Adele

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born on May 5, 1988, in Tottenham, north London, to Penny Adkins, an English mother, and Marc Evans, a Welsh father who left the family when Adele was a small child ^[1]. Her mother, who was eighteen when Adele was born, raised her alone, moving between rented flats in Brixton and West Norwood in south London. Money was tight, and Adele has often credited her mother with encouraging every creative impulse she showed, from singing to sketching ^[2].

Music arrived early. She sang along to the Spice Girls as a child and later discovered records by Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald in a bargain bin, an accident she has described as the moment she understood what a voice could do ^[1]. At fourteen she won a place at the BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology in Croydon, the state-funded school whose alumni include Amy Winehouse and Leona Lewis. She graduated in 2006, in the same class as the singer Jessie J ^[3].

Anyone tracing the beginnings of the Adele biography usually starts with a demo. A friend posted three of her songs to Myspace while she was still at school, and the recordings caught the attention of the independent label XL Recordings, which signed her in September 2006, only months after she left the BRIT School ^[2].

Her debut single, Hometown Glory, written when she was sixteen about West Norwood, appeared in October 2007 on the small Pacemaker label before XL reissued it ^[2]. The follow-up, Chasing Pavements, reached number two on the UK singles chart in January 2008 and introduced her voice to a national audience. That same month XL released her first album, 19, named for her age when she wrote most of it. The record entered the UK albums chart at number one ^[1].

Recognition came quickly. In 2008 she received the first ever BRIT Awards Critics' Choice prize and topped the BBC's Sound of 2008 poll, both of which marked her as the most anticipated new British act of the year ^[3]. Breaking America took one television booking: an appearance on Saturday Night Live in October 2008, on an episode drawing unusually large ratings during the presidential campaign, sent 19 up the American charts almost overnight ^[4].

At the 51st Grammy Awards in February 2009 she won Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance for Chasing Pavements ^[5]. For a debut built on sparse arrangements and confessional writing rather than radio formulas, it was an unusually fast ascent, and it set expectations that her second record would somehow have to exceed.

The second record did exceed them. 21, released in January 2011 and written in the aftermath of a broken relationship, became one of the best-selling albums of the twenty-first century, with certified sales in the tens of millions worldwide ^[1]. Rolling in the Deep, Someone Like You, and Set Fire to the Rain all reached number one in the United States. In the United Kingdom, 21 spent 23 consecutive weeks at number one, the longest run by a female solo artist in UK chart history at that time ^[2].

At the 2012 Grammy ceremony Adele won all six categories in which she was nominated, including Album, Record, and Song of the Year, matching the single-night record for a female artist then held by Beyoncé ^[5]. The same year she recorded Skyfall, the theme for the James Bond film of that name, which brought her the Academy Award for Best Original Song and a Golden Globe in early 2013 ^[6]. She was appointed MBE in the 2013 Birthday Honours for services to music ^[3].

Her third album, 25, arrived in November 2015 after a long silence and opened with the single Hello, whose video accumulated a billion views on YouTube faster than any before it. The album sold 3.38 million copies in the United States in its first week, the largest single-week sales total ever recorded by Nielsen since tracking began in 1991 ^[4]. At the 2017 Grammys, 25 won Album of the Year and Hello took Record and Song of the Year, making Adele the first artist to sweep those three top categories twice ^[5]. Any list of Adele achievements also has to include her touring: the Adele Live 2016 and 2017 dates played to millions across Europe, North America, and Oceania, closing with stadium shows at Wembley.

Adele has kept her private life comparatively guarded, releasing information mainly through her own interviews. She began a relationship with Simon Konecki, a charity executive, around 2011, and their son Angelo was born in October 2012 ^[1]. The couple married and announced their separation in April 2019; the divorce was finalised in 2021 ^[7]. Songs on her fourth album address the divorce and her worries about its effect on her son directly, a candour she discussed at length in interviews with Vogue and Oprah Winfrey in late 2021 ^[7].

Her health has shaped her career at several points. A vocal cord haemorrhage forced her to cancel tour dates in 2011 and undergo laser microsurgery, performed by the Massachusetts General Hospital surgeon Steven Zeitels, after which she rested her voice for months ^[4]. She has also spoken openly about postnatal depression, stage anxiety, and, more recently, chronic back pain dating to a slipped disc in her youth ^[7].

Since 2021 she has been in a relationship with the American sports agent Rich Paul, whom she has referenced in interviews and from the stage of her Las Vegas residency ^[7]. She lives primarily in Los Angeles, though she has repeatedly described herself as a Londoner first, and her lyrics keep returning to the city where she grew up.

After another six-year interval, Adele released 30 in November 2021, an album named, like its predecessors, for the age at which its writing began. Easy on Me, the lead single, topped charts in dozens of countries, and 30 became the best-selling album of 2021 worldwide according to the IFPI, the international recording industry federation ^[8]. At the 2023 Grammy Awards, Easy on Me won Best Pop Solo Performance, lifting her career Grammy total to sixteen ^[5].

Rather than mount another world tour, she chose residencies. Weekends with Adele opened at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas in November 2022, after a postponement she announced in a tearful video that January, and the run was extended repeatedly through November 2024 ^[7]. In August 2024 she played ten open-air concerts in a purpose-built arena in Munich, an unusual format that drew roughly 730,000 spectators over the month ^[8].

As the Munich and Las Vegas shows closed in late 2024, she told audiences she intended to take an extended break from performing, saying she wanted to live an ordinary life for a while ^[8]. She has released no album since 30, and she has given no firm date for a return, which by now is a familiar rhythm: her career has always run on long silences followed by enormous records.

Ask who was Adele to listeners a generation from now and the likely answer will centre on the voice: a powerful, grainy mezzo-soprano applied to plainspoken songs about heartbreak, regret, and repair. In a period when pop production grew denser and more digital, she proved that a piano, a vocal, and a well-built melody could still outsell everything else. 21 and 25 are, by most industry accountings, among the top-selling albums released anywhere in the past two decades ^[1].

Her influence runs through commerce as well as sound. She declined to place 25 on streaming services at release in 2015, one of the most prominent tests of whether a major artist could hold back from streaming, and the album's record-breaking physical and download sales made the experiment famous ^[4]. Her insistence on numbering albums by age turned each release into a public chapter of a single autobiography, a framing many later artists have echoed.

Among basic Adele facts, the honours list is long: sixteen Grammy Awards, an Oscar, a Golden Globe, twelve BRIT Awards including multiple Album of the Year wins, an Emmy for her 2021 television special, and an MBE ^[5][6]. Yet her larger mark may be cultural rather than statistical. She widened the space in mainstream pop for unglamorous honesty, for songs sung in her own accent about ordinary grief, and she did it while giving away almost nothing of herself except the music.