Everything he’s done

On 29 June 1991, a record called ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’ by Bryan Adams entered the UK charts, at No. 8. At that point, I was blissfully in love with my girlfriend, had just got a first at university and had won a scholarship to a postgraduate journalism course. By the time it departed from the charts, on 14 December — after a run that included a still-record 16 weeks at No. 1 — I had been dumped by my girlfriend, had dropped out of the journalism course, and my dad, who had been poorly when the record entered the charts, was a month away from dying.

During the course of one single’s chart run, all the certainties in my life had been overturned. All of which is a roundabout way of saying how right Noël Coward was about cheap music: think how many personal disasters and triumphs must have been soundtracked by Adams’s theme to Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

In 1991 it was hard to think of Adams as anything other than the blandest of the bland, a gruff emoter dealing in lowest common denominators (‘There’s no love like your love/ And no other could give more love,’ is a lyric so clumsy is still makes me cringe).

But something has happened in the meantime. It’s not that Adams got hip (the crowd at Wembley Arena veered strongly towards late middle-aged couples, though there were kids there, too: I noticed a pair of young women in front of me, a couple of teenagers to my left), more that some of his virtues have been reassessed.

These days you can go to a club night, Ultimate Power, where you can be surrounded by 1,200 young people singing along to power ballads like ‘I Do It For You’.