In little more than eight years, Adele has come
from nowhere to establish herself as one of the
world's biggest entertainment brands, right up
there with Grand Theft Auto, Star Wars, FIFA
2016, and Call of Duty. The proof was in the
prizes on Wednesday night, when she walked
away with a record-equalling four Brit Awards.
Her success is a remarkable achievement - all
the more impressive given that she is operating
in a market that has roughly halved in size over
the past decade.

It is a feat for which she has been been lauded,
applauded and awarded across the globe. And
called a "freak", by Tim Ingham, the respected
music journalist who runs the website Music
Business Worldwide. She is not normal, he told
me. At least, in terms of her achievements:
"Breaking album sales records in 2016 is in and
of itself a miracle." That is a sentiment echoed
by a high-ranking music exec who preferred not
to be named. He called Adele "an anomaly",
"label-proof", and a beacon "of hope for the
industry".

For a beleaguered and besieged music business
Adele is living proof that money can still be
made in an industry dominated and decimated by
streaming and freeness. The bad news,
according to Ingham, is that Adele is "the artist
you cannot manufacture". She's a one-off. Which
was apparent from the start.

There is a slightly irritating but quite enlightening
lo-fi video you can watch of Adele Adkins
online. It was recorded in the back of an
Airstream caravan as part of Pete Townshend's
In The Attic series of webcasts, which were
usually made around the time of a Who show.
This particular edition was filmed in late May
2007, just before Adele got famous.

She had turned 19 a couple of weeks earlier and
was still working on her first album (eventually
released in January 2008 and called 19 after her
age). Townshend's partner, the musician Rachel
Fuller, plays the Chat Show Host. She and Adele
sit side-by-side in the foreground on faux Louis
XIV chairs, Townshend and songwriter Mikey
Cuthbert are squeezed in at the back.

The interview aims at a Tiswas/TFI Friday
informality and irreverence. It misses. But it is
telling, nevertheless. We learn a lot. There are
the basics: Adele was born in Tottenham, North
London. Around the age of 10 she moved to
South London (Brixton, then West Norwood). She
didn't enjoy school until she was 14 years old.
That was when she accepted an offer to attend
the selective, state-sponsored Brit School for
Performing Arts & Technology in Croydon. There
she thrived. Her dad -of whom more later-
bought her the Simon & Patrick guitar she plays
in the video, an instrument she says she'd only
taken up 18 months earlier. By then she'd
cracked playing the sax, having given up the
flute at 13 because she'd started smoking.

There's plenty more bio-type info to pick over,
but that's not what makes this homespun tape
an ace in Adele's archive pack. It's her
performance as an ingenue interviewee and
singer. In both guises she is conspicuously
composed and self-assured. So much so she
makes her hosts look like the wannabes. It is
apparent even at this very early stage of her
career that Adele knew what she was about.

She is neither star-struck by Townshend's
presence nor impressed by Fuller's overbearing
style. She goes along with the banter enough to
ensure she doesn't appear rude or arrogant, but
makes it obvious she thinks the conversation is a
bit silly. She comes across as an independently
minded, matter-of-fact alpha-female who is
comfortable in her own skin.

She has since been variously described as fun,
gobby, bolshie, and loud - a big personality who
(and this comes up less frequently) is not one to
suffer fools. I have heard that a lot. Not publicly
though. "Off the record" was a standard refrain
used by industry-types when speaking to me
about her. They were worried about upsetting
the singer, which is not surprising. She is a
powerful individual who can make people
nervous. My guess is that has always been the
case. Adele Adkins is a force to be reckoned
with. As is her voice.

Notwithstanding the technical mishaps of her
recent Grammy performance where she
described her singing as "pitchy", there is no
doubt she is blessed with a remarkable voice.
Hearing it live is something else. I remember
being in the O2 Arena in London one afternoon
back in 2012. I was on my own save for seven or
eight events staff preparing tables for that
night's Brit Awards. I was standing at the end of
the runway stage when Adele walked on from
the wings with three or four backing singers,
tapped a microphone, signalled to the sound
desk, and let rip with Rolling in the Deep.

Her voice filled the arena, its natural ampage
sufficiently voluminous to make the great hall
feel like an intimate nightclub- a sensation
heightened by the raw emotion she conveyed in
the song. She had already demonstrated this
ability to the thousands gathered in the same
venue a year earlier for the 2011 Brit Awards
where she gave a career-defining, reputation-
sealing, sceptic-crushing performance that was
witnessed by millions watching live on television
and subsequently hundreds of millions catching
up online.

She sang track 11 - Someone Like You - from
her then recently released album, 21. Some of
the other acts that night had been unbelievable,
wowing the audience with their fancy routines
and stunning stage sets. Not Adele. She was not
unbelievable at all. She was much better than
that. She was totally believable. Many an eye
welled as she sang her painful lament with
heartrending candour.

From a production point of view, it was a pared
down piece of showbiz perfection. The attention
to detail was forensic, the presentation as slick
as a diplomat's dinner party. Adele, for her part,
gave a masterclass in the art of method acting.
She has the emotional dexterity of a leading
lady, shifting seamlessly between time and
place, drawing on past experiences, conjuring up
the associated feelings, and then unbelievably
believably reliving them in the present.

But for her to do so, the scene has to be
appropriately set. There is no place for the
spectacular pyrotechnics on which other
performers rely. Simplicity is all - no distractions,
no safety net. She is playing the solo artist in
every sense, vulnerable but defiant.

Hence we see her standing apart on a bare
stage in the cavernous O2. The scale of the
physical space mattered. There she was, alone
and exposed like a Bronte heroine in the
landscape. Away to her right was a grand piano
at which a silent man in a dark suit and a pair of
shades sat. A single spotlight framed Adele,
making her earrings sparkle and golden hair
glow. The mood of sombre isolation was
accentuated by her black dress. The look was
minimalistic and monochromatic, the message
clear: This is special, it is for you, pay attention.

It worked. When she finished the room erupted
in vigorous applause. Adele stepped away from
the microphone and looked at her feet. Emotions
were running high, hers included. That was down
to the lyrics, which hark back to the end of a
relationship with a man 10 years her senior who
- she had recently discovered - had become
engaged to someone else. As her mezzo-
contralto voice had sung out the words she had
started to picture her ex-lover watching the telly
and laughing at her inability to get over him.

There are many artists - Nina Simone comes to
mind - who can communicate love and loss with
staggering authenticity in songs written by
others. Not so much Adele. With the exception
of her version of Bob Dylan's Make You Feel My
Love, she is much, much better when performing
her own songs, where her investment in the
narrative is palpable and persuasive.

Her approach to writing typically involves her
hand taking direct instruction from her broken
heart - sometimes in the form of a "drunk diary"
- and then, more often than not, being honed
with an established lyricist such as Eg White,
Paul Epworth, or Ryan Tedder. The idea is to
make them as "personal as possible", according
to Dan Wilson, co-writer of Someone Like You.

Frank honesty is her trademark, her shtick. It's
her default public persona on stage and off - the
whole what-you-see-is-what-you-get thing,
complete with cackles, vulgarities, and informal
chattiness. It's charming, in the same way as
being polite to your friend's parents is charming.
In reality there is absolutely nothing easygoing or
flippant about the way Adele controls her public
image. Her "brand" is micro-managed with the
same meticulous professionalism she brings to
her music. In the fame game you have a choice -
manipulate or be manipulated. She has chosen
the former.

Adele in her own words:

• "When Twitter first came out, I was drunk-
tweeting and nearly put my foot in quite a
few times. So my management decided that
you have to go through two people, and then
it has to be signed off by someone." (BBC,
2015)

• "I don't make music for eyes, I make music
for ears." (Rolling Stone, 2011)

• "I get so nervous on stage I can't help but
talk. I try. I try telling my brain: stop sending
words to the mouth. But I get nervous and
turn into my grandma." (Observer, 2011)

• "I love a bit of drama. That's a bad thing. I
can flip really quickly." (US Vogue, 2012)

When stories started to leak out about her in the
press a few years ago, her suspicious mind
turned towards members of her inner circle. She
devised a mischievous plan to test the loyalty of
her subjects and flush out the treacherous. She
instigated a series of private tete a tetes with
individuals in her court into which she would
drop a juicy piece of bespoke insider information.
With the trap thus laid, she would sit back and
wait to see which, if any, of her planted tidbits
found their way into the public domain. If and
when they did - and they did - the culprit(s)
would be swiftly excommunicated "I get rid of
them", a process she described as "quite fun".

It did the trick. The leaks dried up. The
frighteners had been put on. But the message
hadn't reached Wales, where her estranged
father Mark Evans was living. He gave chapter
and verse to the Sun in 2011, with further quotes
appearing in the Daily Mail. He told how he met
Adele's mother, Penny Adkins, in a North London
pub in 1987 when he was in his mid-20s and she
was a teenage art student. They moved in
together, she soon fell pregnant, and Adele
Laurie Blue Adkins was born on 5 May 1988.

He didn't hang around. He went back to Wales,
worked as a plumber and became an alcoholic.
Penny moved to South London with their
daughter and worked as a masseuse, furniture
maker and office administrator. He speculated
that Adele's music was "rooted in the very dark
places she went through as a young girl", citing
his departure and the death of his father, to
whom he said his daughter was very close. He
hoped that after years of separation from Adele
they could patch things up. Adele's response to
her dad's tabloid tales was unequivocal: "He's
f***ing blown it. He'll never hear from me
again… If I ever see him I will spit in his face."

Her father said it was he who imbued his
daughter with a love of music. She talks about
her mother listening to Jeff Buckley and taking
her to gigs - The Beautiful South when she was
three years old, The Cure a couple of years later.
By the age of 10 she was making her own
choices, with The Spice Girls her No 1: "It was a
huge moment in my life when they came out. It
was girl power. It was five ordinary girls who did
so well and just got out. I was like, I want to get
out."

She did. She left her comprehensive school in
Balham, where she said there was a depressing
lack of ambition, and went to the Brit School -
Amy Winehouse's alma mater. She met her best
friend Laura Dockrill (now an author and
performance poet), about whom she wrote the
song My Same (they had a big falling-out, then
made up. Adele says she likes to create drama).
Her guitarist Ben Thomas went there too,
watching Adele get in to trouble for sleeping in
and turning up late. But she was there promptly
for at least one morning assembly where she
sang a song that impressed Stuart Worden, now
the headmaster, so much he asked if he could
have a copy. "Well…" she said. "You'll have to
buy it."

That's the thing about the Brit School. It teaches
its students (Mr Worden calls them artists) the
business behind the show, which has benefited
Adele. She likes a good deal. Like the time back
then when she went into a record shop and
bought two albums for £5, one by Ella Fitzgerald,
the other by Etta James. She didn't actually
know who they were, she just wanted to look
cool. But she listened to them. Eventually. And
was inspired (she frequently name-checks Etta
James as an influence). She wrote some songs
and a friend posted them on MySpace. It was
the summer of 2006.

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Continuation...

Some context. Amy Winehouse had already
become a big deal by this time. Lily Allen was
making a splash with her first album Alright, Still.
Ergo, feisty young women from London who
could sing about their love lives were proving
good for business. Music execs were on high
alert to find the new Amy/Lily. MySpace was the
default page on their computers.

A producer at a hip indie record label called XL
heard Adele's demo and gave a heads-up to
Jonathan Dickins, a young, thrusting, recently
established talent manager. Dickins met Adele.
They got along. She knew he was the man for
her plan. He took a little longer.

At this stage she had three songs. Dickins
pointed her towards Dylan's Make You Feel My
Love. Now she had four. He took her on and
went back to XL. Richard Russell, the label's
boss, signed her up even though her easy
listening vibe (she called it acoustic soul) was
not exactly true to his rave roots. The teenage
girl who was into mainstream pop acts like
Destiny's Child and Gabrielle was joining a roster
that included the White Stripes and The Prodigy.
It was now autumn 2006.

When she was at school scribbling down lyrics
and coming up with melodies Adele was having
fun. Now she wasn't. She felt under pressure.
Professional people had invested time and
money and belief in her, and she had writer's
block. Months passed. She wasn't ready. Then
she met a "horrible boy". He broke her heart.
Bingo. A month or two later she was climbing
into the back of Pete Townshend's trailer…

She had her style nailed from the start - sit or
stand and sing. No fuss. No bother. But then,
she says she doesn't have rhythm, so dancing is
out. Nor is she the athletic type with a Florence-
like inclination to prance around the stage.
There's not a band to interact with or Rihanna-
style body to flaunt. She's just an ordinary girl
with an extraordinary voice. So, er… flaunt that.

Which is what she has done, to great effect. She
is perfectly imperfect. The ordinary girl thing
works for her melancholic love songs - a
universal theme to which the entire globe can
relate. Her whole style seems so relaxed, so
nonchalant. She can afford it to be. She has
people covering her back.

Adele has built her very own A-Team - a
formidable, mostly male, collection of world-class
producers and managers, who keep her show on
the road; a band of pipers paid to call her tune.
Which is what you would expect given her
position as the 21st Century's best-selling
recording artist. More surprising, perhaps, is that
her core crew has been with her from the very
beginning. Which tells you something about
Adele's story - it is largely about judgement not
luck. She calls it right so often you'd have her
pick your Lottery numbers.

There's Carl Fysh at Purple PR (who also looks
after Beyonce, one of Adele's celebrity fans)
managing her profile and avoiding the multiple
elephant traps that are scattered across today's
complex media landscape. And the
aforementioned Richard Russell at XL, a creative
collaborator who had the contacts and musical
sensitivity to draft in the right talent to help her
where and when she needed it, hiring producers
of the calibre of Mark Ronson, Jim Abbiss, Brian
Burton, and perhaps most notably, Rick Rubin,
the celebrated, Svengali-like American co-
founder of Def Jam Records. These were all
good choices made by a savvy teenage Adele.
But her best pick has to be Jonathan Dickins,
her manager.

Team Adele

• Rick Rubin - co-producer of 21; founded Def Jam Records which launched hip-hop stars Public Enemy and the Beastie Boys; also produced Johnny Cash's final LPs

• Richard Russell - owner of XL Recordings, Adele's UK label; other artists on his roster include Jamie XX,
Damon Albarn and FKA twigs

• Rob Stringer - English-born chairman of Columbia Records, which releases Adele's records in the US

The fit appears to be perfect, the vision shared.
They are in it for the long haul, they say. He
jokes about the job being easy - all he has to do
is spend 99% of his time saying no. Which is why
you don't see the singer endorsing products,
tipping up at celebrity openings, or rushing to
get her next record out. Unlike her one-time rival
Duffy - another British purveyor of "blue-eyed
soul" - who was neck-and-neck with Adele for a
while in the bestselling, Grammy-winning stakes,
until she agreed to star in an awful commercial
for Diet Coke in 2009, after which the wheels
seemed to come off.

By contrast, Adele and Dickins - who also
decided to get into bed with a multi-national
consumer giant - didn't go down the route of
providing a celebrity face for their corporate
suitor. They did the opposite. The deal they did
with Sony's Colombia Records was to use its
reputation and clout to be the face of their
product in America.

Being on the super-cool XL label in the UK
worked. It set her apart from her major-label
peers, and helpfully suggested her ostensibly
commercial pop was tinged with an indie edge.
But when it came to cracking the US market
they needed something different, a partner with
access to the all-important entertainment TV
shows. XL could look after the rest of the world,
but Rob Stringer at Columbia was going to be
their man in America.

He didn't let them down. Columbia launched 19
in June 2008 with solid if unspectacular sales.
But then Stringer got to work. He invited some
execs from the high-profile satirical TV
programme Saturday Night Live (SNL) to come
and see one of Adele's shows. They liked it and
booked her to be SNL's musical guest on 18
October 2008.

In what has now become a legendary episode in
Adele's story, she ended up being on the same
bill as the prominent Republican Sarah Palin,
who had been invited at the last minute. That is
the same Sarah Palin which SNL star-turn, Tina
Fey, had down pat in a mocking caricature. The
political/comic combo cranked up the viewing
figures for the show by several million to a 14-
year high. Fey came on and did her bit, Palin did
hers, and then the director cut to the unknown
and nervous young Londoner with a cherubic
face and big green eyes that were partially
concealed by a thick fringe of gingerish hair.

Adele was standing as still as a statue in a long
shapeless black cardigan, gripping the mic stand
as if she had vertigo. The piano, strings and
snare drum struck up while the camera zoomed
in and isolated the singer, a known sufferer of
severe pre-performance nerves. She blinks…
raises her chin… and storms it.

She softened them up with Chasing Pavements
and then knocked them out with her Cold
Shoulder. She was No 40 on iTunes before the
show. When she woke up in the morning to
prepare to fly home she was No 8. By the time
she landed back in the UK she was No 1.
Appearances on the David Letterman and Ellen
DeGeneres shows followed, as did a frenzy of
downloading and CD buying. Adele had cracked
America.

Or so she thought. In fact, as the subsequent
record-breaking sales of her second album 21
would reveal, she had barely scratched the
surface. The United States is a nation with an
insatiable appetite for power ballads soulfully
sung. Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, and Shania
Twain are but three of the hundreds of talented
female vocalists who have rolled off the US
production line of ladies who can sell a love
song. Adele can do that too, of course. But she
has something others do not.

Like the way she pronounces her words when
singing. It brings a freshness and energy to the
gentle genre. Her inflections are the product of
London's inner-city multicultural melting pot,
which has morphed the traditional cockney
diction into a one-size-fits-all urban patois. It's
not an accent you're going to pick up in
Nashville or Detroit. And then there's her vocal
technique of riding the notes and chords like a
super surfer in a high sea - effortlessly jumping
octaves, applying her natural vibrato, changing
pace, eliding words and verses, and modulating
pitch. She uses this vocal dexterity like a lasso,
to draw us in, to create a sense of intimacy, to
turn the emotional dial all the way up to tear-
jerking.

Her style is not everybody's cup of tea. Noel
Gallagher "can't see what all the fuss is about".
He doesn't like her music, thinks it's for "f***ing
grannies" and is part of a "sea of cheese"
washing over the rock'n'roll landscape. It is an
idiosyncratic view but not an uncommon one.
Nor is it altogether factually inaccurate.

What the critics said

• "She may have a jazz musician's disdain for
melody, but just listen to her informing a
lover that he is a 'temporary fix' on 'Best For
Last': 'You're just a filler in the space that
happened to be free/ How dare you think
you'd get away with trying to play me?' she
huffs, a schoolgirl on the top deck of a bus
nonchalantly channelling Aretha." The
Observer, 2008

• "Some will find Adele rigidly old-fashioned.
Her influences (Etta James, Dusty
Springfield, Billie Holiday) are from another
age. Her music breaks less ground than a
pneumatic drill made from plasticine. But
she sings with unabashed passion about a
kind of pain we can all recognise, and that
sort of thing doesn't date." Daily Telegraph,
2008

• "21, Adele's second album—named for her
age at the time she began composing it—has
a diva's stride and a diva's purpose. With a
touch of sass and lots of grandeur, it's an
often magical thing that insists on its
importance." The Village Voice, 2011

A Nielsen survey undertaken in December 2015
shortly after her latest album 25 was released in
America, found that a significant percentage of
the "early adopters" buying the physical product
were empty nesters aged 55-64 and most likely
from high-income households. That's not the
usual demographic for pop music.

Nor is Adele's overall American fan-base, which,
according to Nielsen is female-skewed (62%),
aged mostly between 25-44 years old, and with
children. It is not known if that profile is
mirrored around the world, but what is beyond
contention is the size of her following. It is
huge. When 25 was released in November it
went straight to No 1 on iTunes in 110 countries.
Moreover, it was the fastest-selling album of all
time in the UK with 800,307 copies sold in its
first week, beating the previous record holder
(turn away now Noel), Oasis's 1997 album Be
Here Now. It did even better in the US,
obliterating any previous first-week album sales
record with an historic 3.38 million units (or
equivalent in aggregated downloaded tracks)
shifted. This tidal wave of chart-topping sales
covered countries and continents.

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This Epistle tooo much

I would like to read but to much to bear