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).
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