By Kevin Rademeyer.
Photo Credit:: Lance Peterson ( Insta: lancepetersonphoto).
There is a peculiar kind of communion that happens when a voice you have carried through your own life suddenly stands before you again, unaged in all the ways that matter. On the first night of the Roll With the Punches tour in Pretoria, Bryan Adams invited a 8500 sold out room, full of strangers to recognise themselves in the long echo of his songs.
He began not with spectacle, but with proximity. While eyes fixed on the main stage, Adams appeared at the rear on a modest B stage, acoustic guitar in hand, opening with “Can’t Stop This Thing We Started,” “Straight From the Heart,” and “Let’s Make a Night to Remember.” In that moment, the arena shed its scale. It became something closer to a shared living room, albeit one glowing with thousands of LED armbands pulsing gently like a collective heartbeat.
This instinct for intimacy in vast spaces remains one of Adams’ quiet triumphs. It is not new, yet it never feels rehearsed. For those seated furthest away at the back of the arena, often resigned to distance, the gesture transforms the experience into something personal. It is here, perhaps more than anywhere else, that Adams reveals his understanding of performance not as display, but as connection.
When he made his way to the main stage, escorted with playful theatrics that nodded to the tour’s boxing motif, the energy shifted but never fractured. “Kick Ass” gave way to “Run to You” and “Somebody,” and the familiar architecture of his catalogue began to rise around us. There were no dancers, no costume changes, no desperate grasp at reinvention. Just a four man band, tight and unadorned, doing the work.
In an era addicted to excess, this restraint feels almost radical. Guitarist Keith Scott, keyboardist Gary Breit, and drummer Pat Steward are not background figures but co -authors of the night’s momentum. Together, they deliver what can only be described as a masterclass in no frills rock performance. The songs carry the weight. The musicians honour it. And then there is the voice.
It is tempting to approach a 66 year old artist with quiet scepticism, to listen for the cracks that time inevitably leaves behind. Yet Adams’ signature rasp remains startlingly intact. Rich, forceful, and emotionally precise, it moved through “Please Forgive Me,” “Heaven,” and “It’s Only Love” with an ease that bordered on defiance.
Having come off three consecutive nights in Cape Town with just a single day’s rest, there was no trace of fatigue. If anything, his voice felt newly sharpened, as though touring itself were the act that keeps it alive. There are artists who age into reverence. Adams seems to resist ageing altogether, not by chasing youth, but by maintaining a kind of emotional immediacy that renders time irrelevant.
The setlist itself was expansive, moving fluidly between decades. Newer material such as “Roll With the Punches” and “Never Ever Let You Go” sat comfortably alongside enduring anthems like “18 Til I Die” and “Summer of ’69.” If some critics have questioned the lyrical ambition of his recent work, they would struggle to do so in this setting. Live, these songs are less about textual scrutiny and more about momentum, about sustaining a feeling that refuses to dim.
That feeling reached something close to joy during “You Belong to Me,” when men in the crowd began lifting their shirts overhead, quickly joined by women in a moment that felt spontaneous and unselfconscious. It was messy, human, and entirely in keeping with Adams’ ethos. This is not coolness. It is something warmer, and perhaps more enduring.
There were quieter moments too. “Shine a Light,” dedicated to his father who passed away six years ago, carried a tenderness that cut through the arena’s scale. Later, the knowledge that his mother appears in the video for “So Happy It Hurts” added another layer to a performance already rich with personal threads. Adams does not foreground these stories, but they linger, shaping the emotional texture of the evening.
Visually, the production walked a careful line. LED armbands transformed the crowd into a shifting canvas of light, while an inflatable silver boxing glove drifted above during “Roll With the Punches,” playful without tipping into excess. Notably, Adams resists the contemporary urge for constant close ups on giant screens. The lighting, often deliberately low and textured, makes it difficult to capture the perfect photograph. In doing so, he quietly insists on presence. You are here to witness, not to document.
As the night unfolded through “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman,” “Here I Am,” “When You’re Gone,” and the inevitable swell of “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You,” it became clear that nostalgia here is not a static exercise. These songs are not museum pieces. They are lived experiences, reactivated each time they are sung. When “Summer of ’69” finally arrived, complete with its playful false starts, it did not feel obligatory. It felt necessary.
The closing stretch, from “Cuts Like a Knife” to an acoustic “All for Love,” returned the audience to that earlier sense of closeness. A full circle, gently drawn.
This was Adams’ tenth tour to South Africa, a statistic that matters less for its number than for what it represents. Continuity. Commitment. A relationship sustained over decades. As only the second international artist to perform at the SunBet Arena, after it opened almost a decade ago, he seemed less concerned with the milestone than with the simple act of showing up and doing the work.
Off stage, that work has taken on new dimensions. Now operating independently through his own label, Adams embodies a different kind of veteran artist, one not content to exist solely as a legacy act. There is a creative restlessness in his continued output, a sense that he is still writing, still searching, still moving forward on his own terms.
Two attendees, speaking exclusively to Fullview, captured the evening’s resonance in their own words. “It felt like he was singing parts of my life back to me,” said Lerato Mokoena, 34. “I came for the old songs, but somehow the new ones made just as much sense.”
For Johan van der Merwe, 58, the experience was more elemental. “You think you’re going to see a legend,” he reflected, “but what you get is a man who still means every word. That’s rare. It was almost three hours of fun” Indeed, rarity and fun, defines the night. Not because Adams does anything unprecedented, but because he does the familiar with such conviction that it feels newly discovered.
There is a line often drawn between artistry and effort, as though the former must obscure the latter. Adams complicates that idea. He is, in many ways, a complicated genius who makes the art look easy. Beneath the apparent simplicity lies discipline, instinct, and an unwavering belief in the songs themselves.
And those songs have endured. Not as relics, but as companions. There are certain melodies that seem immune to time, and certain voices that carry them forward with undiminished clarity. Adams remains one of the few who can deliver both with equal force.
In Pretoria, that truth was not argued. It was sung, loudly, by thousands. The tour, brought to South Africa by Big Concerts, continues tonight with a second show at the Sunbet Arena, before moving to Durban next week.