Adele Untamed
A pop superstar at the moment of being "a clueless girl who's going places."
“The first time I met Rick Rubin… I had a tampon on my thumb.” - Adele
TO BE SAT DIRECTLY opposite someone and find yourself absolutely certain, right there in the moment, that their life is about to be changed utterly, and forever, is a rare and powerful thing. It’s happened to me once and never again since. The person on the other side of the table was 22-year-old Adele Laurie Blue Adkins.
October 2011. Adele had just completed her second album. Her first, 19, titled after her age at the point of making it, had won her admirers including Beyonce and Oprah Winfrey. Yet on the cusp of a properly huge breakthrough, she’d declined to tour it anymore. Life on the road had been a challenge for her, afflicted as she was with a terror of flying and sometimes-acute stage fright.
Four months ahead of the release of the follow-up, 21, another time-marker, I found myself in Adele’s South London home about to hear it previewed. A two-bedroom flat overlooking Battersea Park, she was sharing the place with her mum, Penny, busy in the kitchen making us a pot tea, and her dog, a Dachshund she’d named Louis Armstrong, scurrying about the living room, nipping at my ankles.
Adele had met me at the door, and out of a vintage lift with wrought iron gates. She was dressed head to toe in black, a dress and leggings, hair scraped up in a bun, her face unmade up but porcelain lovely. First impressions. She swore like a trooper and had a laugh that could crack cement. We chatted for an hour over tea and a plate of digestive biscuits. As well as being loud, warm, rude, and funny, she seemed to me entirely without filter and the more vulnerable because of it. I liked her a lot.
She mentioned sitting next to Jay Z at an awards ceremony, and I enquired what he’d smelt like. “Delicious,” she boomed. “He smells like money! Ha-ha-ha!!”
Of Rick Rubin, who’d produced a bunch of tracks for 21, she revealed: “The first time I met him, it was at a dinner for Neil Diamond, and I had a tampon on my thumb.” Pressed to elaborate, she offered: “I’d got four-inch fake nails on. I had a tickling fight and one of them got pulled off. The nail was weak, so I put a tampon on it and forgot to take it off.”
She told me a joke – “What do you call a blonde standing on her head? A brunette with bad breath.” When I asked her what she saw when she looked in the mirror, without skipping a beat, she fired back: “A clueless girl who’s going places.”
SHE WANTED TO PLAY me three tracks from 21. We moved over to the dining table. She plugged her iPod into a small speaker, lit up a Marlboro Light, and cued the opening track, ‘Rolling in the Deep’. It was the first time she’d played anything from the record to anyone outside of her family and small circle of confidantes, she told me, and she was visibly nervous. Fidgety, a nail-biter. She needn’t have fretted. I believe my mouth sagged open.
However over-exposed the whole of 21 has gotten to be, right there and then, I was bowled over. ‘Rolling in the Deep’ was, is, such a magnificent song. Her voice a force of nature. She put on ‘Set Fire to the Rain’ next, and then ‘Someone Like You’, closing her eyes as it played out, sucking deep on another cigarette. An idiot could have deduced this was a sure thing, and he did. More so, though, I knew to my bones that these songs were soon enough going to blow up Adele Adkins’s whole world in ways she couldn’t possibly imagine.
A week later, I went to see her play ‘Rolling in the Deep’ and ‘Someone Like You’ on Jools Holland’s TV show. That evening, I found her pacing up and down the warren of corridors at BBC TV Centre, a sly ciggie on the go. She gave me a hug, a peck on the cheek, and of her impending performance announced, “I’m shitting meself.”
TV studios are frigid, sterile environments, the Beeb’s no exception. Gaggles of people milling about. The recording process stop-start unnatural. Not a place for magic to happen, except just then it did. Accompanied by her American pianist Elliott, she nailed ‘Someone Like You’ in a single take, her voice filling up the room and with the other guests on the show, Robert Plant, Arcade Fire, and Mavis Staples, watching on, as rapt as the rest of us. As the last note faded away, and before the applause erupted, there were seconds of dead still silence, as if everyone there needed a moment to process what they’d witnessed.
Afterwards in her dressing room, along with friends and her mum, she sat snaffling on a Chinese takeaway, doling a bottle of Prosecco out into plastic cups. Robert Plant poked his around the door and told her she made him proud to be English. No-one spoke as Plant’s footsteps echoed off down the corridor, and until Adele, eyes wide as saucers, shouted out: “Faaaacking hell!!!”
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I SAW HER NEXT, and finally, in Madrid, unseasonably warm in the first week of November. She was in the Spanish capital to play a low-key promotional show at a smoky, subterranean jazz club, solo but for Elliott once again, and where a group of excitable teenage girls waited for her on the pavement outside, waving camera phones and scraps of paper for her to sign.
Earlier in the day, I’d done an interview with her at our hotel, a grand city centre establishment, the two of us sat on wicker chairs in a conservatory dappled by the late afternoon sun. She told me how the inspiration for 21 derived from long drives across America on a tour bus, hearing Dolly Parton, Garth Brooks, and Rascal Flatts on Country radio.
I nodded along, but I was suffering. Unbeknown to me, or indeed to Adele, I was going down with a gastric flu and found myself increasingly discomfited. The longer we talked, the more ominous the rumblings from my stomach. I started to squirm, desperately, in my seat, clammy with sweat, fearful of the deluge to come. Evidently, I was quite the pallid, wild-eyed sight. Later, and with concern, she asked her PR if I was “alright, or is there something wrong with him?” I’m not sure whether she meant physically, or mentally.
Even so, towards the end of the interview, she managed to jolt me from my inner turmoil. It was, in fact, the moment I’ve remembered her the most by, and the way I hope she is still. Unguarded, untamed, delightful, her face lighting up. She was thinking back on a Dutch TV appearance she’d made a couple of years previous, a breakfast-time chat show. The host sprung her with an on-air surprise, bringing out her ‘number one fan’. A robust lady from Amsterdam with, it fast transpired, serious boundary issues.
“She couldn’t keep her eyes off me,” Adele gasped. At the end of broadcast, she continued, “no word of a lie, she asked me to go home with her!”
At which, Adele leaned back in her chair, mouth agape. Her laugh when it came was like an express train roaring out of a tunnel. “And I said to her,” she thundered, prompting heads to snap round in the farthest recesses of the hotel, “thanks and all love… but I like dick.”
This captures something rare about catching talent at that exact inflection point before it explodes. The unfiltered quotes and that raw Jools Holland moment really convey why she was different from the start. Loved the balance between showing her warmth and that underlying nervousness most profiles miss.