Bryan Adams on returning to India for five-city tour, branching out to movies, and the future of rock

For Bryan Adams, India’s charm lies in its quirks, which is why he cannot stop keep coming back. The Canadian rocker, who is in the country for his fifth outing, describes his first time here and even though it does make him sound like a gleeful, wide-eyed Western tourist, it is raw. “On my first trip to India, there were no cars to collect us, so Keith my guitarist and I got in a taxi from the airport. The suspension was broken in the car so we leaned over the seat to watch where we were going. Along the way we had to stop because an elephant had gone to sleep in the middle of the road. That story would not happen anywhere else in the world, welcome to India. It’s always an adventure when I’ve been here,” he says. [caption id=“attachment_5363441” align=“alignnone” width=“825”]  Bryan Adams[/caption] It is no secret that the singer-songwriter loves being on tour. He has been on stage almost every year and he likes it more than being in the studio. Big or small, he says, shows are important because they teach you how to present yourself, “even if it was an empty club with three people in it.” However, the rush of being on stage has not kept him away from recording — he reveals his new album will come out in 2019. Although Adams ruled the charts in the ’80s and ’90s with his power ballads, playing to sold out arenas and holding the longest consecutive reign for Number 1 single in chart history at 16 weeks for ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’, he evidently branched out. Since the ’90s, he has written for movies and published several photography books, moves which were often seen as attempts at gaining commercial headway or even signs that he was drifting away from music. He would love to write more for films, but if there is anything that is keeping him from doing that, it is the prospect of moving to Los Angeles permanently. “I’ve collaborated with some of the best composers; Hans Zimmer, Marvin Hamlisch and my dearly departed friend Michael Kamen. The experiences were always interesting, and pushed me to write things that I would never had written, had I been on my own. So it’s quite different to composing for myself,” The rocker has also an interesting take on the purported death of rock. Does its absence from the charts herald what has been debated repeatedly since pop took over? He thinks there are artists who will stay. Although there are those who will burn bright only to fade out and that is the way it is. And him? “I’m more like one of those space stations that floats along and every now and then an astronaut pops out and says ‘Hi’.” Maybe Adams is not so gruff, after all. He does not like doing interviews but he has made time for an emailer. He must because he has come a long way from his first tour here “where the light switches were large levers beside the stage.” Months have gone into preparing for this tour which has already taken him to two cities, three more to go. And for Mumbai, where he performs today (12 October), he promises his best work.