LITMIR.BIZ

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love and enthusiasm for music, even though Shingai was more than six years older than Adele. Shingai looked like an African supermodel. She was fashionable and flamboyant, but had a voice that Adele thought was terrific: ‘When she was rehearsing, I used to press my ear against the wall to listen.’ When opportunity allowed, she would pop next door to see Shingai and they would spend the evening jamming together. By this time, Penny and Simon had bought Adele a piano and sometimes Shingai would bring some drums over to hers. It was part of Adele’s musical education. The older woman joked, ‘Awesome days. They should put up two blue plaques!’

      Adele stopped playing the saxophone when she found too many rollies weren’t helping her breath control. In any case, she preferred using her guitar to compose her own songs, which pupils at the BRIT School were encouraged to do.

      Liz Penney was by no means the only teacher who appreciated that Adele had something extra. Stuart Worden, the current principal, but then assistant to Nick Williams, recalls noticing Adele for the first time in a Year 10 history class: ‘I popped my head in to see what was going on and they were studying the civil rights movement. I mentioned Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and this girl said: “I love Billie Holiday.” No fourteen-year-old loved Billie Holiday! I wondered who this girl was, listening to such sophisticated music at such a young age.’ Adele then engaged Stuart in conversation, telling him she was also a fan of Eminem. He thought it was a nice mix for her to be a fan of classic jazz and ‘a rapper with a spark and anger about him’.

      As a teenager, Adele was far more intelligent and culturally aware than she likes to let on. One of her classmates observes, ‘She was very smart!’ Liz confirms, ‘She was very bright. She always looked older than she was, so it was easy to forget that she was pretty much the youngest in her year. You might think she’d struggle and be behind the others, but she did not struggle at all. She is very quick witted. Some of the students were very able performers but struggled with the academic, literacy side of things, but Adele didn’t.

      ‘The thing about Adele is she was quick. She didn’t need telling loads of times. She would just go off and, you know, do it. She also had very grown-up handwriting. Her work always looked like a sixth-form student rather than a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old.’

      Adele didn’t turn into a nerd the moment she went through the doors of the BRIT School. As Liz Penney tactfully put it, ‘Sometimes she worked hard and sometimes she worked not so hard.’ In other words, she embraced being a teenager with gusto.

      She made friends easily with other students who were older than her. She already knew Tawiah from the open day and the elder girl would try to watch out for her: ‘Adele was always cool and shit. She was like my little one.’

      Tawiah would look for Adele at Clapham Junction when they changed trains in the morning. Often she would be with another girl, Kate Nash, who was also in the year above but specialised in theatre. She would be destined for great things in a career that mirrored Adele’s for a while. At this stage, the two girls, who were only nine months apart in age, simply made each other laugh.

      Adele’s best friend, however, was an extroverted teenager from Brixton, down the road from her old stamping ground. Laura Dockrill, also a close friend of Kate’s, is two years older than Adele, but they shared the same approach to urban life and embraced its unpredictability. Laura observed, ‘I love the pure mix-up of people; you can never stereotype a road in South London.’

      Laura’s favourite childhood memory was of her father driving the family to Battersea Park, where everyone would ‘pour out with bikes and breadsticks’. Her father was a prop man and she loved the ever-changing view of people as he whizzed about collecting and picking up all manner of objects around central London, people watching and eating crisps in cheap cafés.

      Laura had an imaginative view of the world and, crucially for her friendship with Adele, the two teenagers weren’t in competition to become the world’s greatest singer. Laura studied theatre with Kate. She is a talented artist, performance poet and writer, and an example of the diverse nature of students at the BRIT School. She found her inspiration walking around her beloved hometown, declaring, ‘I love watching, listening and thinking.’ It’s easy to imagine such an outlook on life having a significant influence on her younger friend.

      The two teenagers shared a love of vintage clothes and big dangly earrings – the kind made famous by Pat Butcher in EastEnders. They didn’t agree on everything, however, particularly where designer labels were concerned. Adele, for instance, loved Burberry, but Laura preferred clothes that were one-offs.

      With her new set of friends, Adele enjoyed what London had to offer. A trip to watch the first UK tour by the American singer Pink at the Brixton Academy proved an eye-opener. It was the first time she was impressed by the sheer power of a live performance. Pink had a fine voice but sang songs that were accessible to chart followers. Adele explained, ‘I had never heard, being in the room, someone sing like that live. I remember sort of feeling like I was in a wind tunnel, her voice just hitting me. It was incredible.’

      While the Pink show had a profound effect on Adele’s understanding of performing live, an even more significant event in her musical development occurred when she was mooching around Oxford Street one Saturday afternoon and drifted aimlessly into the HMV store.

      She received £10 a week pocket money from Penny, so, after investigating the new chart CDs that she couldn’t afford, she rummaged through the bargain bin, emerging with two for a fiver. She didn’t know it then, but one of them would be of huge importance to her.

      The first CD was by jazz great Ella Fitzgerald and the second by Etta James. Etta was one of the most lauded and influential female singers of the past fifty years, but Adele had never heard of her. She chose it for two reasons: first, she was careful with money and loved a bargain – a trait she had inherited from her mother when they had to watch the pennies; secondly, she thought Etta had beautiful cat-like eyes and fabulous hair, although it was one of the blonde wigs she invariably wore.

      Adele pictured herself with hair like that and figured that if she took the cover photograph into the hairdresser’s, they could copy the style. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but when she got home, she idly tossed the albums onto a shelf and forgot all about them.

      About a year later, when she was fifteen, she finally got around to listening to them. She liked Ella, because it was impossible not to, but she absolutely loved the rasping, raw power of Etta James: ‘I found that her delivery was just so sincere that she really could convince me she was singing directly to me. Which is something I had never ever found in any other artist.’

      Adele looked at the ordinary London girls she loved growing up, such as Gabrielle and Emma Bunton, and believed she could be them. There wasn’t much she shared with Jamesetta Hawkins, who changed her name to Etta James when she recorded the defiantly risqué and subsequently banned ‘Roll with Me, Henry’ in 1955.

      Etta never knew her father, although she suspected he was the famous pool shark Minnesota Fats. Her fourteen-year-old mother gave her up for adoption, but when she re-entered Etta’s life, she turned out to be a hustler who ended up in jail. Violence, prejudice and serious drug abuse became the staples of a hard life. It didn’t help that Etta was continually ripped off by unscrupulous record company executives. As the Guardian put it, ‘She was addicted to heroin and bad men.’

      By the time Adele listened to Etta, the latter had finally received the acclaim she deserved for some classic songs, including her signature ballads, the sensuous ‘At Last’ and the emotional ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’. But it was the despairing ‘Fool That I Am’ that had a profound effect on Adele.

      It wasn’t just the sentiment of regret and final parting – ‘This is goodbye, but I still care’ – it was the way she conveyed her feelings. Adele became obsessed with the sincerity in her voice: ‘It was the first time a voice made me stop what I was doing and sit down and listen. It took over my mind and body.’ Surprisingly, perhaps, Etta didn’t write the song, she just had total empathy with it. It was written in 1946 by Harlem-based songwriter Floyd Hunt and recorded initially by his own quartet, featuring jazz singer Gladys Palmer.

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