Bryan Adams 1997 Interview: Six Days After MTV Unplugged

In this December 1997 broadcast of The Dini Petty Show, Bryan Adams sits down six days after his MTV Unplugged album arrived, for a rare long-form conversation. Petty introduces him as “hot, sexy, creative, talented, Canadian” — the Betty Crocker of Rock — and he spends the next twenty minutes being far more forthcoming than his own stated position on interviews would predict.

That position is the joke at the centre of it. He tells Petty he would be just as happy if he never did another interview, and then gives her one of the most open hours of his career anyway, with the band he had toured with for over a decade sitting right beside him: Keith Scott, Mickey Curry, Dave Taylor and Tommy Mandel. This is one of the only times the reluctant Canadian superstar ever sat for a real talk show, and the band’s presence is a large part of why it works.

The conversation goes almost everywhere except where a promo stop would. What Pavarotti taught him about parmesan. The George Martin mixing console. Why he moved to London. The fact that the hitmaker never learned to read music. Getting hugged by Tina Turner. Auditioning, at fourteen, for his own bass player’s band. The parachute that almost didn’t open, the steak that made him a vegetarian, the Linda Evangelista charity record, and an antique microphone handed over on air.

Unplugged caught Adams at a hinge: he had spent the decade as an arena-rock machine, and here he was tearing his own hits down to their acoustic bones and rebuilding them. Nearly thirty years on, his Unplugged is still named among the era-defining sessions of the format, and Adams is back on the road worldwide in 2026. Unseen since it was first broadcast, this master tape has been meticulously optimized and preserved via the official archive of The Dini Petty Show.