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For those who haven't thought about Bryan Adams for a while, the name might conjure any number of thoughts: the local boy who found fame precisely in the middle of the yellow brick road, who provided the grit-and-velvet vocals for a thousand wedding dances, who in recent years discovered a talent for portrait photography.

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But a tabloid fixture? A Euro-gallivanter, friend to troubled pop stars and top fashion models?

Yes, if you're looking for Adams these days, you're as likely to find him in Britain's red-top newspapers as onstage. While he'll soon be in the news promoting his new record, 11, recently he's been the subject of stories about mentoring Amy Winehouse (he gave refuge to the troubled pop star at his house in Mustique for what the tabs described as a drug- and alcohol-free Christmas), and an even closer friendship with Australian model Elle Macpherson.

Wait a minute: the kid who just wanted to rock – and Elle (The Body) Macpherson?

“We're just friends,” says Adams. There's a small, polite smile on his face, and while he gamely addresses the question, he'd clearly rather talk about his new record. It must be odd, though, to find yourself a London gossip-column fixture at 48.

“I know. Suddenly there was all this news everywhere,” says Adams, lounging on a sofa in his stark, chic office in an old mews house near the Thames River. “She'd been at my house and we'd had a party, and unfortunately there were people there I didn't know. I guess somebody decided to construe general, friendly affection to be a relationship. In fact, I've known Elle a long time, she's a really great friend.”

These are the boilerplate denials usually heard from club-hopping young actors, not hometown Canadian heroes. But the man who told us about playing his six-string till his fingers bled has entered a new phase of fame: There's a spread about him in the current issue of Tatler magazine, a publication usually uninterested in anyone with only one surname, and a new show of his photographs at London's National Portrait Gallery.

He's a European star, with a much higher profile here than in the United States. He's got a huge following in such places as Germany and Belgium, but at the time of this interview didn't even have a U.S. deal – although a May American release date has since been announced.

He has a house in London and another in the Caribbean, a recording studio in Vancouver, and a yen for a little cottage in Northern Ontario.

The guitar man is now a global brand.

Here, in his office, Adams continues to smile graciously – so in for a pence, in for a pound. There's a question I've always wanted to ask him, and I'm afraid it doesn't have to do with music. It has to do with the late Princess of Wales, with whom the singer had some kind of relationship – a romantic one, if you believe the British press, but then the hacks thought Diana had a relationship with every taxi driver she passed on the street.

“I've never talked about her,” Adams says, and he's still smiling, if slightly more pained.

He doesn't want to start now? “Not really.”

Fair enough. He will say that he didn't want to be involved with the memorial concert organized by Diana's sons last summer to mark the 10th anniversary of her death. “I didn't want to be part of that whole commercialization of her. I stayed away from it deliberately.”

There's a long moment of silence. It's very quiet in this small room, and Adams isn't one for filling in pauses. He's as minimalist as the décor in many ways, wiry and youthful in a cucumber-crisp white shirt and dark jeans. His healthy glow is probably attributable to an enviably un-rock-star lifestyle: He's vegan; his shopping cart was just appraised glowingly in a British newspaper by a nutritionist who noted that “dried fruit is relatively healthy – not just for vegan rock stars, but other mortals too.”

But he doesn't want to talk about quinoa, or girlfriends, or any of the things nosy reporters are interested in. It's 11 that he's here to promote: his 11th studio album, a continuing collaboration with songwriting partners Robert (Mutt) Lange and Jim Vallance, among others. Adams is exploring new ground artistically through his photographs, but his music remains in the familiar, guitar-based territory that won't alienate his old fans. There's not a taint of grime, a thump of nu soul. A trend hound like Madonna he is not.

“I don't know how to do that,” he says. “I only know how to do what I do – make this kind of record. It's simple – my band and myself – and I try to find the right feel, the right moment in each song.”

It started out originally as an acoustic record, aiming for the kind of soft-hard effect that the Who perfected. But as Adams bounced around on tour, recording backstage in hotel rooms, the songs started to grow. The guitar amps would be put in one room, the organ in another. He'd record for a few hours and then wheel the whole kit back onstage for another night. “It makes me a little more interested in going on tour,” he says. “The two hours onstage is the best part. The other 22 hours – how do you make it interesting?”

How, indeed? One way is to take some of those instruments away, hence his just-wrapped acoustic tour of 11 countries in 11 days, culminating in a show with a naked stage and a guitar at historic St. James's Church in central London.

There's a particular dynamic in many of Adams's songs, the whisky vocal wrapped around the sweet-liqueur sentiment, that's proved hugely appealing over the years. He has sold 65 million records, and last year, when a list of the most-played artists of 2007 was tallied in Canada, he was No. 6 – with no new record out in three years.

That formula's still in place on 11, with Adams singing “I need to breathe you in like oxygen” and then, a couple of songs later, “You taught me how to fly on broken wings, yeah.” There's a generic “you” at the centre of most of the songs, an unnamed and yearned-for love object, but when Adams is asked if there was a specific face that inspired those melodies, he just laughs and shakes his head. He's too canny to bite.

There is a girl, an unlikely one, at the centre of one of the songs. Flower Grown Wild sounds like a cautionary tale about the kind of girl whose sense of adventure outweighs her survival instincts, and in fact Adams was thinking about just such a doomed young woman – the porn star Savannah, who committed suicide immediately after a car accident in 1994 – when he wrote it.

“I never met her, but I read her story in Rolling Stone. I thought what an amazing life she had, what a tough life. I wrote another song about a girl like that, Dorothy Stratten. I wrote The Best Was Yet to Come for [the Stratten biopic] Star 80.”

Stratten, like Adams, was a B.C. teenager whose ambitions led her away from home, to Los Angeles and the Playboy mansion and a sorry end; she was murdered by her estranged husband. Adams may have always been on a straighter road, but you get the sense that it's the road that mattered. Perhaps the nomadic life is second nature for someone who was raised around the world; Adams's parents are English, and he was born in Kingston, Ont., but followed his family around the globe before they settled in Vancouver. “I'm everywhere,” he says. “I'm not even so much here. I'm all around the world. My work takes me so many places. I've got to go where I've got to go. I kind of love it.”

Home appears to be wherever he can follow his charitable pursuits (through his Bryan Adams Foundation, whose mandate is to “advance education and learning opportunities for children and young people worldwide”), his music and his pictures. Right now, it's the western edge of London, with the river at his back and a great chunk of rock 'n' roll history steps away – there's Cheyne Walk where Mick Jagger once lived, and, across the river, the utilitarian majesty of the Battersea power station, famous to Pink Floyd fans from the cover of their album Animals.

A sombre, beautiful black-and-white photo of the power station sits in the bathroom next to the office. Is it one of Adams's pictures?

“That one? No, I think I got it at an auction.” He looks around the room, which is entirely free of sentimental clutter and vanity shots. “No gold records, very, very minimal.” In fact, to see his photos you'd have to pick up a magazine and find the new Guess campaign; or buy his coffee-table book American Women; or make a trip to the National Portrait Gallery, which is mounting a show called Modern Muses, commissioned by BlackBerry, and featuring pictures of high-profile women from architect Zaha Hadid to singer Annie Lennox.

They join his portraits of the Queen and Salman Rushdie that already hang in the London space. He has also donated a collection of pop-star photos, including Diana Krall, to the nascent Canadian portrait gallery.Taking pictures, Adams says, allows him to step out of “the bubble” of the music world and breathe different creative air. So is he a rock 'n' roller who takes pictures, or a photographer who finds the time to rock?

His laugh cracks the stillness of the air. “Really,” he says, “you don't even need to ask that question.”