Bryan Adams does it for the adoring Marquee crowd

Well, Bryan Adams did say performing in the Marquee tent was like playing in an Irish bar.

It felt like that when he came to his encore last night — an exquisite acoustic performance of that venerable Thin Lizzy pub classic, ‘Whiskey In The Jar’.

The line “goin over the Cork and Kerry mountains” elicited the biggest cheer of a show where the Canadian had the audience in his grip for two and a quarter hours of rock.

Adams will be 65 in November and his heyday of late 1980s and early ’90s soft rock is long gone, but his audience revelled in the nostalgia on his first appearance at the Marquee in seven years — he quipped that he and his band had gone to the former marquee site across the road and were wondering where everyone was!

Powerhouse

The 5ft 8in powerhouse belted out a succession of his hits, and in tribute to the 40th anniversary of his hit album Reckless, those included bangers ‘Heaven’, ‘Run To You’, and ‘Summer Of ‘69’ to get the crowd going.

But with Adams, there is always a heartfelt ballad to calm things down again, like ‘Please Forgive Me’ and ‘Shine A Light’.

Anyone alive in 1991 will remember his theme tune to the Robin Hood film, ‘Everything I Do, I Do It For You’, which reigned at No 1 here for 10 weeks that encompassed the summer holidays. The Cork audience sang along to his every word as though they still had the hairbrush to their mouths in their bedrooms.

Similarly, ‘All For Love’ — the song he recorded with Rod Stewart and Sting — hit the spot, as did ‘Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?’ It’s a shame Mel C wasn’t there to provide backing to their hit, ‘When You’re Gone’, but it must be hard to book a Spice Girl!

Adams’ cover version of ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’ was another high spot, on a night when the performance level and fan adoration never dropped.

Poignantly, Adams paid an emotional tribute to his 95-year-old mother, Elizabeth, in the big tent, calling her his biggest supporter. 

A good few thousand of the folk at the Marquee last night must have run her close.