Adele thinks this might be her last tour — but let’s be honest, it probably won’t be.
Time and again, big name artists — exhausted by a tour — proclaim that this will be their last. But they often come back for more. At her recent sold-out Wembley shows, the last on a world tour which was cut short this weekend after she damaged her vocal chords, Adele dropped the strongest possible hint to date that she may be done with touring.
In a handwritten note tucked inside the concert programme, she wrote: “Touring is a peculiar thing, it doesn’t suit me particularly well. I’m a real homebody and I get so much joy in the small things. Plus, I’m dramatic and have a terrible history of touring. Until now that is!”
It had been a lengthy haul for the many-Grammy-ed artist, a mother of a four-year-old son. Over 15 months she has played 123 shows, a hefty stint of globetrotting and performing that swept from the UK to America, Europe to Australia and New Zealand. It was an epic adventure, and a rewarding one, too. Adele sold some 600,000 top-dollar tickets in Australia alone, and earned somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1m every time she walked on stage.
But for those mourning the loss of her live shows, take heed: if history is anything to go by, this won’t be the end. Adele may well be the latest in a conga line of musicians who, at the end of a long and draining tour, have sworn off the road forever — only to later rediscover their mojo, often when they have a new record to promote.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever tour again,” Adele said to her first Australian crowd in March. And who wouldn’t be sick of it after such a long journey? And yet: proclaiming that this will be the last tour can be a dangerous thing, a big jolt to an artist’s credibility if she goes back on it.
Australia, of course, is home to John Farnham: pop music’s answer to Dame Nellie Melba, who was known for an endless series of farewells stretching over the final decade of her life. The man known as Farnsie is due to hit the road again later this year, but every tour he’s undertaken since the mid-1990s has come with a caveat: this may be the end. He made a big mistake in 2002 when he titled an album and tour The Last Time. Many of his diehard fans took him at his word; some were so incensed when he announced a subsequent tour that there was talk of suing him for false advertising.
LCD Soundsystem’s recent reunion — which followed an enormous farewell gig at Madison Square Garden in 2011, for which fans tackled long distances and exploitative scalpers — has been met with similar ire. Then there’s Farnsie’s compatriots, Midnight Oil. When frontman Peter Garrett’s mainstream Australian political career was heating up in 2005, he called it a day on a very large scale, before 50,000 fans at the WaveAid fund-raiser at the SCG. “It’s our opportunity to say farewell,” Garrett told the masses at the end of that remarkable concert, before bidding adieu with a furious Best of Both Worlds — and igniting a flair, a nifty bit of live theatre. And yet, like rock and roll’s answer to Lazarus, Garrett and the Oils are now on their first full-scale tour since 2002.
The true believers, naturally, snapped up tickets in a credit card-fuelled feeding frenzy, but there were some asking why such an ethical figure as Garrett would perform this backflip. Perhaps it had something to do with the mountains of cash the band would pocket. Then there are the acts that seem to teeter on the brink of retirement (and a retirement home), only to keep on rolling. Rolling Stones and AC/DC are two heritage acts at the vanguard of the “when will they retire?” movement, whose every new release, every show, is rumoured to be their swansong.
Mind you, in the case of AC/DC and Angus Young, it’s hard to hang up the six-string and schoolboy uniform when your last two world tours have grossed somewhere in the vicinity of $700m. Bon Scott was right: it is a long way to the top, but perhaps it’s an even longer trip back to normality for this fabulously well-paid act and their ageing peers. And Adele? It’s hard to say what happens next, although she’s made it clear she will continue recording. My tip, however, is a live return somewhere around 2020, or whenever a new album emerges. Watch this space...
