2.

THE LIFE

The split between Penny and Mark was surprisingly amicable. Evans returned to Wales where he continued to drink heavily after the deaths of his father and a close friend. He became involved in other relationships and fathered another child. Money was always tight, but Evans would send Penny some money when he could.

For a time, Adele was still a part of his life. There would be sporadic visits by Penny and Adele to Wales over the next couple of years. Evans would marvel at how his daughter had gravitated toward music. He related in the Sun interview that Adele had come to visit around the time she turned four and brought along a used acoustic guitar her mother had picked up in a charity shop. “She told me that she was teaching herself to play by listening to blues records on an old record player and trying to make the same noises.”

Sadly, the visits became less and less frequent as Evans fell victim to alcoholism, and by the time Adele had turned seven, Evans was essentially out of her life.

Penny and Adele had taken up residence in a cramped Tottenham flat in a less-than-ideal part of the city. But Penny proved resourceful and determined to make the best of life as a single mother and to provide for her infant daughter. Her enterprising spirit at jobs such as masseuse, furniture maker, and office administrator carved out a less-than-lavish but comfortable existence.

“She always had to do things, whether she wanted to or not, to get money to bring me up,” Adele told The Scotsman.

Owing to the intricacies of the British subsidized housing system, Penny and Adele moved with regularity to various low-income flats. It was a life that would have easily beaten down lesser souls.

But Adele, who early on began to refer to her mother as “hippie mum” because of her artistic nature, has often said that the nomadic lifestyle was more of an ongoing adventure than an ordeal born of poverty, and often credits her mother with making even the most dire circumstances fun.

“I never had an issue of being comfortable in my own skin,” she explained during a segment of the television show CBS This Morning. “That came from my mum.”

Adele had also acknowledged that her mother would regularly tell her that she should do what she felt was best for her and not for others.

Adele’s early years were shaped by a real sense of family in and around Tottenham. She often spoke of aunts she would stay with when her mother was at work and, of course, there were Penny’s parents, grandparents, cousins, and siblings at all hours of the day and night. With an estimated thirty-three family members about, Adele was never alone. Sometimes, she recalled in a Guardian interview, she relished the moments when she was.

“I’d go and see them (the family) and they were always arguing and hating to share. Then I would go back to my tidy room and my unbroken toys. I had the best of both worlds.”

Even in the most chaotic family moments, she would remember that there always seemed to be music playing. Oftentimes it would be the radio blaring out the pop hits of the day. Sometimes it would be the older family members’ classical and jazz records. There would always be something to listen to.

But she would often insist that the best times were when she and her mother were alone; “Thick as thieves,” she recalled.

It was inevitable that Penny and Adele would have their dustups over the young girl’s acting out or moments of misbehavior. Adele recalled in Out magazine that she would respond to those disagreements with pencil and paper.

“Being an only child, I was never very good at saying how I felt about things. So from about age five, I would always write my apology out if I did something wrong and give it to her. Over the years there must have been hundreds of notes.”

Like most children, Adele went through her fantasy phase where she imagined herself in grown-up occupations. When Adele’s grandfather died, the then ten-year-old Adele advanced the notion that she would be a heart surgeon. “I think I wanted to be a heart surgeon,” she told State Magazine. “I wanted to be able to help people and fix people.”

When a very young Adele announced that her ambition was to grow up and be, by turns, a mum, a weather girl, or a ballet dancer, Penny would never dismiss these childish notions out of hand but would be diligent in gently pointing her daughter in a far more ambitious, logical direction.

“My mother was the most encouraging person,” Adele told a Telegraph journalist. “She was always telling me to explore and to not just stick with one thing.”

Adele took the encouragement to heart and, without the least amount of direction, quite naturally gravitated toward the notion of voices and, by association, singing and music. How voices sounded and changed became an obsession. So did the way singers sounded.

Music became a constant in the flat: blues, jazz, soul, and late ’80s pop and new wave. Penny was young enough to be hip when it came to the music of the day and so it was not unusual for her to extol the virtues of 10,000 Maniacs and Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Jeff Buckley. However, Adele always seemed to gravitate toward love songs, as she explained to The Sun.

“I always loved the ones about horrible relationships. Those were the ones you could relate to and that always made you cry.”

And the very first song that made her shed tears was “Troy” by Sinéad O’Connor. It made such a strong impression that, years later, Adele would consider doing a cover of the song. She would later relent on the grounds that she did not think she could do it justice.

Although not musically inclined beyond pure enjoyment, Adele would often showcase an intuitive/sensitive side when it came to a song that she sensed meant something deeper. Adele would often be found off in a corner, reading the sleeve notes and lyric sheets that accompanied her favorite albums and daydreaming about when she was going to feel the things those songs talked about.

The always progressive-thinking Penny saw fit to feed Adele’s interest in music by taking the then three-year-old to her first concert, a show by the group The Cure. It is a safe assumption that Adele’s first concert experience was a largely nonsensical blur of sights and sounds. But the experience became an important part of her early psyche.

The Cure would be Adele’s first big influence. The group’s intensity, emotion, and pure soulfulness struck a chord in the young child’s flowering musical influences. And she would continue to experience the group through their records nonstop in her early childhood years.

“The Cure was the sound track to my life until I was nine,” Adele said in an interview with The Scotsman.

Their music would remain a constant even after she sought out new musical heroes, and recently, Adele paid homage to that all-important element of her being by covering The Cure’s signature song, “Lovesong.”

Ever the liberal parent, Penny also stretched some rules by allowing Adele, at age four, a regular pass on a good night’s sleep so she could stay up late and watch the popular music show, Later … with Jools Holland, a UK tradition which showcased the top musical stars of the day as well as the occasional newcomer. Even at four, Adele would be fascinated by the notion of pop stars and the attention they received. Adele looked at the music heroes of the day as only a child would. It was a neat fantasy to watch and dream about. But Adele at age four could hardly be accused of taking a life in music seriously.

*   *   *

It would remain for pop music’s flavor of the moment, Spice Girls, to finally point Adele on a musical path. Adele came upon the group at age six. They were all over the radio for a time; she would get the records and catch every opportunity to see the group perform on television. Everything about the group fascinated her: the songs, the singing, the over-the-top pop personalities. She would readily admit to the obsession in an interview with Ahlan! Live.

“I was obsessed with them! I wrote a blog about them at one point. I went to see them at Wembley Arena and Earls Court back in the day.”

And looking back, Adele makes no bones about the fact that they influenced her life.

“The Spice Girls made me what I am today,” she told the Minneapolis StarTribune. “I knew it was kind of cheesy but that was my generation.”

And she found a willing accomplice to her Spice Girls obsession in her mother. Adele had found her muse in Spice Girls and, to a slightly lesser degree, pop singer Gabrielle, and even as a young child, she had become fairly adept at mimicking the singers’ voices.

“I would be singing the song ‘Dreams’ by Gabrielle,” she told Ahlan! Live, “and my mum would hear me and say ‘you sound like a twenty-year-old.’”

Penny was more than willing to play along and would regularly invite family and friends over to their flat for mini-concerts.

“My mum’s quite arty,” she related to The Independent and countless other outlets as part of a story Adele seemingly never gets tired of telling. “She’d get all these lamps and shine them up to make one big spotlight.”

Those privy to Adele’s earliest performances have indicated that the youngster definitely had a gift for impersonation, but that it still played out as a game with little if any serious intent.

Adele began her schooling in Tottenham. The reality was that Tottenham was economically segregated and largely populated by African and Caribbean immigrants. The crime rate was high. The unemployment rate was higher. Tottenham was recognized as one of the UK’s most hopeless outposts.

From the outset, formal education and Adele seemed an oil-and-water mix. By all accounts, the young child was bright and inquisitive. And like most young children, Adele could be easily distracted if what was being taught did not interest her. She could be rambunctious when the mood struck her.

So it was not surprising that even at a young age Adele’s free-spirited nature ran afoul of teachers who had little on their agendas but to teach the basics that would ensure a low-paying, dead-end, and decidedly uncreative life.

“Growing up, I had to bear the brunt of negative attitudes from authority figures, like teachers, who led me to believe that success was unrealistic,” she said. “My response to that was to escape into a world of fantasy because I was not very good academically.”

Adele was one of only a handful of white students in the largely black school. At first it was difficult not to notice that she stood out, but after a while she stopped noticing the difference. Never a brilliant student, Adele nevertheless managed to get by academically, fit in with her classmates, and make friends easily.

But it was never a perfect fit. Adele would lapse into periods of being standoffish and sullen, and there was no getting around the fact that Adele was a big girl, and kids would sometimes be cruel when it came to issues of weight and body image. But with her mother’s support, Adele would get through the rough times relatively unscathed.

Adele and her mother relocated to Brixton when she was nine. Much like Tottenham, Brixton was a rough-and-tumble, blue-collar, multiracial town. Prospects, economically and otherwise, were limited, although Brixton had turned out a more-than-expected collection of famous residents that included former British Prime Minister John Major and rock stars David Bowie, and Mick Jones and Paul Simonon of The Clash.

School was still a necessary evil for Adele, but she continued to slowly but surely see music as more than a passing fancy. Adele continued to be fond of the guitar and had developed basic skills on clarinet and bass. Adele’s voice was still a raw instrument but was showing surprising pitch and control for an untrained child. It was the rare moment when Adele could not be heard singing her favorite songs while in the shower or walking down the street.

“My first public singing experience was at a school show at age eleven,” she explained to Ahlan! Live. “My mum had made me an eye patch with sequins on it to wear so I would look like Gabrielle. I liked the patch so much that I would continue to wear it to school and I would get in trouble for it.”

Experiences like this were playing to Adele’s ego and her growing need to be the center of attention. But even as she was accepting applause for her performances, singing was still nothing more than fun and games.

Adele and her musically inclined friends would regularly get together for impromptu song sessions, and the songs that Adele would belt out with vigor were the pop hits of the day, songs like “Independent Woman, Part 1” and “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child. During these street and schoolyard sessions, Adele would mug and pose and, along with her friends, laugh up a storm. Nobody was taking it seriously. Not even Adele.

While her tastes were largely running to the pop of the moment, Adele’s mother saw to it that her daughter received a healthy dose of rock, soul, rhythm & blues, and mild hip-hop. Music by Mary J. Blige, Alicia Keyes, and Lauryn Hill became the sound track around the Brixton flat. When her mother developed a crush on Jeff Buckley, that’s all Adele heard. R.E.M., Dylan, and Janis Joplin continued as major items on what would become a musical mix that, according to a Rolling Stone assessment, became a “life-defining” time for the youngster.

Adele would often acknowledge that, like most young people, she was, by degrees, tolerant, impatient, and dismissive with her mother’s musical choices growing up, but that she eventually came around to appreciate her mother’s esoteric choices. And that what she was hearing was “amazing.”

It would soon be a life-defining time for Adele’s mother. After a number of years alone, Penny fell in love and eventually married. Adele was quite happy for her mother and had a good feeling about the new man in her mother’s life. By the time Adele turned eleven, the family was off to another residence.…

And a new adventure.