A 65-year-old rock star’s Calcutta debut drew thousands of music lovers from near and far.

Hours before Bryan Adams arrived on stage on the Aquatica grounds in Rajarhat on Sunday evening, his fans had queued up outside the gates. The audience was made up of people cutting across the barriers of age and background, reaffirming the Canadian musician’s mass appeal.

Calcutta is the first stop of the rock legend’s So Happy It Hurts India Tour 24. The other stops will be Shillong, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

A fractured right shoulder could not keep Sambitya Seal at his Barasat home. With a sling in his right arm, Seal was waiting in a snaking queue outside the gates around 5pm, accompanied by wife Smita Deb and her cousin, Shaswata Neogi.

Deb is a singer, Seal is a self-proclaimed “bathroom singer” and Neogi plays the drum. “I fell from the stairs some five months ago. The pain is still there. But there is no way I could have missed this chance,” said Seal, a businessman.

Neogi was the one who booked the tickets. “The window went live around noon on August 8. I bought the tickets at 12.21pm,” he said.

For Deb, Adam’s passion and energy stand out. She feels Adams is “ageing like fine wine”.

Anirban Das and wife Mouli Gupta came from Behala. The two were in Gurgaon to see Adams live in October 2018. Their daughter was six months’ old then. She was at their Calcutta home with her grandparents.

Das loves to play the guitar and has introduced the instrument to his daughter. “He plays songs like Everything I Do and she listens in rapt attention,” said Gupta, a state government employee.

“Adams has been a part of our lives for a long time now. From our teens to our courtship and now our family, Adams has been by our side through his music,” said Das, who works as a management consultant with a leading global accounting firm.

Soumya Basu, a chartered accountant from Kasba, and daughter Samriddha, a Class XII student, were also bound by music, and, hence, Adams.

“We saw MLTR (Michael Learns To Rock, the Danish soft rock band) live in Calcutta in 2015. But I was way too young then,” said Samriddha.

Two decades ago, Basu would regularly visit Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, for work. “I would buy DVDs of Byran’s concerts from Kathmandu. Those were not easily available in Calcutta back then. I always liked Bryan’s voice and his music. But watching him perform at concerts was an amazing experience,” said Basu.

On Sunday, there were separate queues at the gates, earmarked for different categories of tickets like VVIP, Platinum, Gold and Silver. By 4.30pm, a good 40 minutes before the gates opened, each queue was at least 500m long. They kept getting longer by the minute.

A stretch of the road that leads to Aquatica from New Town is like a dust bowl. Every time a car passed by, it left a cloud of dust behind. But the rather unpleasant setting failed to dent the spirit of the concert-goers. The mood was festive and the spirits were high.

A couple of men sold fancy headgear — typical of Park Street and Esplanade in the run-up to Christmas and New Year — and glowing armbands near the venue. “I should have come an hour earlier. I did not expect so many people,” said Amit Haldar, who came from Barasat.

Stalls selling packaged drinking water, tea, coffee, soft drinks and cigarettes also did brisk business.

Hirak Sen and wife Sandeepa, from Barrackpore, were sipping tea as they waited in a queue. Their son, a drummer who aspires to make a career out of music, introduced his parents to Bryan Adams.

He accompanied them to the concert on Sunday.

“Our son has been part of a cover of Summer of 69 (an Adams classic). Seeing the man live means a lot to him. We try to encourage his passion for music,” said Sandeepa, a former teacher at a private school near Acropolis Mall in Kasba.

Saikat Sarkar, 60, came with Suprio Chowdhury, his neighbour from Hiland Park, in Chak Garia off the EM Bypass.

Sarkar was a frequent visitor to Canada in the 1990s for work. “It was long before Justin Bieber. Adams was Canada’s most famous import,” Sarkar said.

“His base voice is superb. His music is fantastic. The lyrics are great. I can identify with a lot of stuff he says,” said Sarkar.