A night of relentless, passionate energy and excellence

Saturday, 1 February 2025

Bryan Adams’ performance at Wolfbrook Arena in Christchurch on Friday night was on of “relentless, passionate energy”, reviewer Grant Shimmin says.

Bryan Adams at Wolfbrook Arena, Christchurch

REVIEW: Two hours of burning through uncontained, effervescent energy is enough to leave anyone feeling utterly spent. And that’s just the audience. Bryan Adams looked like he might have more in him.

Though perhaps that impression was partly the result of the apparently still pristine tighty whitey T-shirt and white stovepipe trousers he’d had on throughout a 120-minute workout that featured few genuinely quiet moments.

Bryan Adams - still rocking a tight white T-shirt and stovepipe trousers after all these years.

No wonder the slightly built 65-year-old is in such incredible shape after five decades of turning it on for global audiences. It’s hard to believe the power of the voice that emanates so unerringly from that slim form.

The tone of a Christchurch show delayed nearly six years, first by the 2019 mosque massacres that shattered the city two days before Adams’ scheduled concert, and then by a global pandemic, was set early, with Kick Ass, a song featuring a spoken word intro by John Cleese that presages an onslaught of driving rock. Adams and his band blew straight on into Can’t Stop This Thing We’ve Started, Somebody, and 18 Till I Die, the title track of his seventh studio album, released in 1996, before pausing for breath.

Adams brought plenty of new music to his set, as well as his classics from yesteryear.

When established acts who have been doing their thing for half a century or more go on tour, there’s sometimes a temptation to lazily assume they might be cashing in on the back catalogue. The thought may have crossed my own mind in the preceding weeks, if I’m honest, as someone who was in my late teens when the Canadian wrote his name indelibly into music history with the 1984 album Reckless, which ended up spawning six singles, including Somebody.

Five decades of performing have not dimmed Adams’ energy or enthusiasm.

That opening salvo would comfortably have blown any such misconceptions away unassisted, but some digging into the period since Adams had last been a feature on my personal playlist had already done some of the heavy lifting. There is nothing “yesterday’s man” about the man from Vancouver Island.

Not only has he continued to release new material, but the production values of this superb show are original and constantly surprising. Kick Ass was a 2021 single off the album So Happy it Hurts, released as a celebration of regained freedom after the deprivations of the pandemic, and the theme for the Australasian tour that kicked off less than 100 metres from Crusaders HQ on Friday, The big screen video footage that accompanies the title track is funny, tender and close to Adams’ heart. You’ll get no spoilers here, but it’s one of a string of highlights.

British former X Factor winner James Arthur was supporting Adams, and gave a “compelling performance”.

Of course there’s a boatload of history associated with the show too, but that experience, running rich through a stellar band all in their sixties, apart from mesmeric guitarist Keith Scott, who has crested 70, adds immeasurably to an extraordinary live experience. Scott’s lead guitar solos are otherworldly, making his shift to the Spanish guitar for Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? a tender and delightful surprise.

The tight unit is completed by Pat Steward, a sprightly 62, who is a regularly looming, intense presence on the big screen, behind the drums, and versatile 64-year-old keyboardist and vocalist Gary Breit.

Their slick togetherness ran like a thread through the concert, but was no better illustrated than on Summer of ’69, a rousing rendition that saw Adams characteristically engage the rapt audience and the audience reciprocate, extending a number that every attendee had been anticipating all night into an extravaganza.

The thing about an artist of the longevity and success of Adams is that just when you think he must have run out of hits, he plucks another one you’d forgotten from the archives. He said at the start they would squeeze as many as they could into the show - “as many as I can remember” - and he wasn’t found wanting.

See him if you can, on Saturday night in Christchurch or at his Auckland gig on Tuesday.

Among the reasons you won’t regret it is the compelling performance of his support act, 2012 British X Factor winner James Arthur, who is living his own dream, confessing that Adams was his first musical love.

– Review by Grant Shimmin.