I'm barely a third of the way through this whole vain enterprise, yet it now feels like we've reached the end of history. The big kahuna. Bayern Munich in the Bundesliga. You get the picture.
It's
[Everything I Do) I Do it for You - Bryan Adams
First of all, I would not have put money on that being where the brackets are.
Second of all, I'm not going to talk down this song. This is a good song.
I was on the train home a few years ago and I suddenly had the thought - "I'm going to listen to 'Everything I Do ...' and I think what I'm going to discover is that it's a good song". And I was right. It is a good song.
I mistakenly thought Adams didn't write it, that it was written solely by Michael Kamen, but that turns out not to be true. The song is based on the love theme Kamen wrote for Robin Hood, but it was Adams and Mutt Lange who turned it into a song, so he wrote it as much as Bob D wrote most of his songs, you know.
Oh, Mutt Lange, you say? Mutt Lange who'd go on to marry Shania Twain? The very same. And bass on the track is played by Larry Klein, who was at the time married to another somewhat successful Canadian called Joni Mitchell.
This song is, obviously, one of the most successful singles of all time, but, unlike most others of the most successful singles ever, it belongs mainly to its time and context. It hasn't been done to death by covers and radio play and X Factor. It's hardly disappeared, it has almost 500 million Spotify streams, but for context, Summer of 69 has almost a billion.
When I listened to it on that train home, it sounded fresh again. Of course, when the Friday night old TOTPs passed through 1991 I was reminded that, for those long, long 3 1/2 months of the summer of 91 (those weren't the best days of my life) it was doing mine and everyone's heads in.
But that's not Bryan Adams' fault. In the last decade or so, quite a few cool-adjacent rock acts have cited Adams' crisp, euphoric unembarrassing radio rock as an influence and an inspiration. That surprised me, but it shouldn't have. He was not cool, but he was mainly not wildly uncool (not until the somewhat creepy Have You Ever Really Love a Woman? (also co-written with Kamen and Lange) and The Only Thing That Looks Good on Me is You,) and his songs were really perfect for the radio, and everyone wants to be on the radio, right ...
I hadn't actually heard of Bryan Adam until 1991 - I guess I was still quite young for his big mid-80s hits and he was quite quiet in the late 80s. He sneaked up on me.
Here comes big diversion. (inevitable really, that as we get towards the early teen years, all of this is unlocking a lot of memories).
16 weeks. A long time. Entered the charts on 27 June 1991, got to Number 1 a couple of weeks later. Held off the challenge of More than Words, Set Adrift on Memory Bliss, Now That We've Found Love, You Could Be Mine, Move Any Mountain, Enter Sandman, I'm Too Sexy, Summertime, Charly, Gett Off, Let's Talk about Sex, Insanity, Love to Hate You, Sunshine on a Rainy Day, Peace, Everybody's Free, Saltwater, Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, Get Ready for This, World in Union, Wind of motherfuckin Change, before succumbing, finally, anticlimactically, to The Fly by U2.
16 weeks. More than one season.
I could write a lot about that summer, about the changes of the wind in those 16 weeks.
Post-Scholarship exams, which had been more stressful, more wholly consuming, than GCSEs, A-Levels or Finals would prove to be, by a long, long way. Leaving behind the prep school. Cruelty, meanness, had started to infect everything, as tends to be the case with boys not managed properly between 11 and 16. I can blame other people, but I was a horror in those years too. Not mean, but just clueless, charmless, obnoxious.
I had two holidays that summer, while Bryan Adams was Number 1. The first one, the one I'd really been looking forward to, the one I'd pressured my mother to pay for, even though it cost far more than most school trips, two weeks' adventure course in the northwest of Scotland.
All these years later, I don't regret going, no way. The beauty of the land, of the lochs, the mountains, the seals, the porpoises, I'll never forget. But I'd not do anything like that again, that's for sure.
Relevantly, it was two weeks without TV, radio, newspapers. The only exception was they let is watch Graf-Sabatini in the Wimbledon final. One of the instructors ruined that impasse somewhat by trying to force-feed me an egg sandwich, as we were just about to be put on a trawler, made to catch fish, thrown into a loch, swim to an island with only the few fish we'd caught and bin bags, build a raft, swim to shore. Actually not my bag, it turns out. At one point, as I sat miserably alone, the same instructor (young military type, as they all were) said "how long before they eat you, David?". Ha, cool guy.
But, actually, the instructors were ok, apart from one creep. Doing their best to toughen us up without being completely horrible. It was the boys I was with that turned out to be the bastards, horrible, really. One kid was really badly bullied. It wasn't me. I didn't do enough defending him, I remember I wrote a story based on it at school or year or so, where I let it go properly Lord of the Flies, and I remember thinking "don't make yourself the good guy in this story, that would be bullshit". But I couldn't resist.
I said "relevantly". The relevance is returning via Inverness after two weeks, so pleased to be going home with my certificate of character assassination (Athleticism 8 Intelligence 8 Teamwork 5 etc) and suddenly being confronted by Bryan Adams. All of a sudden, everywhere, out of nowhere.
The other holiday, in late August, I'd given no thought to. The Christian Union House Party. My mother, though not a Christian, encouraged me to go as she thought it would be good to know some people at the big school.
I could write, and have written, many things about that 10 days, but the key things now are a) Bryan Adams was still Number 1! Still only halfway through it and b) the difference, and I guess why it really and truly affected me as much as it did, was the kindness. Just the kindness, after the cruelty of school and the feral pit the adventure holiday had been, the deep breath of shock kindness on that first house party ... thank god for that.
Anyway, Everything I Do stayed Number 1 right up to half-term of that first year. I must have fitted in seeing the film at some point, the definition of fun nonsense, with, especially in retrospect, one of the most fun casts imaginable - The Artful Dodger! Miss Marple! Rabies! Hans Gruber! Mike McShane! James Bond! Christian Slater! I forgive that silly film its many flaws.
And the song ... there's nothing to forgive. It's a good song.
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