Adele - Sean Smith

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she released her definitive version in 1961.

      When Adele came home from school at night, she would chill out on her bed listening to Etta for an hour. She knew nothing of Etta’s troubled personal history or her feisty personality. While she was cosseted in the comfy world of the BRIT School, Etta, at a similar age, was a hard-drinking delinquent teenager with a penchant for smoking weed and skipping school.

      Adele was by no means the first artist to be influenced by the style of Etta James. The famous white soul singer Janis Joplin copied her raucous quality, as if she were always singing with a chronic complaint, but it is Adele who does Etta most justice.

      ‘Fool That I Am’ is the blueprint for Adele’s vocal style. The two women have a very similar pitch with a deeply resonant lower register. Adele extends the end of a note in an identical way to Etta, making one word become two. Unsurprisingly, she sang ‘Fool That I Am’ so much that it became a staple of her early live performances and featured on the B-side of her re-released single ‘Hometown Glory’.

      Adele could match the intensity of an Etta James vocal, but perhaps at this stage in her life, she couldn’t convey the same inner anger that one critic described as a ‘raging bull quality’. That would change dramatically once Adele had experienced her share of unhappy relationships.

      Etta won six Grammies, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was portrayed memorably by Beyoncé in the film Cadillac Records. She wasn’t impressed when Beyoncé sang ‘At Last’ at the inauguration of President Obama in 2009, publicly stating that she should have sung it and would have done a much better job. A year later, Adele finally saw her live at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in Times Square, New York, when the seventy-one-year-old Etta could still belt out a song with attitude. She was scheduled to appear with Adele at the Hollywood Bowl, the last night of the An Evening with Adele US tour, but cried off at the last minute.

      When she died in January 2012, Adele wrote a personal thank you in an online blog, graciously praising Etta’s originality and breathtaking voice. Her true feelings are better described in this poignant observation about her biggest influence: ‘I feel her pain.’

      5

       Missing the Train

      One of the secrets of the BRIT School was that it made students feel comfortable in their own skin – happy with who they were. Physically, Adele changed a lot when she became an adolescent. She was tall, a characteristic she inherited from both her mother and her father, eventually ending up at 5ft 9in. But whereas Penny was always slim, Adele was big boned like Marc, becoming a comfortable size 14–16 as a teenager. Sometimes she would need to reach for the size 18 in a fashion store.

      She didn’t help her figure by having a predilection for chocolate digestives and pizza, providing it didn’t have anchovies on the top. ‘I can’t stand to have anchovies in my mouth,’ she declared. ‘I think they are disgusting. They remind me of sea monkeys. When you are a kid and you can go and buy them dry little fish and you can put them in some water and they survive for a little while. Not that I have ever eaten a sea monkey, but anchovies are just salty and yuk! I don’t like them.’

      She was unbothered by her size, however, and never threw herself into PE or a faddy diet to be MTV thin. She was content eating lunch rather than going to the gym, as long as it didn’t affect her health or any potential relationship. None of her close girl friends was obsessing over their weight. In fact, it was the boys in her set who were most conscious of the way they looked, favouring lettuce leaves over pasta. She exclaimed, ‘And they’re not even gay, they’re straight. Trying to be skinny indie boys …’

      Adele was very interested in the latest fashions and would spend many happy afternoons scouring vintage shops with her mother to find a bargain they could afford. One of the reasons she enjoyed reading glossy magazines was to see what the celebrities were wearing. She enjoyed getting dressed up, but chose clothes more for comfort than anything else, even though she was surrounded by fashion plates at the BRIT School.

      The short walk to the school from Selhurst Station was like an elongated catwalk in suburbia. One writer memorably described it: ‘Follow the teen wearing bright yellow drainpipe jeans, a leather motorcycle jacket and bird’s nest hairstyle. The school is no more than a five-minute strut from the station.’

      One of the advantages of being a big girl was being able to get into places when she was underage. She had no trouble gaining admission to a club in Holborn, where she used to go with her friends. After a night out when she was fourteen, she came up with the idea for ‘Hometown Glory’, now a classic, but then the idle ramblings of a drunkenly swaying girl trying her hardest not to step on the cracks in the pavement. She told Q magazine, ‘I was really pissed, wobbling all over the place. This French woman comes up to me and goes, “You need help, dah-ling?” And I went, “Nah, it’s me hometown, luv.”’

      At this stage, she filed away the promising song to bring out again at a future date. She wasn’t yet fully focused on songwriting and many of the thoughts she had at this age would have to wait to be developed. Another one became the 2016 single ‘Send My Love to Your New Lover’, which she first sketched out when she was even younger – only thirteen.

      Adele may have looked mature for her age, but she was more a schoolgirl than a music student. She was enjoying herself. She still couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings, which almost led to the ultimate reprimand. The teachers were despairing of her commitment when she rolled up to classes four hours late, even though she always said that she wasn’t ‘bunking’, just sleeping. She genuinely wanted to go to school each day.

      The final straw occurred when she was selected as one of the twenty most promising students to travel to Devon to perform at a West Country festival. They were all due to meet at Clapham Junction to catch the 9.30 a.m. train to Exeter. Adele was one of the closest to the station, just a short hop from West Norwood, but as departure time approached there was no sign of her. The teachers weren’t surprised she was late. She was always late. The Director of Music, Tony Castro, phoned her and asked, ‘Are you on the way?’, expecting a ‘Yes, sorry’ response, but she had only just woken up. She had no chance of making the train. She told Rolling Stone, ‘My heart exploded in my chest. It was pretty horrible. I almost did get kicked out of the school for that.’

      Liz Penney had thought she would turn up at the last moment. She confirms, ‘She was so upset.’ A few years later when Liz saw Adele, her former student remembered the day clearly and was still distressed about it. ‘I am so gutted,’ she said.

      It was literally the wake-up call Adele needed. She was beginning to understand the massive opportunity she had. Superficially, she was still the same old Adele, always the life and soul, but her older friends were contemplating what they might do when they left school and she, too, was beginning to think about her future.

      The BRIT School was becoming famous. For more than a decade, nobody really knew it existed. That changed for ever when Adele was in her second year. At last a pupil had achieved enormous success and would test the school’s policy of playing down the desire for fame.

      The breakthrough was achieved, not as many now think, through the efforts of Amy Winehouse or Leona Lewis, but thanks to a stunningly pretty girl from Eastern Europe called Ketevan Melua. The record-buying public knew her better as Katie Melua.

      Katie was another example of the diversity of the BRIT School. You could find yourself sitting next to a streetwise girl from West Norwood living with her mum or a middle-class daughter of a heart specialist from Georgia. Their artistic talents brought them together under one roof.

      Katie, whose mother was Irish, spent her early childhood in Georgia, then part of the Soviet Union, before her parents moved to Belfast and subsequently to Surrey. A bright, studious girl, she began attending the BRIT School, aged sixteen, after taking her GCSEs.

      At one of the school’s showcases, she was discovered by the multi-talented songwriter and producer Mike Batt,

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