“I had no idea it would become such a classic… I just threw in the lyric ‘It was the summer of 69’ and it stuck’”: How Bryan Adams and his co-writer Jim Vallance created one of the greatest pop-rock guitar anthems of all time

A black and white image of Bryan Adams onstage with a Les Paul, fist clenched.

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Best of 2024: There’s one drawback to writing a globally successful pop/rock anthem – no matter how long ago you released the song, TV presenters and journalists will still be asking you about it decades later. Such was the case with Bryan Adams, whose soaring anthem Summer Of ‘69 was seemingly everywhere in the mid-1980s.