Adele before twenty-five

Adele Adkins grew up in Tottenham, London, with her both parents splitting when Adkins was two-years-old, just growing up with her mother, working a range of different jobs to bring home some money. Her singing started at just four years old and as she grew up, she would sing and play guitar to her friends in Brockwell Park, South London. Adele had gone to BRIT school, graduating in 2006, alongside the likes of Jessie J, and Leona Lewis.

After graduation, Adkins released two songs via an online arts page ‘Platforms Magazine’ which led her to meet Richard Russel, a very important boss from XL Recordings music label. From this, she was recommended to a manager at September Management, Jonathan Dickins, which then became her official manager in 2006. This year she also met Jim Abbiss, a producer that went on to help her a lot with her first two debut albums. As 2007 came around, Adele made her first television appearance on the BBC, performing the track ‘Daydreamer’, leading her to release ‘Hometown Glory’, a track she had written in her teenage years, later that year. In 2008, Adkins was headlining an acoustic set, becoming the first ‘Brit Awards Critics’ Choice’, and being named the number one predicted breakthrough act of 2008. Leading onto her classic single ‘Chasing Pavements’ just two weeks before her debut album ‘19’ was due to be released. The track reached number two in the charts and of course, it stayed there for four weeks in a row.

As her very first album was released, the awards came flooding in for the artist, being nominated for the 2008 Mercury Prize, and a MOBO for ‘Best UK Female’, winning ‘Best Jazz Act’ at Urban Music Awards. This led her to sign a deal with Columbia Records, with Billboard Magazine stating that Adele was to “become among the most respected and inspiring international artists of her generation”. Adele then started her ‘An Evening with Adele’ world tour, starting in May 2008 and was due to finish in June 2009. However, Adkins had cancelled her US tour dates to be with her boyfriend at the time and had later come out and said that she couldn’t believe she actually did that and was going through a period of her life that she called an “early life crisis”. Adele had then failed her attempt to break America and was then booked for a lot of TV appearances for the US, performing ‘Chasing Pavements’, and ‘Cold Shoulder’. The following day her album ranked number five on Amazon and reached number eleven on the Billboard 200, becoming certified gold in early 2009, selling 2.2 million worldwide copies at the time. Adele then won ‘Best New Artist’ at the Grammy Awards, as well as ‘Best Female Pop Vocal Performance’.

Advancing on to her second album, ‘21’ released in 2011, Adele had said this album was inspired by the break up with a partner, being described as contemporary country and roots music, and was meant to be showing growth that she had experienced since the last album. The album charted in thirty different countries and led her to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone. Adele performed ‘Someone Like You’ at the Brit Awards in February of 2011, helping the track get to number one in the UK as well as her first album re-entering the charts. This made Adele the first living artist to achieve the feat of two top-five hits in both the singles and album charts since the Beatles in 1964. By the end of that year, ‘21’ sold over three million copies and became the biggest-selling album of the 21st century, allowing Adkins to be the first artist to sell three million albums in the UK in a single year. Spending more weeks on the Billboard 200 chart than any album by a female.

Following the release of this album, Adele recorded a live show performance ‘Live at the Royal Albert Hall’, selling over 96,000 copies, becoming the best-selling DVD of 2011. Being the first artist ever to have the year’s number on the album, number one single, and number one music video. At the end of 2011, Adele won three awards for the album, being named artist of the year, leading her to be the first woman ever to tap all three categories.

In 2012, Adele appeared at the Grammy Awards and won all six of the categories she was nominated for, making her the second female artist in Grammy history to win that many awards in a single night, going on to receive more Brit awards for ‘British Female Solo Artist’ and ‘British Album of the Year’. The album was then number one for twenty-one non-consecutive weeks, selling over four million copies, and being the best-selling album worldwide in 2011 and 2012. Adele became the only artist in the last decade in the US to earn a diamond certification for one single album in less than two years.

Adele announced that she had been writing and recording the theme song to the twenty-third James Bond film, ‘Skyfall’, being recorded at Abbey Road Studios. Adkins has labelled this song ‘one of the proudest moments’ of her time, at the time of release, the song climbed up to number two in the UK singles charts, selling more than five million copies worldwide, earning the artist a Golden Globe Award for ‘Best Original Song’. At the time of December 2012, Adele was named ‘Billboard Artist of the Year’, and ’21’ was labelled the ‘Album of the Year’, being the first artist to receive both accolades two years in a row.

After a cryptic message online, Adkins announced her next album during a thirty-second advertisement break on The X Factor. A few days later, she revealed her next album was to be titled ‘25’, followed by the statement

“My last record was a break-up record, and if I had to label this one, I would call it a make-up record. Making up for lost time. Making up for everything I ever did and never did. 25 is about getting to know who I’ve become without realising. And I’m sorry it took so long but, you know, life happened.”

Her first single ‘Hello’ was to be released on October 2012. After its release, the music video was viewed over twenty-seven million times in twenty-four hours on YouTube, overtaking the record of twenty million by Taylor Swift with ‘Bad Blood’. The hit single went on to be the biggest-selling number-one single in three years. By the end of the year, it had sold over twelve million units and was the seventh best-selling single despite being released in October. ‘25’ became the fastest-selling album in UK chart history, staying at number one in the album charts for seven weeks on the run.

Adele then went on to tour the world, win a handful of awards, headline Glastonbury, release another album ‘30’, and then held a thirty-two weekend Las Vegas residency.

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