Adele: The Biography

INTRODUCTION

Adele worked Sunday shifts at the cafe her auntie ran in Haringey, north London. As the teenager waited tables, the crackly radio announced the countdown of the pop charts. She wondered what it would be like to have her own song in the hit parade. By the time she was 22, she would be at No 1 in charts around the world.

Her influence is immense: she was named the most powerful person in music when she topped the Guardian’s Music Power 100 list. To put this in context, the mighty Simon Cowell finished third. Adele has sold millions of albums worldwide, won numerous awards, including Grammys and a Brit, and as a result has deservedly been crowned queen of the music industry – and all just three years after she released her first single. Along the way she has built a fortune of around £20 million.

It is the authenticity and sincerity of her work that appeals: there are no gimmicks but plenty of soul. With firmly autobiographical lyrics that simply yet powerfully and often painfully speak truths about her personal heartaches, she has touched a nerve with music fans. Speaking as a fan herself, Adele expresses distaste at lazy lyricism. ‘You know, I hate – I’m actually offended by – literal, easy lyrics that have no thought behind them and are purely written because they rhyme,’ she said. Though her higher standards pay off, they come with an emotional price. Remember, for a moment, how songs like ‘Someone Like You’ can make you feel: the way they make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, the way they send a shiver of recognition down your spine, the way they can make your eyes fill with tears and your lips tremble. Now imagine how emotionally draining it is to perform those songs night after night on tour.

‘That’s really hard,’ Adele said. She has developed coping mechanisms, including thinking about mundane things as she sings – the furniture store Ikea is one such distracting thought. The challenges of live performances of such material are exceeded by the rewards. ‘Anything I find difficult is completely thrown in the bin when I see how people respond to my music,’ she said. ‘I love it when a wife drags her husband to a show and he’s standing there like a lemon. You spend the whole night trying to win him over and by the end he’s kissing his wife. That’s amazing.’

What a fascinating character Adele is: not least due to the contrast between her musical persona and her everyday personality. Despite the heartbreaking sadness of her music, Adele remains surprisingly happy and content in her real life. Her raucous, cackling laugh is a catchy and regular feature of her positive and loquacious conversations. Far from discovering a gloomy, self-pitying soul, people who have met her often remark that she laughs more than anyone else. It makes her an attractive personality. When she embarked on the difficult, sometimes soul-destroying tour of American radio and television shows that is required of any overseas artist attempting to ‘break the States’, she so charmed the industry bigwigs there that as well as wanting to promote her music – ‘that decision was a no-brainer for us’ said one – they also wanted to go for a drink with her and become her friend.

Her takes on everything from fame to her love life are always diverting. She once recalled how a male fan sent her an unsettling ‘crispy tissue’ in the post. ‘Oh, you sent me a crispy tissue,’ she said of the offering. ‘I’ll definitely get in touch with you! Hey, let’s get married and have children!’

Her candour is legendary. Asked when she was typically struck with inspiration to write a new song, she said it usually happened as she got up from her bed to spend a penny in the early hours. She was also asked what she would do if a partner called her fat. ‘I’d murder him,’ she replied. When she discovered she had won a prestigious Grammy award, she had just returned to her seat from the loo. She had not even done her belt up. Audiences frequently laugh at her on-stage humour, including the dirty jokes. ‘What do you call a blonde standing on her head?’ she once asked. ‘A brunette with bad breath.’ Too much information? There is always more where that came from. Explaining why she eschews the social-networking micro-blog site Twitter, which so many other musical stars are addicted to, she said, ‘I don’t want to write, Oh, I’m on the toilet – last night’s dinner was really spicy. That’s just gross.’

Though she is confident and forthright, she is also humble and grounded. She does not even accept the description of ‘singer’ for herself. ‘I always say I’m a singing lady, rather than a singer,’ she said. ‘Singer is a big word for me. My interpretation of a singer is Etta James and Carole King and Aretha Franklin.’ When asked what she would have done had she not made it as a singer, she said, ‘If I weren’t singing, I’d be a cleaner, I love a clean.’

Adele’s songs document real-life dramas and heartaches she has endured: both her albums are about painful breakups, and she said her songs for her second album 21 began life as ‘drunken diary ramblings’. These are ramblings that have grown to become the soundtrack of our times, much to her surprise. Adele thought she was the only one dealing with those problems. As she began to sing to the world about her emotions, she discovered that millions of others shared her feelings. When she realised that her songs had left those millions feeling less isolated, she was delighted to have created such a virtuous circle. ‘It’s like my job is done,’ she said.

Done successfully, too. Her second album sold more than three million copies and went platinum ten times. She is the first living artist in nearly 50 years to have two Top 5 singles and albums in the charts at the same time. She has topped the charts in 18 countries to date. The girl from London is huge in America, where she has had a No 1 album, performed on leading shows, including Saturday Night Live, and won two Grammy awards in 2009. As her sales have soared, her feet have remained grounded. For instance, when she was backstage at the New York television studio for The Late Show with David Letterman, someone observed that her dressing room was rather small. Adele was having none of that: ‘You don’t complain about your dressing room,’ she said and when she got home to London, all she wanted to do was sit in the park with her old friends, chatting and drinking cider.

As we shall see, she gets spectacularly, physically nervous before live performances. Once she is on-stage with the microphone in her hand, the anxiety evaporates. ‘I feel more at ease performing than when I’m walking down the street,’ she said. ‘I love entertaining people. It’s a huge deal that people pay their hard-earned money, no matter how much or little, to spend an hour of their day to come and watch me. I don’t take that responsibility lightly.’ At her live performances, there is little emotional barrier between Adele and her fans. You probably love her because you know that – for all her success and fame – she is someone like you.

Here is her remarkable story.

CHAPTER ONE

BABY BLUE

‘People think,’ said Adele, ‘that I popped out of my mother’s womb singing Chasing Pavements.’ One should tread carefully when discussing Adele’s early years. Do not, for instance, try telling her that she was ‘born to perform’. She will have none of that sort of talk. ‘Fuck off, no one’s born to perform,’ she has snapped.

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins cried, rather than sang, as she was born on 5 May 1988 in London. The soundtrack to that year included Bros wondering aloud when they would be famous, Rick Astley vowing to never give you up and Michael Jackson starting with the man in the mirror. Elsewhere, people partied in warehouses while raving to acid house and, in Wembley Stadium, tens of thousands bounced up and down while calling for the release of Nelson Mandela. In years to come, when future celebrities are profiled, Adele’s worldwide hits will be used as a cultural benchmark of the times they were born into. People will be proud to have been born as songs like ‘Someone Like You’ filled the airwaves.

Adele’s mother, Penny Adkins, was 18 when she gave birth to her daughter, or ‘18 and-a-half’, as Adele cutely, and more precisely, puts it. Adele was Penny’s first and – to date – only child. Not long before she became a mother, Penny had been – lovingly – shown the door by her own mother and father, who were firm believers that their offspring would benefit from being taught self-reliance the hard way. ‘That’s what we did with all the kids,’ said Penny’s mother, Doreen. ‘They had to make their own way in life.’ This was a rule Doreen had for all her offspring and she has seen the results it led to. ‘My kids, they all work. The whole family have got jobs. You have got to get on and it hasn’t done any of them any harm.’ This sense of independence, toughness and ambition has found its way through Penny to Adele.

Doreen has said that she was not shocked when Penny told her she was pregnant. Adele’s father Mark Evans and her mother split when Adele was just three years of age. Therefore, Evans was, Adele has said, ‘never in the picture’. As we shall see, the extent of his involvement in his daughter’s life is a topic of some disagreement. She described her father as ‘a really big Welsh guy who works on the ships and stuff’. She does not mourn the lack of a relationship with him. ‘It’s fine, I don’t feel like I’m missing anything,’ she said. ‘Some people make a big deal about coming from a single-parent family but I know loads of people who grew up without having their dads around.’

Penny, then an art student, had met Evans in a pub in north London in 1987. Evans described his feelings that night as ‘love at first sight’. They quickly became an item and within months Penny was pregnant with Adele.

Evans says it was an unplanned pregnancy; both were determined at that stage to make the most of the situation they found themselves in. Evans says that he proposed to his girlfriend around this time. ‘I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with Penny so I asked her to marry me,’ he said. ‘She turned me down – she kept saying we were too young to get married.’ Although he split with Penny early in Adele’s life, Evans claims a slice of credit for his daughter’s musical tastes. ‘I’d lie on the sofa all night cradling Adele in my arms and listening to my favourite music – Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan and Nina Simone,’ he said. ‘Night after night I’d play those records. I’m certain that is what shaped Adele’s music.’ He added that his musical taste and love of blues music certainly influenced part of his daughter’s name. ‘The music I loved – and still love today – is what gave me the idea for one of her middle names, Blue. I always think of Adele as Blue.’ There were moments of tenderness between father and daughter. An early photograph of her shows Evans proudly holding his daughter wearing a pink babygro and red boots. She seems fascinated by the camera. Nowadays, the fascination flows strongly still – but in the opposite direction.

After Evans split with Penny, he moved back to his native Wales. There, he joined a family business, helping his own father John who had acquired the lease for a cafe in Barry Island funfair. It is the same site that is featured on the popular BBC comedy Gavin & Stacey. ‘I remember she came to stay in the summer after her fourth birthday and she was carrying this little acoustic guitar she’d picked up in a charity shop,’ he said. ‘She said she was teaching herself how to play it by listening to the blues songs we used to listen to on my record player and then trying to make the same noise.’ Each time he saw Adele, Evans noticed that her musical ability had improved dramatically. ‘Within a couple of years, she’d started singing along and I remember thinking, when she was seven, my God, Adele’s really got it. She’s going to be a huge star one day.’ A friend of his, who worked as a music producer, also praised Adele’s vocal skills when he heard her sing as a child. He felt her voice had great colour and range. He encouraged her to record herself singing the song ‘Heart of Glass’ by Blondie. As well as her musical skills, Adele was also practising her lyrical ones: she started writing poetry when she was little more than a toddler.

Evans’s own family had been shocked to learn of the pregnancy. But they vowed to help look after the child, regardless of the split. Penny and Adele often spent weekends at the family home in Penarth, near Cardiff. Sometimes, said Evans, they would take caravan trips along the Welsh coast during Adele’s summer holidays. Her paternal grandfather, in particular, made a real effort to help raise Adele. ‘He just loved my mum and because my dad wasn’t in her life they completely took her over as their daughter,’ recalled Adele fondly.

‘I think my dad was Adele’s most significant role model,’ said Evans. The feeling was mutual: John idolised Adele, his first grandchild. ‘They spent a lot of time together, just the two of them,’ said Evans. ‘Adele would spend much of the summer with my parents and most of that time my dad would be playing with her, talking to her, showing her the sights.’ As a result of this, Adele elevated her grandfather in her own imagination.

‘I painted him as this Jesus figure in my life,’ she said. Interestingly, Amy Winehouse – who attended the same school as Adele and was a huge influence on her music – was also extremely close to a grandparent. In this case it was her grandmother Cynthia, whose death was said to be a factor in Winehouse’s downward spiral after 2006.

Adele is extremely keen to recall the sacrifices Penny made for her. ‘She fell pregnant with me when she would have been applying for uni, but chose to have me instead,’ said Adele. ‘She never, ever reminds me of that. I try to remember it.’ Her mother has a creative side to her personality, which Adele describes as ‘arty’. She works across several projects and areas including as an artist, a furniture maker, an activity organiser for adults with special needs and as a masseuse. Adele and her mother have always been very close: ‘Thick as thieves,’ says Adele. ‘She’s the love of my life.’ One of the things that made Adele so intensely fond of her mother is that Penny has a great perspective on life. The way her daughter describes her, Penny could hardly sound less like the sort of pushy mothers that often loom large in the lives of performers who are successful while young. ‘She doesn’t worry about little things. She’s never disappointed even when I know she probably is. You know that parent thing, I am not angry; I am disappointed. Like a bullet. She’s not like that. She’s honest and open and so supportive.’

Adele grew up with Penny’s new partner as a stepfather, and she quickly grew close to him. She also has a half-brother called Cameron. The half-siblings bonded as if they were full relatives. ‘He looks like my twin,’ said Adele. ‘We’re identical, same hair and everything.’ To this day, they find many things to unite them. ‘It’s bizarre growing up in a completely different city but then, when you see each other, it’s as if you’ve spent every day of your lives together,’ said Adele. ‘Straight away I’m bullying him. Straight away he’s like … You fuck off… It’s amazing, immediate. He’s lovely. Really shy, which is the only difference.’ Despite the absence of her father, Adele never felt isolated at all, partly because her mother comes from a large family. ‘There are 33 immediate family members on my mum’s side alone,’ she said. Indeed, she is one of the 14 grandchildren her maternal grandmother boasts.

Many of those relatives are male, so she was never short of unofficial father figures. ‘We are all really bolshie,’ she added. That trait comes across often in her interviews and her on-stage chatter between tracks. She invariably enjoyed visiting her cousins, many living nearby. In their company, she got to experience for a while the sensation of being in a large family, with all the joys, tribulations and other experiences that implied. Then, when she got back home, she could return to the pleasures of being – effectively – an only child. It was a strangely agreeable state of affairs for her. ‘I’d go and see them, always arguing and hating to share, then I’d be back home to my tidy room and unbroken toys and no fighting over my Barbie,’ she said. ‘It was like I had the best of both worlds.’ She was certainly comfortable with being an only child. Whatever she was up to, she was happiest when she could be in control of the process. ‘If I was building a castle out of Lego, I’d have to do it myself,’ she said.

She has a similar feeling of wanting to control now, when she embarks on songwriting. Indeed, looking back over her life to date she has sometimes wondered whether it is her only-child status that has contributed to her writing ability. As someone who has rarely read a book, she has found herself considering just why she is so gifted with the pen. ‘I don’t know if it’s because I’m an only child, but I was never, ever good at saying how I felt about things,’ she said. ‘From the age of about five, if I was told off for not sharing or I didn’t tidy my room or I spoke back to my mum, I’d always write a note as my apology.’ She found that she could express herself much better with a pen in her hand. Indeed, many of the songs that she has since written can be considered letters of heartache and disenchantment, set to music. Her first hit was written in the same circumstances as many of her childhood letters: immediately following a row with her mum.

Initially, though, her dreams for the future were not musical ones. Instead, Adele dreamt of becoming a fashion reporter or a heart surgeon. Her journalistic ambitions again see her mirror Amy Winehouse, who was working in an entertainment reporting agency before musical fame swept her off her feet. The medical route, meanwhile, wouldn’t come as a surprise to astrologers. Her birthday means she was born under the star sign of Taurus. Considered one of the most distinctive of star signs, the typical Taurus is expected to be a calm, consistent person who rarely gets stressed or upset by life. Were Adele that level-headed, then her life and emotional feelings would have made for a set of pop songs with minimal drama, as opposed to the gut-wrenching themes she has written about. It is precisely her emotive nature and eventful life that have helped give her music and image so much edge. A Taurus is also expected to have a stubborn nature and here we have a trait it is much easier to identify in our heroine. This is a highly honest star sign, too, which chimes with the outspoken and forthright nature of Adele. In interviews she frequently gives explosive quotes, some of which have got her into trouble and, of course, her on-stage banter is legendary.

The neighbourhood Adele grew up in is a little over six miles north of central London, and lies in the borough of Haringey. Tottenham is a multi-cultural neighbourhood – researchers at the University College London have declared the southern end of it