A brief exploration of my (unnecessary) adoration for Bryan Adams

The moment I fell in love with music: I was ten years old and had tuned into my town’s only radio station, an AM station that played nothing that was released before 1990. The song was one I had heard many times, the Grease theme song by the one and only Frankie Valli. From that moment on I listened to music constantly. Weekends were always filled with Rage and Video Hits weekends, my dad had always loved music playing in the background and I just took it up a notch. Soon I was asking to buy music magazines with my pocket money and I was given a CD player for my birthday.

The moment I fell in love with Bryan Adams: I heard Let’s Make a Night To Remember playing in a restaurant. It was the most romantic song I had ever heard. And I knew it was a bit of a sexy song, so I kept this information entirely to myself. Night to Remember hit the ARIA chart at 7# and for a few weeks I heard it a lot. And then, hardly at all.

I wasn’t really in love with Bryan Adams, he was way too old for me, and I was much more inclined to follow boy bands with dorky haircuts than Bryan who is older than my parents. And he wasn’t cool in the way that Human Nature were cool. He wasn’t John Farnham — our family’s copy of Full House was constantly on repeat, and in our house we all love Whispering Jack. Bryan’s music was just there, and in the 90s, it always was. Many times I’d looked at the 18 ’Til I Die CD at Kmart and put it back — I would have to make do with taping his songs on the radio until I…