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Bryan Adams

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This article is about the singer. For other people with a similar name, see Brian Adams.

Bryan Adams, OC, OBC (born 5 November 1959) is a Canadian singer, guitarist and songwriter.

Some of his best-known albums are Reckless, Waking up the Neighbours and 18 Til I Die.

Adams is a Member of the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia for his contribution to popular music. In 1998 he was promoted to an Officer of the Order of Canada for his philanthropic work. He was also inducted into Canada's Walk of Fame in 1998, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame at Canada's Juno Awards April 2006. He has been nominated for three Academy Awards.

Early life

Adams was born in Kingston, Ontario, and traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East as a child with his diplomat parents, until they settled back in Canada in 1973. Adams started his musical career by dropping out of school at age 15.

Musical career

At the age of seventeen, Adams sent a few demo recordings to A&M Records and was signed to them by age 18 for one dollar. He has written and released fourteen albums since then.

Some of the first demos written in 1978 have surfaced over the years; most notably is "I'm Ready" (recorded for both the Cuts Like a Knife LP and later on the MTV Unplugged album) and "Remember", which went on his first album. Both songs were covered by other artists before his first album was even released.

This time was also the start of a long songwriting partnership between Adams and co-writer Jim Vallance, which led to the first solo album, Bryan Adams, released in 1980. His second album, You Want It You Got It (1981), contained the FM radio hit "Lonely Nights", but it wasn't until his third album, Cuts Like a Knife, that he broke through with four hits in 1983, most notably with the title track. He quickly followed up that album with Reckless at the end of 1984, which produced six Top 40 songs and has since been certified five times platinum in the US. Next came Into the Fire in 1987, which was also certified platinum. This was the last album completely written by Adams and Vallance, but many of the fragments of their other songs ended up on the forthcoming block buster Waking up the Neighbours .

Live!Live!Live! is the complete recording of the 3 July 1988 concert in Werchter, Belgium, which was broadcast by the CBC in Canada and on MTV around the world. One of his most successful albums is 1991's Waking up the Neighbours (see 1991 in music), which was produced by Robert John "Mutt" Lange and Adams, and featured the single "Everything I Do (I Do It for You)". This album and the song went to number one everywhere in the world in 1991 and 1992, with the song spending a record-breaking sixteen weeks at number one on the charts in the United Kingdom. The next album was the hits collection So Far So Good lead by the single "Please forgive Me", a slow rock ballad.

The next four years saw Adams releasing an album every year for four years, with 18 til I Die summer 1996, Bryan Adams MTV Unplugged winter 1997, On a Day Like Today autumn 1998, and The Best of Me worldwide in 1999 and in the U.S. in early 2002. In May 2002 he released the DreamWorks soundtrack, which went gold in the U.S.

Room Service was released on 20 September 2004, in Canada and in Europe; "Open Road" was its first single. The album was released in the U.S. on 10 May 2005, on Mercury Nashville. Anthology is a two disc set, released in 2005 as a retrospective collection of hits and some more obscure tracks from the 25 years of recording.

Social activist

In 1985 Adams co-wrote the Canadian benefit record for Ethiopia called Tears Are Not Enough. In that same year, he took part in the U.S. side of the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia. He was a featured member of Amnesty International's 1986 A Conspiracy of Hope Tour and was in London to play at the Nelson Mandela birthday party concert at Wembley Stadium in 1988.

In 1990 he joined many other guests (including Michael Kamen) for Roger Waters' massive performance of The Wall in Berlin, Germany. In 1992 Adams protested against backward Canadian Content regulations, which were changed as a result. He successfully campaigned for the Southern Antarctic Whale Sanctuary in the mid-1990s with Greenpeace Chairman David McTaggert. (The two distributed over 500,000 postcards at concerts around the world encouraging politicians to vote yes for the creation of the sanctuary.) On his 1998 album On a Day Like Today, he supports the Elephant Sanctuary, Hohenwald in Tennessee and Elefriends in England. Adams also supports breast cancer research through donations from his photography (see below).

On 29 January 2005, Adams joined the CBC benefit concert from Toronto for victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake

On 2 July 2005, Adams performed at Live 8's Canadian performance in Barrie, Ontario.

On 25 May 2005, Adams and cousin Johnny Armitage raised £1.3M from a concert and auction entitled Rock by the River for the Royal Marsden Hospital in London.

On 15 November 2005, Adams played in Qatar and raised an astonishing £1.5M ($2,617,000) through a performance and the auction of a guitar he had purposely signed by many of the worlds most prominent guitarists. The money went to Qatar's "Reach Out to Asia" campaign to help the underprivileged across the continent, and to his own projects of rebuilding a school in Thailand and building a new sports center in Sri Lanka, both of which had been devastated by the tsunami.

On 29 January 2006, he was the first western artist to perform in Karachi, Pakistan, in conjunction with a benefit concert to raise money for underprivileged children to go to school; some of the proceeds of that concert also went to victims of the 2005 earthquake.

On 15th May he attended the Hope Foundation's London event (hosted by designer Bella Freud) helping to raise a portion of the £250,000 pounds for support of Palestinian Refugee Children.

On 15th May 2006 Adams was made an Ambassador to the Prince's Trust, an honarary appointment made by Prince Charles Charity in London to raise awareness for young people looking for work.

In June 2006 at three different charity auctions in London, England, Adams offered individuals from the public the chance to bid to sing with him live in concert. Over £50,000.00 was raised with money going to the NSPCC (The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children), Children in Need (an annual British charity appeal organized by the BBC) and the UCLH.

As a photographer

Adams accepting a LeadAward for photography in 2006.
Enlarge
Adams accepting a LeadAward for photography in 2006.

Adams has had his photographs published in Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, Jane and Interview, among others. His other photographic efforts are publishing 'Zoo Magazine', the fashion/art magazine based in Berlin, Germany. On 1 June 2005, he published his first book of photos in the United States with Calvin Klein called American Women; proceeds from this book go to breast cancer research for programs at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. He released a similar book of photos called Made in Canada in December 1999. Both were a tribute to his friend Donna, who died of breast cancer.

In 2004 Adams was invited, along with other photographers from the Commonwealth, to photograph Queen Elizabeth II during her Golden Jubilee; one of his photographs was used as a Canadian postage stamp in 2004 and again in 2005 (see Queen Elizabeth II definitive stamp (Canada)).

On the 15 March 2006, Adams was presented with the gold award for his photo editorial on actor Mickey Rourke at the German Lead Awards in Hamburg, Germany.

Photographic Exhibitions include:

Personal life

Soundtrack works

His works for movie soundtracks include: Adams has been nominated for three Academy Awards for his film compositions.

Discography

Albums

Singles

From Bryan Adams (1980): From You Want It You Got It (1981): From ''Cuts Like a Knife (1983): From Reckless (1984): From Into the Fire (1987): From Waking up the Neighbours (1991): From So Far So Good (1993): From The Three Musketeers (soundtrack) (1993): From Don Juan DeMarco (soundtrack) (1995): From Road Tested (Bonnie Raitt) (1995): From 18 til I Die (1996): From The Mirror Has Two Faces (soundtrack) (1996): From Unplugged (1997): From On a Day Like Today (1998): From The Best of Me (1999 & 2002): From Behind the Sun (Chicane album) (2000): From (soundtrack) (2002): From Room Service: From Anthology (2005):

Songs written for and/or performed by other artists

B-sides and odd singles

Odd recordings

Filmography

See also

External links

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