“I don’t want to get my hopes up,” she says about the expectation riding on her third album, 25. “I could just feel something coming.”Īdele at the Church Studios, London, July 2015. I remember my mum asking, ‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’” Adele couldn’t explain. Suddenly there was the prospect of breaking America and it was, like, ‘Fuck.’” She says she felt oddly dislocated at the time. (I remember Adele being put out: Someone Like You wasn’t supposed to be formally released as a single for months, so her diary was all out of whack.) When word came through that the song had gone to No 1, she went off for a pedicure.Īdele remembers it as a time of surprise and satisfaction also of mounting terror. Her live recording of Someone Like You was fast bundling up the UK singles charts. Champagne sent to her table… Hungover, Adele climbed on to a plane to JFK and by the time she landed everything had changed. Her rendition of Someone Like You, a ballad off the new album, had gone down well. That was mad.”īefore flying out to New York, Adele had sung at the 2011 Brit awards in London. “That was mad, that weekend,” Adele recalls. But the attitude in Adele’s camp seemed to be: might as bloody well give it a shitting go. Pop history suggested the effort would likely fail. At the time I thought I was writing a story about a promising Londoner (born north London, raised south London, trained at the Brit School, signed to XL in 2006, her debut 19 out in 2008) who was trying to break America with her second album. I followed her around for a weekend, hanging out with her small entourage while they shouted at each other in dressing rooms, gossiped, watched illegal streams of Premier League football matches, and impressed Americans wherever they went with their ability to cram swearwords into unusual crannies of speech. It was February 2011 and the musician, then 22 and very hectic, very gobby, had been flown to New York for a series of gigs and interviews. W hen I first met Adele, five years ago, we didn’t know. Some people I’ve spoken to have said, ‘You’re going to sell at least half what you sold before.’ But I don’t think anything’s a given. “Well, I don’t want to get my hopes up,” says Adele. Though you expect some sort of nuke or pandemic would have to wipe out most of the waiting public first. “But, no, see, this is the thing,” Adele says. As recently as August, 21 was still being bought a couple of thousand times a week. Sales-wise, it was a generational one-off, a moon landing. The last time Adele put out an album, her second, 2011’s 21, it returned seven Grammys, two Brits, two Ivor Novellos, three AMAs, two Aims, an Ascap, an Impala, a Mobo, two Music Week awards, two Q awards, four MTV awards, two Nickelodeon awards, a Glamour award, two German Echos, two French NRJs, a Polish Fryderyk, a Mexican Premios Oye! and a Canadian Juno. And after that – who knows? I’m an artist, I have an ego and it likes to be fed Digital editions of 25 will be made iTunes- and Amazon-ready. Great pillars of CDs will start to cook in factories. First thing tomorrow, liner notes and promotional literature will begin to churn from print presses. At supper time tonight, Adele will submit to her label bosses a final tracklist. “I would have been embarrassed if I’d got away with that record. Then the pop star herself hinted that the record would come out in 2014 – as indeed it might have done a version was more or less ready to go last year, only for Adele to junk half the tracks. There were rumours that Adele would release 25 in 2013, the year she actually turned 25. “I’m 60% excited,” says Adele, directing me to a couch beside a set of speakers, “40% shitting it.” She’s invited me here today to hear her third album, 25.Īdele’s third album! This thing has become almost mythical in our culture, like Salinger’s unpublished story trove, or the long-lost method of Incan stone-fitting. Jet black fakeys have been glued to her fingernails, but they’re in ruins – bitten away. Heeled boots, studded with glitter, have begun to moult in the autumn damp wherever Adele settles around the room she leaves behind traces of sparkle. The 27-year-old is dressed today in dark jumper and tapered trousers, her red hair pulled back to reveal rows of hooped gold in each ear.
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