One night love affair

Tonight I'm feeling reckless

Last night, after a random theatre trip to see a simply astonishing performance of Jesus Christ Superstar with my all time besties, I dropped one of the girls back home. As we chatted excitedly about how great the show was, and how the three principals did the roles of Jesus, Judas and Mary Magdalene proud (we are JC Superstar afficionados), she dropped into the conversation about how she was going to the the Royal Albert Hall this evening to see Bryan Adams. I felt a pang – I had tried to get tickets to his tour but to no avail. I had wanted to see Bryan Adams perform live since I was a teenager, but had never managed to, in forty years. She then quietly mentioned that her husband who was supposed to be going with her was ill…and although she knew I had plans tonight…did I by any chance want the spare ticket…?

(photo: my original vinyl from the 80s)

The group of us girls who went to the theatre last night, along with my sister and her bestie, have melded in and around each other’s lives for forty years. We met between the ages of ten and thirteen, went to school together, and although we have had differing paths and all hold completely different lives, there is something about us as a group that is pure magic. During Covid, our WhatsApp group chat gave me the singularly most funny and joyous moments of my entire life, and I say that with no exaggeration. We don’t always get to see each other, yet we save each other, champion each other, love and lift each other week in, week out, without fail. I honestly don’t think I would get through ‘adulting’ without them. It is special indeed.

It's not just that we have crossover in our shared life experiences, whether that be through parenting, work stress, illness, grief, caring for sick parents, managing mental health, bouncing to the edges of divorce and back, and any number of other things; it’s that we have a shared soundtrack to our lives. A soundtrack that allows us to be together in the theatre mouthing every single word of Jesus Christ Superstar, and to remember when ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’ was played at one of our weddings just as vividly as we remember The Buggles appearing on Top of the Pops. For the four of us that were born in the school year 1971/1972, Bryan Adams featured heavily during a particular period, punctuating a series of significant teenage experiences, and now I finally had the chance to hear him live. My plans for tonight hastily rearranged thanks to the generosity and grace of another very special friend, I gratefully accepted the ticket.

I have mixed feelings about gigs these days, as a woman of a certain age. I love and appreciate music more than ever, but I generally don’t really want to go out at all, especially if it’s cold and raining. Live music is utterly magical, but the reality of getting to and from my ‘no longer in London’ suburban home to somewhere like the O2 or the Albert Hall is vaguely hellish, and I’m not great with crowds, or queues, or not being able to get to a loo quickly – because, well why would you be? The things we accepted in our twenties such as standing up for hours in the cold, queueing for overpriced warm cocktails and cramming up against other people’s armpits to get a fleeting glimpse of our idols become anathema as we embrace the well-earned right to be comfortable and to go to bed early in our fifties. I love my fifties.

Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash

But this was Bryan Adams, and at the Royal Albert Hall (darling). There would be seats, and space, and most likely a crowd of people politely moving around each other rather than slamming into each other. For the first time in ages, my overriding emotion at going to a gig is not anxiety and barely suppressed dread, but pure excitement. In this limited run, he is performing one album a night, and tonight, the album is ‘Reckless’ - the multi-million selling pop/rock masterpiece which painted huge splashes onto the backdrop to some of the most vibrant and technicolour years of my formative life. As I danced round the kitchen this morning singing Bryan Adams tunes at the top of my voice, I giggled like a school girl to my family: ‘OMG I am sooooo excited!!! After all these years I’m going to see BRYAN ADAMS!!!’ Himself smiled and said wryly: ‘I can’t think of anything worse’.

My husband is three years younger than me, so whilst my memories of being mid-teens are of drinking vodka in my loft bedroom, hanging out the window for a smoke and belting out ‘Summer of 69’ with the JC Superstar crew, the year he turned 16 was the summer that Bryan’s Adam’s soundtrack to Robin Hood Prince of Thieves ‘Everything I do, I do it for you’ stayed at number one. For sixteen weeks. That summer, when I was 19, I was living in California on a work exchange programme, so I pretty much missed the whole thing. I had been working the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk – the home of the classic 80s movie The Lost Boys – as a fairground ride operator. I spent my work days operating the rollercoasters that Keifer Sutherland and his vampire friends had hung from, and my (scant) days off lazing on the beach or drinking cold beers around dipping pools in the Redwood forests.  I don’t know if ‘Everything I do’ even charted in the U.S., although Wiki tells me it did, but I certainly wasn’t listening to it, having well and truly evolved into my Indie/Madchester phase by then. When I arrived home in late September that year (1991) and heard it for the first time I thought it was a really cute ‘end of disco’ love song, whereas everyone else was, by then, wanting to stick pins in their eyes.

With my husband re-living his despair (and vague disgust) of waking up week after groundhog week to hear ‘Everything I do’ at number 1 again instead of a proper band like REM or The Stone Roses,  I treated him to my own acapella rendition this morning in the kitchen at 8am, as if I were Maid Marion. My daughter’s boyfriend entered just as I reached the peak note, totally baffled by the entire scene. But that was a later album…that was not ‘Reckless’. My husband would only have been 10/11 years old when I entered my Bryan Adams phase - and three years is a cultural gulf in the t(w)eenage landscape - one where he and I can’t quite meet, which makes the magic of those years, with the girls I shared it with at the time, such a unique pinpoint in my personal history.

When ‘Reckless’ came out in 1985, I was 13 years old, so I didn’t fully embrace it for another year or so as I was still emerging from my ‘Bardo’ era - grappling with my dismay at how they could only have been a one-hit-wonder, alongside my conflicting feelings towards a new feisty popstrel called Madonna. My bedroom walls and record collection were bursting with bands like Duran Duran and A-ha, but when ‘Reckless’ found me, by God it found me. I immediately proceeded to stock up on the Bryan Adams vinyl back catalogue marking me as a bona fide fan with my knowledge of ‘Cuts Like a Knife’ B-sides and previous. To this day, ‘Summer of ‘69’ takes me straight back to that loft bedroom, and those exact girls I saw last night.

Obviously back then we didn’t share every moment together, there were teenage disruptions, arguments and separations; holidays that some went on that others couldn’t, other friendships and pulls in different directions, but there was always my loft bedroom, and there was always ‘Summer of ‘69’. I remember falling in love with that song alongside falling in love with a boy on a school skiing trip. I fell so hard and so fast I don’t know if I ever really got over it, unrequited as it was. The timing wasn’t right, the logistics didn’t work, but if ever in life I have felt something unfinished - that was it. I still occasionally wonder what would happen if he and I ever crossed paths now…

It was the time of Marty McFly and Back to the Future, where my crushes were Michael J. Fox and Jason Bateman (alongside Morten Harket and John Taylor). I would hang puppy dog-like over every episode of Family Ties and It’s Your Move until Rob Lowe finally rescued me and brought me into the Brat Pack. The pure and burning love I felt for each of them matching my ache for the boy I met skiing. The world was full of skateboards and hope, as we started to skim the edges of danger and adulthood, whilst knowing we could still safely retreat. My own desires confused between the sexuality of Rob Lowe and the safety and eternal happiness of settling down behind a white picket fence with Michael J. I mean, Bryan Adams himself wasn’t too shabby, but I was hardly going to date a rock star, whereas Michael J. Fox was far more realistic a proposition.

Photo by Ch P on Unsplash

With ‘Summer of ‘69’, I somehow knew we were creating our own nostalgia in those very moments. None of us were born in 1969, let alone ‘quitting or getting married’, but there was something so powerful in the notion of reflecting back on the days of being ‘young and restless’, of making music and of first loves. I wanted to spend evenings at the drive-in, holding hands, on mama’s porch. As we hollered ‘THOSE WERE THE BEST DAYS OF MY LIFE’ at the top of our voices, we held the notion of our future selves reflecting back on the moments we were in right then and there. Huddling in my loft room in pink silk pyjamas, cigarettes lazily hanging from our fingertips in the breeze, readying ourselves for discos with mascara and glitter, gently intoxicated with the twin lacing of contraband alcohol and nascent pheromones. Some unknowingly prescient knowing that we would gather again in the future, reflecting back on these moments with fierce joy; and so it has become.

Today I’ve unearthed my original copy of ‘Reckless’ from our vinyl collection, and am currently torturing my husband with it as he works at home. Every song, every word, transporting me to a place in time. Tonight, as two of us head up to see Bryan Adams performing ‘Reckless’ - he in his sixties, us carrying with us the weathering of our own lives - I cannot wait to have a one night love affair with my own teenage self and the wonder of lifelong female friendships. To feel the power of our connection through the music, with the added bonus of knowing that our bonds are a thousand times stronger today than they have ever been. To remember first loves and crushes and how it felt to believe that we might really actually marry a film star because that’s what happened in the movies. To indulge in the moment in all its glory whilst celebrating the memories of when we danced on the edges of hopes yet to be fulfilled. To sing so loudly together tonight that the other girls will hear us across London, knowing that whilst we have indeed shared the best days of our lives, that as last night, we will forever continue to do so.

School dinner girls - this one is for you. I love you more than tea and elephants ❤️

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Do you still have friends from your school days? How have those relationships evolved? What is your soundtrack to those times - do you have a stand out song? Who was/were your teenage crush(es)?

I’d love to hear.

As always,

Love & lemons 💕🍋

Em xx