Adele Adkins is an anomaly. She has won at the fame game simply by refusing to play it, and her music is all the better for it. She’s perhaps the most important British singer of right here, right now. In her first interview in forever, Adele talks about being a mum, her fear of fame and why she wouldn’t want to follow up 21, even if she could.
When she was 10 years old, Adele’s grand-dad died. She was devastated.
“I loved him so much, more than the world.”
As well as her own grief, she sensed the depth of loss felt by her grandmother.
“My grampy and my nana had always been my ideal relationship — ideal friendship, companionship, everything. Even though I’m sure there’s loads of stuff I don’t know about, as their granddaughter it was bliss, just heaven. I was so, so sad.”
So acute was the grief that she decided there and then to become a heart surgeon.
“I wanted to fix people’s hearts,” she says.
A year later, Adele started senior school and threw herself into biology lessons at Balham’s Chestnut Grove School. Until she discovered, well, fun — and boys.
“I gave up on it. My heart wasn’t in it anymore.” And that was that for Adele’s aortic ambitions.
A decade after the death of her gramps, Adele returned home to London from LA where she had been recording with the producer Dan Wilson for the follow-up to her debut album, 19.
She got off the 11-hour flight, jetlagged off her face, and went over to her mum’s house.
“I played her the unmixed version of Someone Like You,” she remembers. “She was pretty teary. ‘You are a surgeon,’ she said, ‘You’re fixing people’s hearts’.”
She pauses and shrugs. “It’s all a bit Sliding Doors really, innit?”
The tropes of Gwyneth Paltrow’s 1998 what if comedy-drama are something of a theme found on Adele’s new album, 25.
When she was ready to start work on the record, Adele walked down to the local shop (“I do actually walk,” she says, laughing) and bought herself a brand new notebook.
“I do it every album. I buy a new pad, sniff it — ’cause smell is important — and then I get a big, fat sharpie and write my age on the front page. Twenty-five has five exclamation marks after it ’cause I was like, ‘How the hell did that happen?!’ 21 to 25.”
The record is about getting older and becoming nostalgic, she says.
It’s about what was, what is, what might have been.
It’s about missing things that you had no idea were so precious, like being 18 years old and drinking two-litre bottles of cider in Brockwell Park with your mates.
“Those were the most real and best moments of my life and I wish I’d known that I wasn’t going to be able to sit in the park and drink a bottle of cider again.”
Not because she’s famous, but because her life — and the lives of her school friends — has moved on. No one is a teenager anymore.
“I think the album is about trying to clear out the past,” she says slowly. “Becoming a parent and moving past my mid-twenties, I simply don’t have the capacity to worry about as many things that I used to really enjoy worrying about.”
She loved worrying?
“Oh yeah, I used to love the drama of all of it,” she hoots, “but now I’m a mum I only have so much head space. I’ve got to clear a lot of stuff out, which is really therapeutic, ’cause I can really hold a grudge. Life is so much easier when you don’t hoard your past.”
25 will possibly be interpreted by critics as a rumination on fame and fortune, but that doesn’t seem either accurate, or fair.
As with her past records, Adele perfectly translates individual experience into collective feeling. She does this with her voice, but also with her songwriting, which is powerfully simple but oh so evocative.
Her heart gets broken because our hearts get broken.
She struggles, we struggle, regardless of who we are and what we do.
25 reflects on how we change, hugely, in our twenties whether we’re a world famous singer or a graduate or a plumber or a new mum.
Whatever 25 it is — and you get the impression that Adele is still figuring that out as the record is being mixed and mastered — it isn’t 21, the 30-million selling multi-award winning album that catapulted her from critical success to global superstar.
“I was very conscious not to make 21 again. I definitely wasn’t going to write a heartbreak record ’cause I’m not heartbroken, but I probably won’t be able to better the one I did, so what’s the point? Bit cliché, innit?” she says.
“Also, how I felt when I wrote 21, it ain’t worth feeling like that again.”
How did she feel?
“I was very sad and very lonely. Regardless of being a mum or a girlfriend, I didn’t want to feel like that again,” she reiterates.
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins, now 27 years old and with an MBE no less, appears for her first interview in three years through the — appropriately enough — sliding doors of the artist lounge at the London offices of her record label, XL, home also to Dizzee, M.I.A., and Tyler, The Creator, who has hung out with Adele, and in 2014 described her to i-D as “a bowl of yellow and happiness”.
She’s weighed down with headphones, a Macbook Pro, an XL promo bomber jacket, an iPhone 6 and a Bob The Builder bag. She asks for a green tea;
“I’m trying to be healthy,” she mutters before laughing that you can kind of kid yourself you’ve been for a Chinese if you drink green tea.
“Reminds me of the taste of wontons,” she says.
