SINGER AND SONGWRITER ENGLANDI didn’t make music to become a sex symbol. I make music to inspire people and make a good record . . . To me, the image isn’t part of music. Music is in your ears, not on your eyes.
—ADELE
Two teens waited outside a London tube station. Adele felt nervous. She was meeting Nick Huggett for the first time. He was the supposed A&R man from XL Recordings, and he wanted to offer her a recording contract. He said he could make her dreams come true!
But Adele wasn’t sure she believed he really worked for a record company. He had contacted her through her MySpace page, where a friend had posted three songs she wrote and recorded for her high school graduation project.
Who gets discovered on MySpace?
This Nick Huggett was probably just some pervert—that’s why she brought her friend Ben along. For protection. Just in case. Even though Ben was tiny and wouldn’t scare a flea, at least she wouldn’t be alone.
It’s funny to think of Adele as being nervous about anything. But she was only eighteen years old—had just graduated from high school—and she was about to take the biggest leap toward her dream of being a singer. Of course we now know that Nick Huggett really was with a record label and Adele really did get that deal. And she went on to become one of the most popular and famous singers of her generation.
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born in 1988, not far from that tube station, in a working-class neighborhood of London. She was the only child of young parents whose marriage didn’t last. When Adele was four, her father moved back to Wales, where he was from, and after that, she was raised by her “artsy” mom.
Adele began singing at age four. Growing up, she sang all the time: alone in the shower, riding in the car, private concerts for her mom, school talent shows, with her friends. Adele always loved to sing, but she never took it seriously.
As a preteen, she loved the same pop music as her peers—the Spice Girls, Lauren Hill, Destiny’s Child—but as a teen, she had two experiences that changed her view of music and of her own singing. At thirteen, she went to a Pink concert, which she described like this: “I had never heard…someone sing like that live. I remember sort of feeling like I was in a wind tunnel, her voice just hitting me.”1 And when she was fifteen, she discovered Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald at a local record store. These two American blues singers from the 1940s blew her away: “Chart music was all I ever knew. So when I listened to the Ettas and the Ellas, . . . it was like an awakening.”2 You can certainly hear these blues legends in Adele’s singing today.
Although they were usually broke, Adele’s mom always managed to scrape up enough money to pay for Adele’s piano and guitar lessons. At age fourteen, Adele, who hated regular school and was never a strong student, had an epiphany while giving a concert for her mom: “As soon as I got the microphone in my hand, I realized I wanted to do this.”3 She told her mom she was done with regular school and wanted to be a singer, so her mom enrolled her in the BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology, which was the right price—free!
Adele isn’t the only famous BRIT alum. Amy Winehouse also graduated from the school.
Like the school from the Fame movie, BRIT is full of dancers and singers and artists of every stripe—all trying to make their mark. For the first time in her life, Adele was happy in school: “It was inspiring to be around a bunch of kids who were trying to be something.”4 But even at BRIT, Adele still didn’t believe in her talent. She planned to work for a record label in A&R (artists and repertoire) when she graduated, discovering other talents (just like Mr. Huggett). But the universe had other plans for Adele.
For university, Adele wanted to stay close to home, but her mom wanted her to leave London and stretch her wings a bit. After the two fought about it, Adele stormed off and wrote “Hometown Glory” in ten minutes. The song was about her love of London and her neighborhood in particular. “I played it as a protest song to my mother,” she explained. “It basically said, ‘This is why I’m staying.’ ”5
Believe it or not, this world-famous singer has terrible stage fright. Adele has confessed that before performing she sometimes has panic attacks and throws up backstage!
In order to graduate from BRIT, Adele had to make a demo tape of three songs she’d written. She recorded “Hometown Glory” and two others, and agreed to let a classmate post them on MySpace just for the fun of it. “I figured the best that might come out of it was that I might get a job as an intern,” she remembers.6
Almost immediately, record labels came knocking. Adele was so surprised by the attention that she didn’t actually believe it: “I’d never heard of those labels; I thought they were just some internet perverts. So I didn’t call them back.”7
But Nick Huggett didn’t give up. “She had the most amazing voice I had ever come across,” he said.8 Nick finally got lucky that day at the tube station and convinced Adele to sign with his label. XL Recordings was home to tons of popular indie groups like The White Stripes and Radiohead, and they loved Adele’s honest, unique sound. They weren’t the only ones—Adele’s star shot up from there.
Adele is so successful she’s made Guinness World Records more than once! She’s the first woman to have two singles and two albums in the UK Top five at the same time (the Beatles did it in 1963). And with three million copies sold in one year, 21 broke records as the first album in UK chart history to ever do this. That album also set records for the most consecutive and the most cumulative weeks for a number-one UK album (solo female).13 Not bad for a girl who never thought she’d make it as a singer!
In 2008, she released her first album, 19 (her age), which included her high school song “Hometown Glory.” The album went platinum in both the United Kingdom and the United States and sold over seven million copies.9 Critics raved about Adele’s voice. People magazine said, “With a knockout voice that’s rich and supple, robust and sultry, it’s hard to believe that this singer-songwriter is barely out of her teens.”10 The following year, she won Grammys for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.
Her next album, 21, did even better. Released in 2011, it has sold seventeen million copies and became the UK’s fourth-bestselling album of all time.11 Adele won six Grammys for it, including Album of the Year.12 In 2012, she released “Skyfall,” a song for a James Bond movie of the same name, which won an Oscar, a Grammy, and a Golden Globe for Best Original Song. In 2015, her album 25 dropped, quickly becoming the year’s best-selling album. It seems like everything Adele records turns to gold.
In addition to her amazing pipes, Adele is also admired for her body-positive attitude. In an industry that puts too much value on being skinny and showing off women’s bodies in super-skimpy outfits, Adele is something entirely different. She describes her feelings about body image this way: “I’ve never had a problem with the way I look. I’d rather have lunch with my friends than go to a gym.”14 Adele is elegant and hip, and she sets fashion trends with her timeless style. She has become an unintentional icon for girls of all shapes and sizes.
Adele never planned to become rich and famous—she never dreamed it could happen to her. But she’s accepted her role as top diva with grace and humor. Time magazine has named her one of the most influential people in the world, and her albums have sold more than one hundred million copies, making her one of the bestselling artists in the world.15 The young girl who thought she would grow up to discover other singers ended up discovering herself.