Still only 22 years old, Adele Adkins has suffered her share of heartbreaks. Strangely, she considers this a stroke of good fortune. Because unlike most girls her age, Adele has written two albums about her failed romances.
"I'm lucky," she cackles, with a gale-force laugh and a London accent that would put the cast of EastEnders to shame. "Before I met my ex, I was panicking, thinking what was I going to write my second album about: hotel rooms and air miles? No one can relate to that. So I'm very lucky that I met him. And I'm lucky that we broke up as well!"
Not that she felt fortunate at the time. "I was devastated!" she bellows, screeching with laughter. "I was so upset. I thought my world had ended. But life goes on. You think you're gonna die but you don't."
Adele's new album, 21 (the follow up to her 2008 number one debut, 19), is an extraordinary piece of work: raw, rootsy, soulful and wise beyond her years. From the bitter blues stomp of angry opening single Rolling in the Deep to the heartfelt ballad of loss and acceptance Someone Like You, it may be the first great album of 2011.
Much of it was recorded in the US with producer Rick Rubin, renowned for his ability to draw out truthful performances, whether from rappers and rockers or classic singer-songwriters such as Johnny Cash and Neil Diamond.
"It was old school," gushes Adele. "We weren't thinking about the bit of glitter that goes on the end, it didn't matter if it fitted in with what's happening in the charts now. I could have been in 1920 or 2050. It was brilliant."
sense of substance
Adele is shaping up to be the real deal. A graduate of Croydon's Brits School, when she first appeared she was deemed to be a kind of post-Amy Winehouse retro soul singer, widely compared to the prettier and more immediately commercial Duffy.
Yet there was always a sense of substance about Adele, a multi-instrumentalist (she plays guitar, piano and bass) with a huge voice and prodigal songwriting gifts.
In her brief career, she has already won a Brit and two Grammy awards, and while Duffy appears to have stalled by making a formulaic second album, Adele has moved boldly on. Her new musical direction started to take shape on tour in America, where her bus driver introduced her to country and blues.
"I used to smoke up the front of the bus and he would be playing the radio and I'd be like ‘Who's that? Where are they from?' He started making me compilations, early Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, The Carter Family, Alison Krauss. It made me really feel like I was in America. Driving through those landscapes of the South, it could have been any era.
"Country was never part of my life growing up but I really like the storytelling. Contemporary records can take three minutes to get to the point, and sometimes you don't know what the song was about even when its finished. Whereas in the first 20 seconds of a country song you know exactly what's going on.
"I found it easy to imagine myself in those situations and kind of pick an old memory of mine and think about it as I listened. I like the feel, it's quite euphoric and triumphant-sounding but also really dangerous and bitter. It's more emotional than pop music."
Adele is like a force of nature, a big, friendly, giggling, earthy girl. At times she comes over like one of Catherine Tate's comedy schoolgirls, but she has a quality of honesty and courage and a strong sense of herself.
Her debut album was full of songs detailing the breakdown of her first big love affair ("He cheated on me, so he had it coming"), now the follow-up is even more emotionally intense, yet she insists she's not melancholic.
"I'm like the opposite of one of those comedians who's funny on stage and depressed behind closed doors. On record, I can get pretty dark, but in real life I'm very carefree. But when I'm happy, I ain't writing songs, I'm out having a laugh, being in love. I wouldn't have the time. If I ever get married, it'll be ‘Darling, I need a divorce, it's been three years, I've got a record to write!'?"
For all her flippancy, the songs clearly come from a deep place.
"The experience of writing this record was quite exhausting. I was trying to explain to myself why the relationship broke down, to the point that I actually forgot about people hearing it.
"When I did Someone Like You live on Jools Holland, I got so upset wondering and hoping and wishing that my ex would be watching it, I went back to my dressing room and sobbed. Making a record is like standing in the middle of Trafalgar Square naked, you let everyone see your good bits and bad bits. I don't know what possesses me to do that, but I'm not good at anything else."
The Brits School has produced a lot of talent in recent years, with new artists Katy B and Jessie J following in the footsteps of Katie Melua, Amy Winehouse, Leona Lewis and Kate Nash as well as bands such as The Kooks and The Feeling.
‘good fun'
"I hate to think where I'd be if I didn't go to the Brit School," muses Adele, who previously attended rather less progressive schools in Tottenham and Brixton.
"It's quite inspiring to be around 700 kids who want to be something, rather than 700 kids who just wanna get pregnant so they get their own flat. It was a bit like Fame sometimes, you had people doing their ballet stretches and singers having sing-offs. It's good fun. I'd rather that than someone pulling out a knife!"
Adele's genuine love for what she is doing is almost tangible.
"I'd like to find my own sound. Not something new, just something that's right for me. A definitive sound, like when you hear a song and you know who it is straight away. But after discovering all this music in America, it's like there's another million genres, it's going to take my whole lifetime to listen to all the music that's out there. I wonder what I'll discover next, and that's exciting."
Those aren't her only thoughts about the future, though. "I do wonder when I'm going to meet the person the next record's going to be about," she admits. "He'll probably run a mile after he hears this one!"
Did you know?
In 2007, Adele was awarded with the first Brit Awards Critics' Choice Award. In 2008, she was nominated for a Mercury Prize for 19. The singer has said that Chasing Pavements was written after a night on the town with her ex-boyfriend, who she realised wasn't worth pursuing anymore. In 2009 Grammys, pop heartthrobs the Jonas Brothers lost to the singer in the Best New Artist category, But there is definitely a mutual admiration between Adele and the boys. When she hit the stage to accept her Best New Artist Grammy, she told the crowd how much she loved the Jonas Brothers. "The Jonas Brothers' choruses are really catchy."And at the Grammy nomination concert in December, 2009, the Jonas Brothers said: "We're big fans of her record." Adele was up for four awards and won Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in addition to Best New Artist in the 51st Grammy 2009 Awards.
