Adele’s career does not have much by way of low points. The singer-songwriter has been on a steady, galactic trajectory since the 2008 release of her celebrated debut album 19. She has won 15 Grammys and, with her devastating vocal power and narrative command, has achieved such celebrity that her name has become shorthand for heartbreak itself. Last November, after a six-year hiatus, Adele released her fourth studio album, 30, which became the best-selling album of 2021 in the UK and the US.
But sitting in her Beverly Hills kitchen one blistering afternoon in June, Adele can easily identify her own professional nadir: it was the morning of January 20, when she uploaded a tearful video to Instagram to inform her fans she was cancelling her Las Vegas residency at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, which was set to premiere the following evening. ‘It was the worst moment in my career, by far,’ she says, within 10 minutes of us sitting down. She hasn’t spoken publicly about these events in the five months since, even as rumours about production issues and set disagreements swirled, and she’s eager to address them right away. ‘By far. I was so excited about those shows. It was devastating.’
Before Adele posted the video, she’d been up for more than 30 hours straight, tormenting herself over a choice she’d known for a week was the right one to make. But her team, already ravaged by absences from the Covid Omicron surge, felt they’d overcome greater challenges under tighter deadlines before. And there was so much on the line: months of planning and rehearsals, her crew’s and band’s livelihoods, and untold dollars in investment. Not to mention the many thousands of ticket holders who had planned travel around birthdays, anniversaries and graduations to come to Vegas and see her. Adele was terrified of letting everyone down. But she also knew in her bones that something about the show did not feel authentic. ‘There was just no soul in it,’ she says. ‘The stage set-up wasn't right. It was very disconnected from me and my band, and it lacked intimacy. And maybe I tried too hard to give it those things in such a controlled environment.
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At a dress rehearsal the night before she announced the cancellation, she got frustrated enough that, during the first song, she walked to the end of the 15,700-square-foot stage, sat down, and crossed her legs over the side. Then she pulled her mic away and started singing a cappella to the mostly empty, 4,300-plus-seat Colosseum. Even unplugged, she says ‘they could hear me up at the top’. As she sang, Adele looked out to the first few rows and realised it was exactly this feeling she’d been missing: an intimate and unpretentious connection within a stardom that has, over 15 years and more than 120 million albums sold world-wide, become its own life force.
‘This would be the best part of the show,’ she remembers thinking. ‘For me, and for you. This is what I want,’ she says, motioning to an imagined audience in front of her kitchen table: the proximity of a fan’s beating heart. ‘And none of that –’ she gestures behind her, to the idea of a Vegas stage with its trappings and special effects – ‘has that.’ The next morning, she called off the shows.
It was ‘brutal’, she says, but it was also a choice in line with what she is known to be: a generational talent who has earned the right to engage with her fame on her own terms, and share her art and self with the world only when she feels most ready to do it. 'With her, everything's about authenticity,' says Jonathan Dickins, who has been her manager since she was 18 years old. 'For her to go out and perform a show she's not happy with would be a lie to the fans.'
‘The first couple of months were really, really hard,’ Adele says. ‘But it actually made my self-confidence grow, because it was a very brave thing to do.And I don’t think many people would have done what I did. I’m very proud of myself for standing by my artistic needs.'
When we meet at her home, Adele is a couple of weeks away from her first proper return to the stage in five years. She is relaxed and rested– normally a terrible sleeper, she’s been getting a luxurious nine hours a night –and dressed down in black joggers and a black Nike Jordan T-shirt, with her hair back and face free of make-up. She greets me brightly and fixes us both iced coffees with almond milk while asking polite questions about Vermont, where I grew up. (To my surprise, she remembers passing through the state for a radio interview when she was promoting 19.)
The next day, she will fly to New York with her boyfriend of a year, the sports agent Rich Paul, to attend the wedding of the basketball player KevinLove. Then she’ll return home to London, to take her nine-year-old son Angelo to see Billie Eilish at The O2. Angelo, whose father is her ex-husband, Simon Konecki, is ‘obsessed’ with Eilish, Adele says. ‘He’ll go up to [his room] after school and read all the lyrics and then he’ll want to discuss them.’
At the start of July, she made her triumphant return to the stage, with two headlining nights at the BST Hyde Park Festival. The rest of the headliners were all men and, in response, Adele assembled an all-women bill for her shows, including Kacey Musgraves and a childhood favourite, the R&B singer Gabrielle. ‘London crowds are the best,’ Adele says, grinning in anticipation. ‘They’re gonna be drunk before I even go on. We’re all gonna have the time of our lives.’
At some point after that, she planned to re-announce her much-anticipated shows in Vegas. Weekends with Adele will run at the Colosseum from November 2022, with nightly shows on Friday and Saturday each week. The announcement will mark an overdue culmination for 30. Aside from two pre-taped television specials (one in the US and one in the UK) that aired the month of 30’s release, until her Hyde Park shows, Adele had scarcely performed any of the songs. After the Vegas cancellation, she largely retreated from the public eye.
Outside of her songwriting, which– with searing hits like 'When We Were Young', 'Someone Like You' and 'Hello' – is vulnerable to the point of narrative purgation, Adele has always been known as a private person. She does not have the password to her official Instagram account, which has more than 50 million followers, and rarely updates it. Like her mononymous peer Beyoncé, she is methodical about the press in which she chooses to participate. When she returned to LA from Vegas in January, someone had tipped off the paparazzi about her flight, so there were cameras waiting at Paul’s house when she arrived. ‘I couldn’t even sit in the garden and be on the phone with my friends,’ she says. ‘I was just trapped inside.’ For a while she had used a secret Twitter account to occasionally lurk her mentions, but as frustrated fans began to flood her social media accounts with critical comments about the abrupt announcement she deleted it. ‘I was embarrassed,’ Adele says, grimacing at the memory. ‘I went into hiding.’
As she licked her wounds, she more or less stopped promoting the album, afraid that doing so would make it seem as if she didn’t care about the cancelled shows. (As a result, she has at least one unreleased music video for 30 in the queue.) ‘I didn’t want anyone to think I wasn’t trying my best,’ she says, her voice getting quiet. ‘I was.’
She ventured out for a performance of 30’s standout power ballad 'I Drink Wine' at the Brit Awards in London in February. She wore a custom Valentino chiffon dress embroidered with lime sequins and sat on top of a piano and, to her surprise, no one booed. ‘I nearly cried after,’ she says. ‘It felt strange receiving so much love when I’d let people down.’
The Colosseum stage is huge – its proscenium alone is reportedly 120 feet wide, almost half the length of an American football field – and it posed issues forAdele, whose set designs tend to be understated and elegant. A planned special effects with a water element, for example,‘looked great for a few songs, and then didn’t do anything. It was just there,’ she says.
In an email, the legendary Bette Midler, who had her own residency at Caesars from 2008 to 2010, called the sheer size of the stage ‘absolutely terrifying’. Midler was supposed to make her grand entrance on a pile of custom Louis Vuitton luggage, but when it arrived during rehearsals, it felt ‘like Spinal Tap,’ Midler wrote, ‘just minuscule on that gigantic stage. We had to fix the luggage, which took weeks. So for the first few weeks, I made my entrance riding a donkey.’
For the stage design at the Brits, Adele teamed up with the British entertainment architecture firm Stufish. It felt like a risky leap: ‘I wasn’t sure if [Stufish] were gonna take me seriously, especially after a failed show.’
She brought them inspiration from an unlikely source: Angelo’s fifth birthday party, for which she’d decorated the house herself. She’d bought a bunch of large sequins and nailed them to a board to make her own photo booth back-drop, and for the Brits she wanted to re-create something like it - only on a national broadcast scale. Stufish was game, and produced a stunning, shimmery wall of gold glitter to complement her dress. She liked working with the firm, and it agreed to come on-board for the revamped Vegas shows, along with director Matt Askem and creative director Kim Gavin.
After the Brits that night, Adele and a couple of close friends picked up a McDonald’s (her order is a Big Mac and fries– ‘and if I’m really, really going for it, six McNuggets’) and went back to her apartment to watch Netflix. As her friends dozed off, Adele’s eyes drifted to the mantelpiece. ‘My TV’s above my fire-place [in London],’ she explains, looking over my shoulder at the fireplace in her LA kitchen for a comparison. ‘Let me find a pen. My fireplace here isn’t the same.’
She gets up slowly – she has had a bad back since she was a teenager, and slipped her L6 vertebra in January 2021, when Angelo jumped out to scare her as she came out of the bathroom – and rummages through a drawer, returning with a blue Sharpie.
She draws an open square, then two smaller ones nested inside, and explains: ‘It’s tiered stone, and I’d been playing over in my head how vast the stage is inVegas. I was like, “How do I make a stadium-sized stage feel small in that room?” I noticed all the borders around the fire, and I was like, “What if I treat it like a puppet stage?”’ The next day, when the Stufish team came over to discuss design plans, she pointed to the mantelpiece: ‘I want that,’ she told them.
The new stage is an adaptation of her design, a fitting inspiration for a show that aims to capture the intimacy she was missing in that January dress rehearsal. With the show, Adele says, ‘I want to tell the story of the beginning of my career to now. I’m not gonna give too much away about it, but the show grows. It’s all about the music, and it’s really, really nostalgic. It’s gonna be so beautiful.’
It will also, of course, feature plenty of her hallmark banter. ‘I haven’t got any bullet points, obviously, when I talk,’ she says. ‘That’s why my shows are so erratic. One time, I gave, like, an hour speech about an aquarium!’ (For her combination of talent and showman-ship, Dickins compares her to Barbra Streisand and Midler, the latter of whom referred to Adele as ‘a living doll’ with ‘exquisite taste’: ‘She’s so warm and winning that it’s impossible not to fall under her spell.’)
Adele wants to make things right for her fans, and anticipates feeling tremendous relief when the Vegas news is out. The residency makes logistical sense for her life – it’s critical for her not to disturb her hard-earned co-parenting routine with Konecki, or uproot Angelo from his life in LA – and she also feels it’s the appropriate time in her career. ‘I think I’m right to do it now,’ she says. ‘I know I’m not, like, 60 years old, and I haven’t got 20 albums under my belt. But I think my music will work in a show in Vegas.’ She’s also excited to finally share in the communal enjoyment of her new music. ‘I haven’t really witnessed 30 out in the world yet,’ Adele says. ‘It’s gonna be so emotional. I don’t know what I’m gonna do with me-self.’
It’s well documented by now that 2020 was a difficult year for Adele. She and Konecki split up in 2019, and she struggled in the early days of the pandemic. She was mourning the end of her relationship and felt despairingly lonely; she had regular anxiety attacks. In her darkest moments, she recorded voice memos of herself crying, and talking to Angelo, a couple of which made it onto 30. ‘It was horrible,’ she remembers. ‘I was flying around this house like a f**king wasp.’
Gradually, she dug herself out of the hole. She committed herself to therapy and tried particularly LA remedies, like sound baths and meditation. She started lifting weights and boxing every day, and found that the routine centred her, and that she liked feeling strong in her body. She also made amends with her estranged father, Mark Evans, who was absent for most of her life. He died of cancer in May 2021; Adele has said their reconciliation ‘set little me free’.
Finally, and perhaps most pivotally, she fell madly in love. ‘Beyond,’ she gushes. ‘I’ve never been in love like this. I’m obsessed with him.’ Adele and Paul had been friends for some time, but their relationship became romantic in 2021, and they went public when she sat court-side with him at an NBA Finals game that July. (‘Lucky for him, I love basketball,’ Adele says. She’s partial to the Phoenix Suns.) This year, she celebrated her one-year anniversary with Paul, turned 34 (on May 5), and bought a new house: a Beverly Hills mansion formerly owned by Sylvester Stallone.
Paul has three children of his own, including a daughter at university, and they are renovating their new home together with a blended family in mind. (Adele’s one existing personal social media account is Pinterest, where she’s been collecting ideas for interiors.) Paul seems a good match for her. He has repped LeBron James for a decade, so he has a familiarity with the stratospheric circle of fame she inhabits. She says he makes her feel safe, and encourages her to live her guarded life more freely. When they were discussing taking a vacation recently, Adele told Paul she had always wanted to go to one of the Italian islands, but feared the paparazzi presence there. 'He was like, “You would let that stop you from going to the place that you most want to go on vacation?”’ she remembers, laughing with affection. ‘He’s like, “For one photograph, what’s the worst that can happen?”’
When I ask if she wants to get married again, she says, ‘Yes, absolutely,’ and when I push further to check if she’s engaged, she offers the most expert –and, as is her style, cheekiest – non-answer I’ve ever encountered. ‘Well! Well. Well, I’m not married,’ she says, and starts to laugh. ‘I’m not married.’ We sit with that for a beat, and then I try again: so... are you engaged? ‘I’m not married. I’m not married!’ she repeats, and takes a big gulp of coffee before singing, ‘I’m just in loooove! I’m happy as I’ll ever be. I might as well be married.’ (In another conversation soon after, she is more straightforward. ‘I’m not engaged. I just love high-end jewellery!’)
She is more conclusive on the topic of expanding her family. ‘I definitely want more kids,’ she says. ‘I’m a homemaker and I’m a matriarch, and a stable life helps me with my music. But right now, all I got in my brain is Vegas,’ she adds. ‘I wanna f**king nail it.’
The sellout shows in Hyde Park – Adele’s first concerts in half a decade – went off without a hitch. She was nervous, as she always is before performing, but after the third song or so, she relaxed and started to enjoy herself. ‘They were two of the best crowds I’ve ever stood in front of, ever, in my whole career,’ she tells me over Zoom from her backyard in Los Angeles on the Fourth of July. (‘I’m sunbathing topless by my pool, so I’m not gonna join you on video,’ she says, laughing. She plans on making herself a white-wine spritzer when we hang up.) The experience made her anticipate Vegas even more. ‘That’s the first thing I said to Rich when I got in the car after the second show,’ she says. ‘I was like, “Well, f**k, now I’ve got itchy feet. I’ve got itchy feet, Rich!”’
When she sang 'Someone Like You' on the first night in London, she let the audience take over on one of the final choruses, and got choked up listening to them sing. ‘I wrote that on my own, in my tiny little flat, when I was 21,’ Adele says. ‘The fact that they all still remember the words and love the song, it was just incredible.’
Writing and releasing 30 was a salve for her; now, nearly a year after its release, she can finally see how her fourth album resonates with the world, and fits into the story of her career.
‘I like seeing myself in these four different moments of my life,’ Adele says. ‘It’s been really emotional putting the set list and the visuals together, because so much has happened. Fifteen years is a long time. But one thing I feel so lucky about, even with how big my life is now, is that I really lived a normal life, you know?’ She pauses. ‘I remember writing 19 very, very clearly, and going from the studio to meet my friend sat the pub. I remember getting on theTube and going to every meeting I had, and I remember going to after-parties of my friends’ intimate gigs. I remember all of those things, and I remember all of the first times I did something. I remember them, even when I’m doing them for the millionth time.’
The October issue of ELLE UK is on sale from September 1.
