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Venue

Santander Arena

700 Penn St., 19602, Reading, PA, US

www.santander-arena.com/

Capacity: 7,083

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Additional details

Doors open: 19:30

Concert in your area for Rock, Folk & Blues, and Pop.

Find out more about Rock and Pop.

Bryan Adams biography

Born on the fifth of November, 1959 and hailing from Ontario, Canada, Bryan Adams is the best selling Canadian rock artist of all time. With over 100 million records sold over nearly 40 years in showbusiness, he’s still at the top of his game.

It would be too easy to focus on Adams’ astonishing commercial success to show his appeal. The millions of records sold, the longest running number one single in UK chart history, the Juno’s. Grammy’s. Golden Globes. Oscar nominations. Ivor Novello’s. However, I don’t think that a simple list of awards and sales statistics quite covers just how vital an artist Bryan Adams was and remains to be to this day.

I think to truly get it one has to look at the man’s global influence. One has to look at how his music can be played and truly loved in pretty much equal measure from his native Kingston, Ontario, to the farest reaches of Nepal.

His is music that transcends culture and language, and that makes him one of very few musicians in pop history to truly realize the universal qualities of rock and roll, and that’s saying something.

“Summer of ‘69”? “Heaven”? “Can’t Stop This Thing We Started”? It would take someone with a heart of stone not to love those songs, from his primal, party starting rockers to his elegant, tear jerking ballads.

In all, what Adams has achieved is shown in how people all around the world have embraced his music. Quite simply, he’s still playing and writing some of the best rock and roll music that the great white north has ever had to offer to this day, and there’s never been a better time to join in than right now.

Pat Benatar biography

With a staggering four Grammy Awards, six Platinum and four Gold albums to her name, you’d think that the sky is the limit for some artists but it’s fair to say that Pat Benatar’s success is off the charts and into the stratosphere.

Pat Benetar, born, Patricia Mae Andrzejwski, is originally from Greenpoint, Brooklyn in New York City. With a passion for music and theatre early on in life at the age of eight, Benetar began singing lessons, singing in every school production that she could. She later had the opportunity to enrol at one of the best arts schools in the world, Julliard, but decided that she didn’t want to embark on that particular career path, so studied Health Education instead. Through a couple of twists and turns, and entering a talent competition where she sang a rock song and won, she found herself recording commercial jingles for Pepsi, which is where she finally got noticed and went on to record the huge hit album, “In the Heat of the Night” which was released in 1979, and reached #12 in the US. It was only the catalyst of what would turn into a 30 plus year career, seeing her sell upwards of 30 million albums to date, becoming a huge international success, releasing 30 plus singles, fifteen of them being top 40, and maintaining such a stellar reputation to this day.

Her career doesn’t stop at music as her song “We Belong” was part of a $20 million campaign for Sheraton Hotels, and is now a commercial spokeswoman for the Energizer company.

Live reviews

I'd forgotten how much I love Bryan Adams' music until this gig - it was great to sing along to every word of every song with the rest of the crowd. His banter was great too, and his interaction with the audience was spot-on - I especially loved him picking an audience member to dance along to 'If Ya Wanna Be Bad Ya Gotta Be Good', which she did brilliantly! He sang every song note-perfect and without any breaks or costume changes. The man is a legend!

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rosie-haswell

Pat Benetar is a rock legend. She and Neil Giraldo still put on a great show, three dozen years after they started. Pat's voice is still in good shape, and both she and Neil tell the history of their songs through the course of the night.

Among the series of hits they played were (not in order):

Invincible
Promises In the Dark
Hell is for Children
We Belong
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
Love Is a Battlefield

As you get toward the end of the night, there's more of a sing-along than a concert, but that's not their fault. :-)

I'd recommend the show to any fan of her music -- so many hits, delivered with the power of a legend.

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uppercaseCatB

Back in the eighties, there was a market for music that struck a balance between rock and pop, especially in terms of female performers; for those who found Joan Jett a bit much and Kim Wilde a little too soft, Pat Benatar - Patricia Mae Andrzejewski, to give her her birth name - was there to fill the gap. The sheer scale of her commercial viability, too, was proven beyond doubt by no fewer than five platinum records throughout that decade; they spawned some hit singles, too, in the shape of the likes of ‘Hit Me with Your Best Shot’, ‘Love Is a Battlefield’ and ‘Invincible’. Perhaps more impressive still, though, is the fact that Benatar - now sixty-one - has never stopped touring, lining up dates almost every year since she began her career. That continues to this day, with her most recent shows - in celebration of thirty-five years in the business - seeing her play with Cheap Trick and Rick Springfield. It’s been some years, though, since she brought her irrepressibly-energetic band over the pond to the UK; perhaps she doesn’t have the same kind of following over here, but for now, British fans are likely going to have to make do with extensive YouTube footage of recent shows - if she does make it over, expect it to be as part of an all-star eighties lineup in big venues rather than out and out solo gigs.

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