The story of Adele

A girl from Tottenham

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born on the fifth of May 1988 in Tottenham, north London. Her mother, Penny Adkins, was just eighteen when she had her. Her father, Mark Evans, was Welsh, and he left when Adele was about two, so she was raised by her mum alone. Adele later said she was singing by the age of four and was obsessed with voices. When she was nine, mother and daughter moved to Brighton on the south coast, and two years later they came back to London, first to Brixton and then to West Norwood in the south of the city. That neighbourhood would become the subject of the very first song she ever wrote.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The first pop act she truly loved was the Spice Girls. By the age of eleven her bedroom was more or less a shrine to them, and she was heartbroken when her favourite, Geri Halliwell, left the group. She did impressions of them at dinner parties. She also adored the British singer Gabrielle, and her mum made her a sequinned eye patch so she could perform as Gabrielle in a school talent show. Then there was Lauryn Hill. Adele said she spent about a month analysing The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill at the age of eight, wondering when she would ever feel that passionate about anything. Music, she has said, was the sibling this only child never had.[1] [2]

Two moments in her early teens changed everything. At thirteen or fourteen she saw Pink perform at the Brixton Academy and felt as if she were standing in a wind tunnel, hit by the sheer force of a voice in the room. Then, around fourteen, she wandered into the jazz section of a local record shop and picked up albums by Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald, drawn in by the covers. She started listening to Etta James every night for an hour and, in her words, got to know her own voice. Later, Amy Winehouse's debut album Frank inspired her to pick up the guitar. Without Amy, she has said, she would never have written her early songs.[1] [2]

There was a darker side, too. Adele has said her melancholy streak began when her grandfather died, when she was about ten, and that she has spent a lot of time in therapy since. From the age of fourteen she lived with her mum in a flat above a discount shop in West Norwood, and she wrote much of her first album in that flat. She went on to the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology in Croydon, where Leona Lewis and Jessie J were fellow students. Surprisingly, she did not dream of stardom. She wanted to work in artists and repertoire, finding and launching other people's careers. She graduated in the spring of 2006.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A demo on Myspace and the album called 19

Adele's name first appeared on a record in 2006, when she was billed as the featured singer on a dance track called Be Divine by a techno DJ called Ricsta. It went nowhere. What mattered was a three song demo she had recorded for a class project. A friend posted it on Myspace, and it caught the ear of Richard Russell, the boss of the independent label XL Recordings. When XL called, Adele assumed it was a joke. The only label she had ever heard of was Virgin, so she brought a friend along to the meeting just in case. XL's Nick Huggett was sold, and he pointed her towards a young manager named Jonathan Dickins.[1] [2]

Dickins ran September Management, which looked after Jamie T, one of Adele's favourite singers. That sealed it. He became her manager in June 2006, and in September she signed to XL. Around the same time she sang backing vocals on a song by Jack Peñate, and the session's producer, Jim Abbiss, was so struck by her voice that he asked if she had any demos of her own. He went on to produce most of her debut album. In June 2007 she made her television debut on Later with Jools Holland, and that October her first single, Hometown Glory, came out on Jamie T's small label, Pacemaker. Only five hundred copies were pressed.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Hometown Glory was a love letter to West Norwood. Adele wrote it at sixteen, in about ten minutes, after her mum tried to persuade her to leave home for university. By early 2008 the buzz was loud. She became the first ever winner of the Critics' Choice award at the Brit Awards and topped the BBC's Sound of 2008 poll of music critics. Her second single, Chasing Pavements, came out on the fourteenth of January 2008 and sat at number two in Britain for weeks. Two weeks later came the album. She called it 19, after the age she was when she wrote most of the songs, and it went straight in at number one in the UK.[1] [2] [3] [4]

19 mixed soul, folk and jazz, and it showed off a voice that sounded far older than its owner. Most of the songs were written by Adele alone, with a few co-written with Eg White. One cover made the cut, Bob Dylan's Make You Feel My Love, recorded because her manager loved the song. The album was shortlisted for the Mercury Prize, and critics praised her phrasing and her maturity. Some also lumped her in with a wave of British female soul singers and called her the new Amy Winehouse. Adele found that lazy. Her reply became famous: they were a gender, she said, not a genre.[1] [2]

Breaking America and an early life crisis

In March 2008 Adele signed with Columbia Records for North America, and 19 came out in the United States that June. At first it barely moved. She was also struggling. That year she cancelled American tour dates to stay with a boyfriend, and she later admitted she had been drinking far too much and could not bear to be apart from him. She called it her early life crisis and said she could not believe she had done something so ungrateful. She hated flying and got badly homesick on the road. Britain loved her, but America was still a long way off.[1] [2]

Then came one night of television. On the eighteenth of October 2008 Adele was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, on an episode that also featured the vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Seventeen million people tuned in, the show's best ratings in fourteen years. Adele sang Chasing Pavements and Cold Shoulder. The cast member Bill Hader later remembered the writers stopping work and pulling back a curtain to see who was singing. The next morning 19 was top of the iTunes chart, and within a week it had jumped to number eleven on the Billboard album chart. Among the viewers was the producer Rick Rubin, who would soon come calling.[1] [2] [3]

At the Grammy Awards in February 2009, Adele, then twenty, won Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for Chasing Pavements. She accepted the new artist award from the British singer Estelle, said she was going to cry, and dedicated the win to her mum and to London. That year 19 kept climbing and passed two million copies worldwide. In 2010, after the song was featured on The X Factor, her version of Make You Feel My Love came back into the UK singles chart at number four.[1] [2] [3]

While touring North America, Adele picked up a new musical obsession. Her tour bus driver was from Nashville, and during smoke breaks he played her the music he loved: bluegrass, rockabilly, Garth Brooks, Dolly Parton, Wanda Jackson, Alison Krauss and Lady Antebellum. Adele had never grown up around country music and loved how direct its stories were. She even sang Lady Antebellum's Need You Now with Darius Rucker on a CMT television special. All of that Southern music was quietly seeping into the songs she was about to write, songs that would come out of the worst heartbreak of her life.[1] [2]

Heartbreak into 21

In April 2009 Adele was twenty and in her first serious relationship, with a man ten years older. She started work on her second album wanting something more upbeat and modern, tired of being called an old soul. The sessions went nowhere. After two weeks she had just one song she liked, a piano ballad called Take It All, and she cancelled the rest. Not long after she played Take It All to her boyfriend, the eighteen month relationship ended. She was devastated. She was also, suddenly, full of songs. The album would move from anger to loneliness to regret and finally to acceptance.[1] [2]

Within a day of the break up she called the producer Paul Epworth. She had had a furious argument the night before, and she walked into the studio and, as she put it, screamed. Epworth pushed her towards something more aggressive, and they rebuilt a half finished ballad into Rolling in the Deep. She sang the first verse unaccompanied, he found a melody on acoustic guitar, and a pounding drum beat was meant to echo her racing heart. The title came from the slang phrase roll deep, which she took to mean having someone who always has your back. For a while she planned to call the whole album Rolling in the Deep.[1] [2]

Other collaborators caught the same raw energy. With Fraser T Smith she wrote Set Fire to the Rain, and Smith liked her first take so much that the demo became the finished record. The OneRepublic singer Ryan Tedder, who had met her at the 2009 Grammys, turned up four hours early to their first session. He had a piano part and a few opening lines, and when Adele arrived fresh from another row with her ex, complaining that he always turned the tables on her, the song Turning Tables was born. In Los Angeles they wrote Rumour Has It, and Tedder was stunned when she nailed the lead vocal from top to bottom in about ten minutes.[1] [2]

Rick Rubin was meant to produce the whole album. In April 2010 he gathered top session players at his Shangri La studio in Malibu and recorded Adele live with the band, and she later recalled moving the musicians to tears. But Adele was unhappy with much of it, and she went back to her rougher early takes. Only five Rubin recordings survived. Weeks later she learned her ex was engaged. She wrote Someone Like You on the end of her bed with a cold, waiting for a bath to run, and finished it at the piano with the songwriter Dan Wilson. The label wanted a fuller version with Rubin's band. Adele refused, and kept just voice and piano.[1] [2]

The phenomenon, the silence and the surgery

21 came out on the twenty fourth of January 2011 in Britain and in February in America. Then, on the fifteenth of February, Adele sang Someone Like You at the Brit Awards, alone at a piano, and the effect was immediate. The song went to number one, and she became the first living act since the Beatles in 1964 to have two top five singles and two top five albums in the UK at the same time. To cope with stage fright she invented an alter ego, Sasha Carter, a mix of Beyoncé's Sasha Fierce and June Carter. Before meeting Beyoncé she had a huge anxiety attack and simply asked herself what Sasha Fierce would do.[1] [2]

The numbers became absurd. 21 topped the charts in more than thirty countries and spent twenty four weeks at number one in the United States, longer than any album since 1985. It became the best selling album of the twenty first century, with more than thirty one million copies sold worldwide. Rolling in the Deep, Someone Like You and Set Fire to the Rain all went to number one in America. At one point in 2011, a copy of 19 or 21 was being sold in Britain every seven seconds. Billboard later credited her with reviving a struggling music industry in 2011.[1] [2]

The success came at a price. In 2011 Adele suffered a haemorrhage on her vocal cords, and in October she cancelled her entire sold out American tour. Singing, she said in a statement, was her life, and she could not risk damaging her voice forever. In early November the surgeon Steven Zeitels performed laser microsurgery at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston to remove a benign polyp. Meanwhile 21 kept selling without her. She later said the bigger her career became, the smaller her life felt, and she found herself retreating into a tiny private space. The death of Amy Winehouse that summer frightened her deeply.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Her comeback was the Grammy Awards in February 2012. She won all six awards she was up for, including Album, Record and Song of the Year, equalling Beyoncé's record for a woman in one night. Days later George Michael handed her the Brit Award for British Album of the Year. That same month her estranged father, Mark Evans, gave an interview to a tabloid. A recovering alcoholic, he said he regretted not being a better father and that drinking had taken over after his own father died. Adele had told an American interviewer she would spit in his face if she saw him. He said he was devastated by that.[1] [2]

Skyfall, a son and the long quiet

In early 2011 Sony's head of film music suggested Adele to the makers of the next James Bond film, hoping for a classic Shirley Bassey feel. Adele was hesitant and told the director Sam Mendes that her songs were personal. Mendes told her to write a personal song, then, and pointed her to Carly Simon's Nobody Does It Better. She read the script, fell in love with it, and wrote Skyfall with Paul Epworth. The first draft took about ten minutes. After her throat surgery she sent Mendes a demo, and he played it to the producer Barbara Broccoli and to Daniel Craig. Both, it was said, shed a tear.[1] [2]

Skyfall was recorded at Abbey Road with a seventy seven piece orchestra. Adele was heavily pregnant at the time, which is why she sings it so low, and she has often found it hard to perform live. She had found out she was pregnant shortly after her 2012 Grammy triumph, and in October 2012 her son Angelo was born. His father was Simon Konecki, a former banker turned charity entrepreneur whom she had met in 2011, just as 21 exploded. In February 2013 Skyfall became the first James Bond theme ever to win the Oscar for Best Original Song. Adele also won a Golden Globe for it, and later that year she was made an MBE.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Motherhood was not simple. Adele later said she had really bad postpartum depression after Angelo was born, and that it frightened her. She felt inadequate, worried she was doing a bad job, and did not talk about it for a long time. She did not take medication. What helped was talking to other mothers, several of whom confessed they felt the same, and giving herself one afternoon a week to do whatever she liked without the baby. She also fought to protect her son. In July 2014 a photo agency paid Angelo a five figure sum in damages over paparazzi pictures of his first family outings, taken in 2013.[1] [2] [3]

Making a third album was agony. Adele wrote a whole record about being a mother and then scrapped it as too boring. Sessions with her friend Kid Harpoon went nowhere, and so did a trip to work with Ryan Tedder in New York, although it produced a tender ballad for her son called Remedy. When she played Rick Rubin her new songs, he told her he did not believe her. They sounded, he said, like they belonged on another pop star's album. Adele took it well, admitting she did not believe herself either. She later said she was not sure she would have come back to music at all if she had not had her son.[1] [2]

Hello, 25 and the biggest tour of her life

The breakthrough came with the producer Greg Kurstin. They wrote the first half of Hello in Chiswick in west London, and then Adele vanished for six months. Kurstin honestly did not know if she would ever come back to finish it. When she did, it became the lead single. Her big inspiration for the album was Madonna's Ray of Light, which Madonna made after having her first child. Adele also sought out the Swedish hitmaker Max Martin after hearing his work on a Taylor Swift single, and with him she built Send My Love to Your New Lover by reworking the skeleton of a song she had first written at thirteen.[1] [2] [3]

On the eighteenth of October 2015, thirty seconds of a new song played over a black screen during an ad break on The X Factor, and the internet lost its mind. Hello came out five days later. Its video, filmed in Montreal by the Canadian director Xavier Dolan, was watched nearly twenty eight million times in its first day, a new record. Hello became the first song in America to sell a million downloads in a single week. Then came the album 25, on the twentieth of November. Adele called it a make up record, as opposed to 21's break up record, about making up for lost time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

25 sold more than eight hundred thousand copies in its first week in Britain, the fastest in UK chart history. In America it sold three point three eight million copies in a single week, a record since modern tracking began in 1991, and it did so without being on streaming services at launch. When tickets went on sale for her 2016 tour, around ten million people tried to buy them. In June 2016 she headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury in front of around one hundred and fifty thousand people. Half an hour before, she broke down in tears during a radio interview, terrified. Afterwards she called it the best moment of her life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The tour ran for more than a hundred shows across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. In Antwerp in June 2016 she dedicated her show, in tears, to the victims of the mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando. In Sydney in March 2017 she broke the record for the biggest concert in Australian history two nights running. At the Grammys in February 2017 she won all five awards she was nominated for, including Album of the Year for 25, and stopped and restarted a tribute to the late George Michael, saying she could not mess it up for him. Accepting her last award, she said the artist of her life was Beyoncé.[1] [2]

The tour ended where it began, in London. The Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017 killed dozens of people in west London, and Adele quietly joined a vigil, visited firefighters with cakes, and urged fans at her Wembley Stadium shows to donate to the survivors. In the concert programme she left a handwritten note saying touring did not really suit her and she did not know if she would ever tour again. After two Wembley nights she damaged her vocal cords, and on medical advice she cancelled the last two shows. She wrote that she had been so desperate to go on that she had even considered miming. Fans gathered outside the stadium to sing her songs anyway.[1] [2] [3]

Divorce, anxiety and 30

Adele later traced a very hard period back to those cancelled Wembley shows. Then, she said, came her Saturn return, the astrological idea that life gets shaken up in your late twenties, and she lost the plot. She and Simon Konecki married in 2018, although the public had long assumed they were already married, and she left the marriage not long after. The separation was announced in April 2019, and in September she filed for divorce in Los Angeles. It was finalised in March 2021, with shared custody of Angelo and no spousal support on either side. Adele has always insisted that neither of them did anything wrong. She simply was not happy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

What followed was what she called her year of anxiety. She went to therapy, where she was told to sit with her seven year old self and face her feelings about her absent father. The hardest moment came from Angelo. When he was six, he asked her if she could see him, because he could not see her. Adele said her whole life fell apart in that moment. The next day she went into the studio and began a song for him, My Little Love. On her therapist's advice she recorded conversations with him about the divorce, and snippets of those voice notes ended up on the album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

To manage her anxiety, Adele began working out every day, sometimes two or three times a day, and over about two years she lost around a hundred pounds. When photos appeared in 2020, the world erupted with theories and opinions. She said it was never about weight, it was about feeling strong, and that the most brutal conversations about her body were between women. Later that summer she also drew criticism for posting a photo of herself in Bantu knots and a Jamaican flag bikini top to mark a cancelled Notting Hill Carnival. She later said she understood why people saw it as appropriation and admitted she had not read the room. In October 2020 she hosted Saturday Night Live.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In May 2021 her father, Mark Evans, died of cancer. Adele had gone to see him, and they made their peace. She played him her new album over Zoom a week before he died, and she said the divorce had taught her to see her parents as human and to forgive him. That autumn the number thirty appeared projected on landmarks around the world. Easy on Me came out on the fifteenth of October 2021. She had found its opening while singing in the shower in 2018, and it broke Spotify's record for the most streams in a day. In it she asks for understanding and forgiveness from her son, her ex husband and herself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

30 arrived on the nineteenth of November 2021. It was more jazz, gospel and soul than anything she had done before, with producers including Greg Kurstin, Max Martin, Ludwig Göransson and the London producer Inflo. It became the best selling album of the year in the world. At her request, Spotify even removed the shuffle button on albums, because she said her stories should be heard in the order she intended. The Oprah Winfrey special Adele One Night Only drew nearly twelve million viewers and later won her an Emmy. In February 2022 30 won British Album of the Year, making Adele the first solo artist ever to win that Brit Award three times.[1] [2]

Vegas, Munich and a big break

Adele did not want to tour stadiums again, so she chose a Las Vegas residency, Weekends with Adele, at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, close to her son in Los Angeles. On the twentieth of January 2022, just one day before opening night, she posted a tearful video saying the show was not ready, blaming delivery delays and a crew hit by Covid. Fans who had already flown in were furious. She later said the backlash left her a shell of a person for months, but she stood by the decision. That July she played two huge homecoming concerts in London's Hyde Park, her first British shows in five years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The residency finally opened on the eighteenth of November 2022, with her son in the crowd, and critics were won over. The show began with just Adele and a pianist, and built to strings, rain and fire, with a piano sinking into a pool during Set Fire to the Rain. It ran, with extensions, until the twenty third of November 2024. The shows were famous for her chatty, unfiltered talk with fans. In October 2023 she told one audience she had been, in her words, borderline alcoholic for much of her twenties, and that she had given up drinking a few months earlier. At one of the last shows, Celine Dion was in the crowd, and the two embraced in tears.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In August 2024 Adele played ten nights in Munich in a stadium built just for her on the city's trade fair grounds. The curved video screen, two hundred and twenty metres long, set a Guinness world record, and more than seven hundred thousand people came. It was her first run of shows in mainland Europe since 2016. On the ninth of August, when a fan jokingly proposed from the crowd, she held up her left hand and said she was already getting married, confirming her engagement to the American sports agent Rich Paul. She also sang Chasing Pavements live for the first time in seven years, and stopped one show so everyone could watch the Olympic women's hundred metres final.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Before Munich she told German television that her tank was empty after so many weekends on stage in Vegas, that she had no plans for new music at all, and that she wanted a big break to do other creative things. A live box set from the residency followed in February 2025. In November 2025 it was announced that she would make her acting debut in Tom Ford's film of the Anne Rice novel Cry to Heaven, alongside Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor Johnson and Colin Firth. Filming took place in Italy in early 2026, with a release expected in late 2026, as of 2026.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The legacy is already enormous. Adele has sold more than one hundred and twenty million records, and 21 and 25 are both certified diamond in the United States. She has won sixteen Grammys, twelve Brit Awards, an Oscar, a Golden Globe and an Emmy, leaving only a Tony between her and the rare set known as an EGOT. Rolling Stone ranked her among the greatest singers of all time. Critics credit her with bringing the heartbreak ballad back to the top of the charts, opening a path for singers from Sam Smith to Olivia Rodrigo. And she did it with just four albums, each one named after a year of her life.[1]

The people around Adele

Adele and Penny Adkins. Penny Adkins had Adele at eighteen and raised her alone, working in furniture restoration and adult education. Adele has described a fun, open relationship with her and said she never rebelled because there was nothing she could not tell her mum. It was Penny who nudged her towards university, prompting Hometown Glory. Adele later bought her mother a home in west London.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adele and Mark Evans. Her Welsh father left when she was a toddler, and alcohol, she said, kept him from her. He gave paid interviews about her to newspapers, and in 2012 she said she would spit in his face. Therapy during her divorce helped her understand him. They reconciled before he died of cancer in May 2021, and she played him her album 30 over Zoom a week before his death.[1] [2] [3]

Adele and Simon Konecki. Adele met Simon Konecki, a former banker who founded the charity Drop4Drop, in 2011 as 21 was exploding. Their son Angelo was born in 2012. They married in 2018 and separated soon after, divorcing in 2021. They share custody, and she bought him a house across the street from hers in Los Angeles. She has said she would trust him with her life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adele and Rich Paul. Rich Paul is the American sports agent who founded Klutch Sports, whose clients include LeBron James. They met at a party, where a tipsy Adele asked if he wanted to sign her because she was an athlete now. They became a couple in early 2021 and went public at the NBA Finals that July. In August 2024 she confirmed on stage in Munich that they were engaged.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adele and Jonathan Dickins. Jonathan Dickins of September Management has managed Adele since June 2006, when she was eighteen. It was Dickins who suggested she cover Make You Feel My Love. He told Rolling Stone he expected her to make twenty records and that they were playing the long game. His sister Lucy Dickins, her agent, helped bring the Munich stadium project to her.[1] [2] [3]

Adele and Paul Epworth. The producer Paul Epworth caught Adele the day after her break up and turned her fury into Rolling in the Deep, the song that launched 21. The two reunited to write Skyfall, which won them the Oscar for Best Original Song in 2013. He also co-wrote two tracks on 25 and said that album was about coming up with the weirdest sounds she could get away with.[1] [2] [3]

Adele and Greg Kurstin. Greg Kurstin broke Adele's writer's block on 25. Together they wrote Hello, even though she disappeared for six months halfway through. On 30 he was her closest collaborator, writing six songs with her, including Easy on Me and My Little Love. He said she could spend years perfecting a song if its opening line felt right, while he looped chords for hours.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adele and Rick Rubin. Rick Rubin spotted Adele on Saturday Night Live in 2008 and was lined up to produce all of 21, but she scrapped most of his live band recordings in favour of her raw demos. Years later, when she played him early songs for 25, he told her he did not believe her. She agreed, went back to the drawing board, and made a better album.[1] [2] [3]

Adele and Ryan Tedder. The OneRepublic frontman met Adele at the 2009 Grammys and wrote Turning Tables and Rumour Has It with her for 21, marvelling that she sang Rumour Has It perfectly in one pass. Their sessions for 25 were harder, but they produced the ballad Remedy, and a lunch together led her to discover Max Martin.[1] [2] [3]

Adele and Beyoncé. Adele has called Beyoncé the artist of her life. She fell for her voice as a child hearing Destiny's Child. At the 2017 Grammys she said she could not accept Album of the Year because Lemonade was monumental, then went to Beyoncé's dressing room to tell her so in person. Beyoncé, in turn, named Adele as an influence on her album 4.[1] [2] [3]

Adele and Amy Winehouse. Amy Winehouse's album Frank made Adele pick up the guitar, and the press called Adele the new Amy. They met only a few times. Watching Winehouse's decline, and her death in 2011 just as Adele became world famous, frightened her about fame, alcohol and the press, and pushed her to withdraw from public life for long stretches.[1] [2] [3]

Adele and Damon Albarn. Adele grew up a big Blur fan, so working with Damon Albarn on 25 should have been a dream. Instead they finished nothing, and he told the press she was insecure and her music was middle of the road. Adele called it a classic case of never meeting your idols and said she regretted spending time with him.[1]

Rare facts about Adele

• The first record with Adele's name on it was a dance track by a techno DJ called Ricsta. In 2006, aged seventeen, she was billed as the featured singer on Be Divine, released on a small label called Stirfried Trax. It never charted and got almost no attention.[1]
• Only five hundred copies of her debut single, Hometown Glory, were pressed. It came out in October 2007 on Pacemaker Recordings, the label run by Jamie T. It only charted properly after it was used on the television drama Skins.[1] [2]
• At school, Adele planned to work behind the scenes finding new artists, not to become one. She has credited the BRIT School with nurturing her talent, but at the time she was more interested in artists and repertoire, launching other people's careers.[1] [2]
• When XL Recordings first called, Adele thought it was a hoax. The only record label she knew of was Virgin, so she took a friend with her to the meeting in case it was not real.[1]
• She was the very first winner of the Brit Awards Critics' Choice prize. The award was created for 2008, and Adele won it before her debut album was even out. She also topped the BBC's Sound of 2008 poll.[1] [2]
• Her big American breakthrough came on the same Saturday Night Live episode as Sarah Palin. The October 2008 episode drew seventeen million viewers, the show's best ratings in fourteen years, and 19 topped iTunes the next morning.[1]
• A Nashville bus driver is partly responsible for the sound of 21. On her first North American tour, her driver played her country, bluegrass and rockabilly during smoke breaks, steering her towards the Southern roots feel of 21.[1]
• 21 was nearly called Rolling in the Deep. The title came from the slang phrase roll deep. She dropped it as too confusing and went back to naming the album after her age.[1]
• The drum beat in Rolling in the Deep was meant to sound like a racing heartbeat. Paul Epworth set the pounding beat to mirror how Adele felt the day after her break up. The demo was cut in two days.[1]
• Ryan Tedder turned up four hours early for his first session with Adele. He wanted time to study her earlier work. Later, she recorded the whole lead vocal for Rumour Has It in about ten minutes, which he said had never happened to him before.[1] [2]
• The released version of Set Fire to the Rain is Adele's first demo take. Producer Fraser T Smith thought no later attempt beat her first vocal, so he kept the demo and built the finished record around it.[1]
• Adele wrote Someone Like You at the end of her bed while nursing a cold. She had just learned her ex was engaged, and she was waiting for her bath to run. She said writing it set her free.[1]
• On her 2011 North American tour, backstage visitors had to donate to a baby loss charity. Every guest had to give at least twenty dollars to SANDS, a British charity supporting families affected by the death of a baby.[1]
• Adele once invented a stage alter ego called Sasha Carter. It combined Beyoncé's Sasha Fierce persona with the country singer June Carter, and helped her cope with crippling stage fright.[1]
• She sings Skyfall so low partly because she was heavily pregnant when she recorded it. The song sits in a low register that she has often found hard to sing live. It was recorded at Abbey Road with a seventy seven piece orchestra.[1]
• Skyfall was the first James Bond theme ever to win an Oscar. Earlier Bond songs like Live and Let Die and Nobody Does It Better had been nominated, but Skyfall was the first to take the award, in 2013.[1]
• Adele became an ordained minister to officiate a friend's wedding. In January 2018 she married the comedian Alan Carr and Paul Drayton in the garden of her Los Angeles home.[1]
• The famous Hello video was shot in Montreal by the director Xavier Dolan. It was watched nearly twenty eight million times in its first day, breaking the record Taylor Swift's Bad Blood had set.[1]
• When We Were Young was written on a piano that belonged to the composer Philip Glass. Adele and Tobias Jesso Jr wrote it at a rented house in Los Angeles that had Glass's piano in it.[1]
• Adele co-wrote Sia's hit Alive, but insisted her voice be removed from the demo. When Sia wanted to offer it to Rihanna, Adele agreed on condition that her demo vocal was taken off. Sia ended up releasing it herself.[1]
• Phil Collins called Adele a slippery little fish after a planned collaboration went quiet. She had sent him music to work on and then went silent, later admitting she simply chickened out.[1]
• The 2017 Wembley shows drew a record crowd for a UK music event at the stadium. Around ninety eight thousand people attended in a single night, a stadium record reported by the BBC.[1] [2]
• Around ten million people tried to buy tickets for her 2016 American tour. For six nights at Madison Square Garden alone, an estimated four million fans chased about one hundred thousand tickets.[1]
• Her 2017 Album of the Year Grammy sits on a shelf with a lemon wedged into it. The trophy arrived broken in the post. Instead of fixing it, she filled the gap with a lemon, a nod to Beyoncé's Lemonade.[1]
• Adele has said she has never smoked cannabis, not even once. She told Rolling Stone in 2015 that her close, open relationship with her mother meant she never felt the need to rebel.[1]
• She has her son's name tattooed on one hand and the word paradise on the other. She later discovered Lana Del Rey has a paradise tattoo too, and joked that Lana must think she is a mad fan.[1]
• I Drink Wine was originally about fifteen minutes long. Adele cut it down after feedback from her label. It was inspired by Elton John and Bernie Taupin.[1]
• All Night Parking is the first song on a standard Adele album with a featured artist, and he had died decades earlier. The jazz pianist Erroll Garner is credited because the track samples a recording of him from a 1964 BBC programme.[1]
• Love Is a Game was written with Breakfast at Tiffany's playing on mute in the studio. As the film ended, Adele suggested writing the ending as if it were the closing music of a movie.[1] [2]
• Spotify removed the shuffle button on albums at Adele's request. When 30 came out, she argued that albums tell a story and should be heard in order, and Spotify agreed.[1]
• More than half a million vinyl copies of 30 were pressed before release. The huge order was blamed for delays across the vinyl industry, though later reports said it probably was not her fault.[1]
• Her friends, not a professional choir, sing the chorus of Hold On. Adele wanted the people who had actually told her to hold on during the divorce to sing it. She told one of them to blend in more.[1] [2]
• In Munich she stopped her own concert so the crowd could watch the Olympic hundred metres. On the third of August 2024 she streamed the women's final on the giant screen. Julien Alfred won Saint Lucia's first ever Olympic medal.[1]
• She says she will not sing Chasing Pavements after Munich because she still sounds nineteen on it. She explained that the way she pronounced the words at nineteen annoys her, even though the song launched her career.[1]
• Her Munich stadium had the largest temporary outdoor LED screen ever built. The curved screen was two hundred and twenty metres long and set a Guinness world record. The venue was dismantled after ten shows.[1]
• During a 2023 Vegas show, she polled fans on whether they would visit the Titanic by submarine. It was the week of the Titan submersible disaster. Adele said she would never go, admitting she will not even ride roller coasters.[1]
• A British prime minister once sent Adele a thank you letter. The then prime minister Gordon Brown wrote to her that in the country's financial troubles she was a light at the end of the tunnel.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.