Better than a pint of ice cream or a weepy movie, Adele’s s music hurts so good it almost makes you wish you’d had your heart broken more often. But at 29, regret is no longer her muse – the queen of the break-up anthem is moving on, as Belinda Beckett reports…
“Forgive my sweaty face, I’m very ‘ot and nervous, God, at the start I was sh**tin’ myself, I couldn’t hear a fackin’ thing. Came good, though,” yelled Adele in her best estuary English to the people of Perth on her Australian tour this spring.
Her on-stage banter, bawdy laughter and ‘what-am-I-likes’ are some of the reasons we love this big brash songstress with the mouth of a construction worker and the voice of an angel.”I get so nervous on stage I can’t help but talk,” she says with her disarming honesty. “I try telling my brain: stop sending words to the mouth. But I have this fear I’m not going to deliver and I turn into my grandma.”
Deliver she does, in a way that’s not in the least grandmotherly. Even after voice surgery, her powerful pipes and heart-rending confessional ballads hit all the right notes with the billions of fans who have ridden her sonic emotional rollercoaster right alongside her. A.k.a. the ‘queen of blue-eyed soul’ (actually they’re green), she had us long before Hello, the global hit from her third album, 25, which won five more Grammies to add to her collection of 10.
She keeps them in her loo, next to her 18 Billboard Music Awards, eight Brit Awards and an MBE presented by Prince Charles, among many other gongs. Only her Oscar for Skyfall – which she roughed out in 10 minutes – has pride of place in the lounge. Daniel Craig shed a tear when he heard it.
Words Belinda Beckett