars' Children in Need charity single.
72.
On December 7,2020, Bryan Adams announced a series of UK concerts following the long hiatus of the "Shine a Light Tour" caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the cancellation of a sold out 17-date tour with Bon Jovi in US arenas.
73.
In July 2021, Bryan Adams signed a deal with Bertelsmann Music Group to release his next album.
74.
On October 11,2021, Bryan Adams released the title track of his 15th studio album, So Happy It Hurts.
75.
Bryan Adams announced dates for a worldwide tour starting in February 2022.
76.
In 2022, via YouTube, Bryan Adams released new versions of the 16 songs of Pretty Woman: The Musical sung by Bryan Adams himself.
77.
In November 2024, Canadian media conglomerate Bell Media announced several partnerships with Bryan Adams, including an internet radio channel, a syndicated radio show that will premiere in January 2025, as well as a CTV concert special featuring a performance of the Reckless album from a three-night residency at the Royal Albert Hall in May 2024.
78.
Bryan Adams' voice has been described as a "sandpaper tenor that's a cross between Joe Cocker and Bruce Springsteen".
79.
Bryan Adams has played various styles of rock, from hard rock and arena rock to pop rock and soft rock.
80.
The genre of the single was disco; the melody, a piano riff inspired by Robbie King, was composed by Vallance on his parents' piano during the Christmas holidays in 1977; Bryan Adams, meanwhile, helped turn the riff into a song.
81.
In 1982, Vallance and Bryan Adams received a call from producer Michael James Jackson to contribute some songs for the next Kiss album.
82.
Bryan Adams was one of the first foreigners to stage a large-scale concert in India in the early 1990s, and he has returned to tour India several times.
83.
Bryan Adams was on the cover of the September 2018 issue of Rolling Stone India; an article in the issue stated that Bryan Adams is "one rock legend whose concerts have created mass frenzy every single time in every single city he's played" in India.
84.
Bryan Adams toured India five times between 1994 and 2018 and has called himself an indophile.
85.
Bryan Adams has participated in concerts and other activities to help raise money and awareness for a variety of causes.
86.
In June 1986, Bryan Adams participated in the two-week Amnesty International "A Conspiracy of Hope" tour alongside Sting, U2 and Peter Gabriel.
87.
In 1986, Bryan Adams performed at The Prince's Trust All-Star Rock Concert in Wembley Arena to celebrate first 10 years of the Trust and again in June 1987 at the 5th Annual Prince's Trust Rock Gala along with Elton John, George Harrison, Ringo Starr and others.
88.
On June 11,1988, Bryan Adams performed at the Nelson Mandela birthday party concert at Wembley Stadium.
89.
In March 1989, Bryan Adams performed on the Greenpeace album Rainbow Warriors, which was released in the Soviet Union on the Melodiya label.
90.
In July 1989, Bryan Adams committed to work on another charity record: the remake of the Deep Purple classic "Smoke on the Water" for Rock Aid Armenia to obtain funds for the 1988 Armenian earthquake.
91.
On March 2,1993, Bryan Adams performed alongside artists including Tina Turner, James Taylor, George Michael, Tom Jones and Dustin Hoffman at that year's edition of Rock for the Rainforest, a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall hosted by Sting and his wife Trudie Styler to benefit the Rainforest Foundation Fund.
92.
On December 10,1997, Bryan Adams took part in a concert called "A Gift of Song", in celebration of the US Committee for UNICEF 50th Anniversary, held at the Z-100 Jingle Ball Madison Square Garden in New York City.
93.
On January 29,2005, Bryan Adams was one of 150 performers at "Canada for Asia", a CBC benefit concert in Toronto for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake; the concert raised $4 million.
94.
In July 2005, Bryan Adams played at Live 8 concert, Barrie, Ontario, to raise awareness about poverty.
95.
On January 29,2006, Bryan Adams became the first Western artist to perform in Karachi, Pakistan after the September 11th attacks in conjunction with a benefit concert by Shehzad Roy to raise money for underprivileged children to go to school and to support victims of the 2005 Pakistan earthquake.
96.
On September 14,2014, Bryan Adams was the first artist to sing at the Invictus Games organised by Prince Harry in East London.
97.
In 2016, Bryan Adams canceled an April 14 concert at Mississippi Coast Coliseum in Biloxi.
98.
In previous years, Bryan Adams had built a playground for Ashburnham Community School in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London with his foundation.
99.
In November 2020, Bryan Adams participated with other artists in the song "Stop Crying Your Heart Out", proposed in a cover performed for the charitable cause of Children in Need under the supervision of BBC Radio 2.
100.
On November 10,2002, Bryan Adams participated in the benefit concert at the Royal Opera House in London for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International.
101.
Bryan Adams is the founder of the St Vincent and the Grenadines Environment Fund, a non-profit company registered in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to support sustainable initiatives to promote the preservation of the beauty and natural value of the islands.
102.
In 2002, Bryan Adams was invited, along with other photographers from the Commonwealth, to photograph Queen Elizabeth II during her Golden Jubilee; one of the photographs from this session was used as a Canadian postage stamp in 2004 and again in 2005, another portrait of both Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip is in the National Portrait Gallery in London.
103.
Bryan Adams won three Lead Awards in Germany for his fashion photography, most recently in October 2015 for his story in Helmut Berger, and previously in June 2012 and again in 2006.
104.
Bryan Adams founded the art fashion Zoo Magazine, based in Berlin, for which he shoots regularly.
105.
Bryan Adams has been published in British Vogue, L'uomo Vogue, American Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, British GQ, Esquire, Interview magazine and i-D, and shot advertising and PR campaigns for Hugo Boss, Guess Jeans, Sand, Converse, Montblanc, John Richmond, Fred Perry, Escada, Gaastra, Zeiss, Joop, Zeiss AG, Schwarzkopf, Ermenegildo Zegna, AGL shoes, Windsor, Jaguar and OPEL cars.
106.
Bryan Adams photographed Iggy Pop, Rita Ora, Cher, Grimes, Normani, Kali Uchis, Jennifer Hudson, Saweetie, St Vincent and Bohan Phoenix.
107.
Bryan Adams has photographed many of his colleagues in the music business.
108.
Bryan Adams became a vegan in 1989, when he was 29 years old, and said that he has more energy as a result of the decision.
109.
Thomsen said that he had an affair with Diana, Princess of Wales; Bryan Adams insists they were just friends.
110.
Grimaldi is Bryan Adams's former personal assistant and is a trustee and co-founder of his namesake foundation.
111.
Bryan Adams maintains homes in London and Paris; the house in Paris was listed on Airbnb.
112.
On October 30,2021, Bryan Adams cancelled his participation in a tribute to singer Tina Turner, just before the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony, after testing positive for COVID-19.
113.
On July 20,2023, Bryan Adams was announced as co-founder of Scottish based music start up SongBox, a web application that allows musicians and other audio content creators to securely store and share their files with anyone they choose.
114.
Bryan Adams was nominated for his fifth Golden Globe in 2007 for songwriting for the film Bobby; the song was performed by Aretha Franklin and Mary J Blige.
115.
In 1990, Bryan Adams was awarded the Order of British Columbia.
116.
Bryan Adams received these awards for his contributions to popular music and philanthropic work via his foundation, which helps improve education for people around the world.
117.
On May 1,2010, Bryan Adams received the Governor General's Performing Arts Award for his 30 years of contributions to the arts.
118.
Bryan Adams has been inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Canada's Walk of Fame, the Canadian Broadcast Hall of Fame, and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.
119.
Bryan Adams is a recipient of the Queen's Golden Jubilee Medal and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal.
120.
In 2023, Bryan Adams was nominated for induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame.