Bryan Adams in 3Arena review: Groover from Vancouver gives fans the night of their lives
Bryan Adams
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★☆
The band drops out and Keith Scott, Bryan Adams's guitar man since 1976, plays that four-chord riff at the centre of Run To You, instantly transporting the majority of his audience back to stonewashed denim, school dances and early amorous fumbles. Reckless, the album Adams released in 1984 on his 25th birthday, is a stone-cold classic and impervious to the passing of time. The crowd punch the air with a collective 'Yes!' to welcome the immortal Somebody, a song so dependable, you'd let it date your daughter.
We're only three numbers in, but already a
3Arena
packed way out past the gills is ecstatically commandeering the chorus and grinning like they've been gifted an unexpected bank holiday. So good are Adams and his tighter-than-a-mountain-bend band they can even be forgiven for speeding up the tempo of Heaven, the perfect power ballad which should have resulted in all other songwriters working in a similar vein downing tools in defeat.
Lean, fit, in miraculously fine voice at 65, and sporting his regulation serial killer haircut, Adams then recalls recording with
Tina Turner
who took him on a European tour. Without her, he reckons, he might still be playing the National Stadium, where he made his Irish debut in 1987. The band explode into It's Only Love and Scott swings his Stratocaster all the way around his body because that's always a class move.
At this point, you might think the groover from Vancouver has carelessly front-loaded the show but the man has more hits than a wedding disco. What about the daft but great Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman? or the wah-wah chug of the superbly titled The Only Thing That Looks Good On Me Is You or even the admirable determination of Go Down Rockin' where he and the great Scott reprise the harmonica/guitar duel at the heart of The Rolling Stones's Midnight Rambler. Adams throws out more hits than an angry Katie Taylor.
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All right, the selections from his forthcoming Roll With The Punches album pale in comparison, but they're quickly forgotten when he detonates the building by recalling the purchase of his first real six-string at the five and dime. Summer Of '69. Had I been wearing a tie, I would have wrapped it around my head and ran up and down the aisle screaming.
The lothario from Ontario even manages to breathe renewed life into (Everything I Do) I Do It For You, a song that held the number one spot for so long in the early 1990s, it made lockdown look like a brief sojourn. But that's Adams's secret. Everything, as he sings in the encore, is coming Straight From The Heart. He holds nothing back and there's no misplaced attempts at irony or cool.
You want to hear Frankie Valli's Can't Take My Eyes Off You played as if it were the B-side to Please Please Me? Here you go. You want to take your shirt off and wave it in the air as Adams encourages the audience to do during his You Belong To Me/Blue Suede Shoes medley? Step right up, and he'll film you.
Cynics may mock him, but what's wrong with writing anthems that people take to their hearts? Every Adams show is a celebration where the audience are as much a part of the proceedings as the performer, and each time the camera is turned towards them, it captures joyous faces having the night of their lives. 'I can't tell you how much I appreciate it,' Adams smiles. Now that's cool.
Bryan Adams plays the SSE Arena in Belfast on Wednesday and is back at the 3Arena in Dublin on Friday.
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Irish Times
an hour ago
- Irish Times
Thomas Mann's 150th birthday present to Germany and the world: a warning from history
Thomas Mann and James Joyce never met in life but, especially in death, found much in common. Both were writers of challenging fiction who ended their days in self-imposed exile in Zürich. Both are buried there, at opposite ends of town. During their lifetimes their respective homelands rejected them first with mockery, then hatred – Joyce's works were banned, Mann's burned. After decades of posthumous apathy, both were resurrected by their homelands for praise and monetisation purposes. Just 10 days before another episode of Ireland's Bloomsday malarkey, Germany is celebrating Thomas Mann's 150th birthday in a state of nervous jubilation. A new, hefty biography heads the long list of books, while critics and essayists have delivered fresh prophetic framings for Mann's major works in the present. READ MORE Is modern Germany and Europe, some wonder, heading back to the Zauberberg (Magic Mountain)? Mann's 1924 novel tells of a healthy young engineer, Hans Castorp, who visits a friend in a Davos mountain-top clinic only to succumb to its self-indulgent charms of introspection, hypochondria, disease and death. Running through the book, two polar-opposite patients - one a humanist democrat and the other a fascism-adjacent communist revolutionary - debate 'power and law, tyranny and freedom, superstition and science'. Mann was channelling the debates that dominated his world a century ago - and ours today. [ The Magician by Colm Tóibín: Beautiful, sweeping exploration of Thomas Mann's life Opens in new window ] For German writer Thomas Wiedermann, who wrote a novel based on the author, the Zauberberg is 'about a pre-war world, a burnt-out society … where the smallest spark is enough to make the world explode'. A century on, he fears the modern world is 'not repeating [the past] but at least mirroring it'. Others see worrying contemporary parallels to Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, drawing on his early years in the northern city of Lübeck where he was born on June 6th, 1875. This debut novel, published when he was 26, sweeps the reader through the rise and fall of a wealthy merchant family whose business is built by the first generation, managed by the second and ruined by the third. Last February, the Neue Zürcher daily suggested Switzerland was suffering from third-generation 'Buddenbrooks syndrome', happily living off the family fortune, 'studying art history, working less, retiring earlier'. Rather than citizens, the NZZ argued, 'the Swiss have become consumers of their own state'. Similar arguments can be heard in Germany, trapped in a never-ending recession, and a recent warning from Chancellor Friedrich Merz that holiday-loving Germans 'need to work more'. Mann won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 for his work, packed with universal, timeless themes that are finding new relevance and attention today. His 150th birthday today became a dual celebration of sorts. [ Opens in new window ] It marked the reopening of the fabled villa that Thomas and Katja Mann had built in California's Pacific Palisades. It was purchased and restored by the German state a decade ago - but it's a miracle there is even a house left. Last January, as wildfires raged through nearby Santa Monica and edged into Pacific Palisades, villa staff raced through the house, snatching the writer's handwritten papers, paintings and beloved Goethe complete works - but had to leave behind thousands of personal mementos and rare books. Much of the neighbourhood was consumed by fire but the worst damage to the Mann villa was a thick coating of soot on the facade, which has been scrubbed and repainted for Friday's party. Mann knew personally how quick disaster could strike. He was on a lecture tour of Europe a month after Hitler took power in 1933 when he decided not to return to Germany and settle in Switzerland. His denunciations of the Nazis from there saw them revoke his citizenship and burn his books. After their invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, Mann resettled his family in the US. Asked by a reporter there how he felt living in exile, Mann replied: 'Where I am is Germany! I carry my culture within.' It was here that Mann produced his perhaps most relevant works for our time. Not novels, but accessible and urgent essays and public lectures about democracy, its strengths and its enemies. In 1938, with Europe on the brink of war, Mann warned radio audiences that the greatest danger to democracy was the fascination and novelty of fascism. His observations carry eerie echoes today. 'Once [fascism] has subjugated the body through fear,' he warned from personal experience, 'it can even subjugate thought.' In 1943, with war raging in Europe, Mann warned, again on the radio: 'It is a terrible spectacle when the irrational becomes popular.' He eventually returned to Europe in 1952 but settled in Zürich, shunning Germany. His countrymen had never forgiven him – for fleeing, for surviving the war under Californian palm trees, but most of all for his BBC propaganda broadcasts into his homeland. Many Germans who convinced themselves later they they knew nothing of the Holocaust resented how, even in far-away California, Mann knew as early as 1942 of the mass murder of Polish Jews using poison gas. It was, he warned, 'an expression of the spirit and attitude of the National Socialist revolution'. Even worse than him knowing: he knew they knew, a point he kept ramming home. In another broadcast he lectured the Germans, literally, about the terrible irony of their situation: a dictator dangling before the noses of a people he viewed as 'cowardly, submissive and stupid' a bright future as a 'race destined for world domination'. In an open letter, published four months after Germany's capitulation, Mann insisted he would not return to a 'stupid, empathy-free' German people who 'would like to pretend that 12 years never happened'. The final kick came with his remark in the letter about the Allied bombings of German cities: 'Everything must be paid for'. No wonder, then, that his eventual return to Germany in 1949 was a chilly affair. Many Germans saw Mann as a traitor, even more so after he visited East Germany to accept a literary medal of honour. Two years later, learning that Mann had resettled in Switzerland, the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily denounced him as 'an exponent of an aversion to Germany that goes as far as stupidity'. Germany fell out of love with Mann but eventually warmed again to him in the 1980s. Mann didn't live long enough for that reconciliation - nor to fall back in love with America. A decade after taking US citizenship in 1944, Mann was dubbed a 'suspected communist' and brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee. There he heard himself described as one of the 'world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company'. A chastened Mann warned his adoptive homeland that, with its embrace of witch-hunts and 'loyalty checks', it was 'well on [its way] to a fascist police state'. To his diary, Mann confessed he was 'shockingly touched by the dwindling sense of justice in this country, the rule of force'. Given that, it doesn't take too much effort to imagine what Thomas Mann would have made of German-American president Donald Trump. As for his literary legacy: given that he died exactly 70 years ago, Mann's works enter the public domain next January to join fellow former Zürich resident James Joyce. Brace yourself for the mash-up, Chat-GPT fan fiction: Leopold Bloom on the Magic Mountain, anyone?
Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Irish Times
Comedian Emma Doran on her Leaving Cert: ‘I had just given birth to my daughter 13 days before'
When and where did you sit the Leaving Cert exams? 2003. I went to school at Sancta Maria College in Dublin. I had just given birth to my daughter 13 days before, so I was in a room alone with a supervisor. What is your most vivid Leaving Cert memory? Opening English Paper 1 on the first day, and panic setting in that I wouldn't be able to do it. I was reading it, but nothing was sinking in. I took a deep breath and had a talk to myself. Who was your most influential teacher and why? My drama teacher, Ms Martin, told me I'd be good on television and I never forgot it. I had loads of really kind teachers in sixth year. Another teacher, Ms Hiney, even offered me childcare if I needed it, so that I could do my exams. What was your most difficult subject? Probably honours Irish. I learned an essay that I was doing regardless of what title came up. If it wasn't past tense, I knew I was pretty much lost. READ MORE And your favourite? I loved art, and the fact that you could be tipping away at it all year, and it didn't all come down to one exam. Can you recall what grades or points you received? I forget my PIN for my bank card most days, but I know I got 335 points. How important were the results for you ultimately? At the time, they were very important. I didn't want to repeat the Leaving and put myself under huge pressure to make sure I got into a degree course. In my mind, I had to get a degree and get a good job. I started at the school as a teenager and finished it as a single mother. Getting 'enough' points was a huge personal focus. If I got what I needed, then in my mind, it meant I wasn't a complete failure. What did you go on to do after secondary school? I went to IADT [Institute of Art, Design and Technology] and did a degree in business and arts management. What would you change about the Leaving Cert? Ask me in six years when my son is doing it! What advice would you give to your Leaving Cert self? I don't think 18-year-old me would listen to 40-year-old me, and she'd start asking me what questions came up. I could tell my 18-year-old self that the Leaving Cert doesn't matter, but I feel that would be unfair. In the context of my life [back then], it felt very important. You can't teach hindsight. In conversation with Tony Clayton-Lea. Emma Doran's UK and Ireland tour, Emmaculate , begins next September.
Irish Times
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Joyce on Trial - Frank McNally on a landmark libel case of 1954
When Gerry Adams took his successful libel action against the BBC in a Dublin court recently, reader Ronan Dodd reminds me, he was following a path that had been trod as far back as the 1950s, in a landmark case involving James Joyce. Joyce was dead by then, but his writings lived on. And when BBC radio's Third Programme marked the 50th anniversary of Bloomsday with a dramatisation of Paddy Dignam's funeral, it was sued by one Reuben J Dodd Jnr, from whom Ronan is laterally descended. Reuben J Jnr had been a classmate of Joyce in Belvedere College. Unfortunately, the two did not get on, continuing a feud that originated with their fathers, Reuben J Dodd Snr and John Joyce respectively. The older Joyce borrowed money from the older Dodd in the 1890s and seems to have been quite resentful that Dodd expected it to be paid back. The younger Joyce inherited the grudge. And when writing Ulysses, one of the great literary masterpieces of 20th century, he managed to include this personal vendetta, using the protagonists' real names. READ MORE Hence he has the Dignam funeral cortege pass Dodd Snr on what is now O'Connell Street, teeing up some casual anti-semitism from the mourners (even though Dodd was a Christian). 'Of the tribe of Reuben,' says Martin Cunningham, nodding towards the footpath. His gaze is followed there by Simon Dedalus, Joyce's fictionalised father, who speaks in the direction of the 'stumping' figure: 'The devil break the hasp of your back!' A conversation on money-lending ensues. The Joyces, senior and junior, were regularly in debt. In the earlier Nestor episode of Ulysses, where the author's alter ego Stephen collects his wages as a teacher from the bigoted northern schoolmaster Mr Deasy, the theme of insolvency also features. Deasy argues that the proudest boast of any Englishman is 'I paid my way', and challenges his young teacher: 'Can you feel that? I owe nothing . Can you?' Whereupon Stephen does a quick mental reckoning: Mulligan, nine pounds, three pairs of socks, one pair brogues, ties. Curran, ten guineas. McCann, one guinea. Fred Ryan, two shillings. Temple, two lunches. Russell, one guinea. Cousins, ten shillings, Bob Reynolds, half a guinea, Kohler, three guineas, five weeks' board… For the moment, no, Stephen answered. But the immediate source of the eventual libel case was not the debt. It was a story recalled by Leopold Bloom, who is also in the funeral carriage, and who himself will later be the subject of anti-semitism (although technically not Jewish either). It was based on real events too, although they hadn't happened yet then. In most ways meticulously faithful to the Dublin of 1904, Joyce in this case backdated an incident from 1911 for the purposes of his family feud. What is beyond dispute about the events in question is that on 26th August 1911, Reuben J Dodd jumped into the River Liffey. In Ulysses, this is presented as a suicide attempt. In the 1954 case (for which the plaintiff's lawyer was a young Ulick O'Connor) Dodd argued that, on the contrary, he was just trying to save his hat, which had been blown into the river. His father, with whom he had been in conversation or argument beforehand, was nearby on the quays. But it fell to a heroic docker, Moses Goldin (an ironic name in the circumstances, since it suggests he was Jewish, although I can't find that confirmed anywhere), to drag Dood Jnr to safety. Goldin was a serial saver of lives, apparently. According to the Daily Worker, which wrote an editorial about the incident, he had rescued 'some twenty' people from similar situations. Suffering from heart problems by the time he fetched Dodd Jnr out of the water, he lived in a slum with his wife and four children, and ended up in hospital from exposure after his latest heroics. But the main point of the Daily Worker's write-up, gleefully amplified by Joyce via Bloom – wad Dodd Snr's alleged meanness. When prompted to reward the docker, he settled on a sum of two shillings and sixpence. 'Mr Dodd thinks his son is worth half-a -crown,' sneered the DW editorial. In Ulysses, this is downgraded to a 'florin' (two shillings). 'One and eightpence too much,' quips Simon Dedalus, provoking laughter in the carriage until they all remember they're at a funeral and decorum is resumed. The 1954/5 libel suit did not trouble a judge, eventually. As Joycean scholar Pat Callan writes in a paper on the subject: 'The BBC settled as it did not wish to have an Irish court determine if a potential libel was committed at the point of reception or the point of transmission.' Dodd Jnr thereby became the only character in Ulysses to win a case for defamation arising from the novel. Joyce had died 13 years earlier. But while alive, he knew that in Ulysses he had given certain hostages to fortune. That may be one of the reasons why, after leaving Dublin in 1912, he never again came home.
