Читать книгу Adele - Sean Smith - Страница 11

Adele’s ambitions tended not to last long. Her mother was used to her wanting to be all sorts of things as she grew up. She had as many passing fancies as any other girl. At various stages, she wanted to be a weathergirl, a ballet dancer, a fashion writer and a saxophone player. Her mum would try to find a local class that might help, only to discover, as many parents do, that the following week it was all forgotten. Adele appreciated the support and encouragement: ‘She has always said, “Do what you want, and, if you’re happy, I’m happy.”’ She was certainly more content in an urban environment where she could make friends easily.

Adele may have wanted to be a Spice Girl, but she was never one to announce loudly in class that she was going to be a star. Her musical taste was evolving, however. Simon came home one day with a present for her – a video of the movie Flubber, starring Robin Williams. It was great fun, but after watching it a couple of times, the invention of a magic gel began to lose its appeal. At the same time, he had brought Penny a copy of the ground-breaking album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, the first solo album from the acclaimed singer of The Fugees. Penny played it constantly and soon Adele found herself singing along with the help of the lyrics sheet: ‘I remember having the sleeve notes and reading every lyric and not understanding half of them and just thinking, “When am I going to be that passionate about something to write a record about it?”, even though at that age I didn’t know that I was going to make a record when I was older.’

Her mum heard her singing Lauryn’s break-up song ‘Ex-Factor’ one day and asked her daughter if she understood what it was about. Adele had to admit that she didn’t have a clue. She did, however, understand the anguish in certain love songs: ‘I always loved the ones about horrible relationships. Those were the ones you could relate to and that always made you cry.’ Ironically, the song expressed painful sentiments that she would come to appreciate all too well in her future relationships, especially when Lauryn exclaims that ‘no one’s hurt me more than you and no one ever will’.

Adele was growing up fast in her inner-city surroundings. She and Penny had moved with Simon to a bigger flat in Tierney Road, close to the South Circular Road in Streatham Hill. They went less often to South Wales. Marc Evans explained, ‘She didn’t like to come to the house in Penarth so much after Dad died.’ She still kept in close touch with her beloved nana – and would continue to do so – but her memories were still very painful. She had seen less of her father during the previous couple of years, largely because he had a new family and a young son to support.

In any case, Marc was struggling to deal with his own series of traumatic events. Shortly after his father passed, his best friend Nigel died suddenly, aged twenty-nine. His relationship with Siobhan came to an abrupt end, so he left the home in Llantwit Major and, by his own admission, drowned his sorrows in far too much alcohol. He could offer no support or care to his daughter.

He took over the family business for a while, before taking a job fitting pipes on cruise ships. He grabbed the chance to see the world at a painful time in his life. He sent his children postcards from around the globe – South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Canada, the USA and the Mediterranean. It sounded glamorous that their dad was sailing down the Indian Ocean, especially when they heard his tales of pirates roaming the high seas. He always made sure he brought them back souvenirs from his trips away.

Back in South London, Adele was mixing with a much cooler group of friends. Until the age of eleven, she was influenced by what was in the charts – a top-ten girl listening to Britney, Backstreet Boys and Take That, as well as her favourite girl group. But as senior school approached, it became trendier to embrace R&B and Adele discovered new sounds in Penny’s collection – black artists with big soulful voices. As well as Lauryn Hill, she liked Mary J. Blige, Faith Evans, Faith Hill and, most of all, Beyoncé. During break time, she and her friends would have sing-offs, belting out ‘Survivor’ and ‘Say My Name’ at the top of their voices. She admitted, ‘I used to try and sound like Beyoncé and I would sing her Destiny’s Child songs all the time. Running with an R&B crowd was the easiest way to fit in and be considered hip.’ In the comfort of her own bedroom in Tierney Road, though, when there were no friends to impress, she would still have a sneaky listen to ‘Wannabe’.

There was a chance of a last hurrah for Adele Adkins, heart surgeon, when she began Year 7 at the Chestnut Grove School in Balham, a mile and a half away. She was enthusiastic about biology lessons, anxious to gather as much knowledge as she could for her chosen career. But she was surrounded by apathy and negativity and soon preferred to hang out with her girlfriends or simply play truant. ‘I gave up on it. My heart wasn’t in it,’ she remembered with unintentional humour.

Chestnut Grove is now one of the best and most in-demand academies in the area, but then it was much rougher. It was a ‘crap comprehensive’, according to Adele. It progressed rapidly under the leadership of head Margaret Peacock, who oversaw it becoming the country’s first visual arts college and achieving ‘Outstanding’ status in a 2008 Ofsted Report. You would have thought its emphasis on the arts would have been perfect for Adele, but she has stated in no uncertain terms that she hated it: ‘There were no aspirations and no encouragement there for anything other than getting to the end and getting pregnant.’

Such disenchantment is not what her deputy headmaster, Dominic Bergin, remembered about her: ‘She was just a very nice girl. I first met her in Year 8 and she was a real lively girl. She was friendly and she was bubbly. She was always a big personality. My wife Claudette used to teach her English and said she was kind, hard-working, motivated and academically able.’

Mr Bergin does, however, remember Adele as being a bit grungy. ‘She used to wear big canvas late-Nineties grunge trousers,’ like many girls at the time. That may have been her fashion of choice, but she also wore brand new Nike trainers and a baseball cap.

Chestnut Grove, undeniably, didn’t spot Adele’s potential. Mr Bergin concedes they would have done more to nurture her if they had. One of her complaints was that she wanted to sing and perform at school, but wasn’t encouraged to do so. Instead, she was told that she couldn’t become part of the choir without taking clarinet lessons. She recalled, ‘They gave me a really hard time.’ This doesn’t sound like the whole story, because Adele was showing signs of being musically proficient, more than just vocally. Learning the clarinet would actually serve her well in the future.

She was becoming more of a ‘street’ girl. Despite her natural desire to want to belong in her home patch of Brixton and Streatham, Adele never went off the rails. She gave the gang culture a wide berth and, as she has stridently asserted, ‘never touched an illegal drug in her life’ – not even a sly puff of something aromatic at a party. Her explanation for resisting the everyday vices of urban life is disarmingly simple: ‘There was never anything I was embarrassed about with my mum, which I think is the reason I never rebelled. We always spoke about everything.’ Another good reason was that she didn’t want any news of misbehaviour to reach her nana’s ears in South Wales. Drugs were a particularly sensitive subject: ‘We had a family death from heroin when I was younger and it frightens me, the whole thing.’ She has never elaborated on this out of respect for those most affected by the distressing turn of events.

The one temptation Adele did give in to, at the age of thirteen, was smoking – she loved it. She liked nothing better than gathering with her friends in Brockwell Park, which was a mile or so away, to talk and smoke her preferred ‘rollies’ before drifting home. Adele smoked a lot.

Penny was young and enlightened enough to want Adele to find her own feet, so she didn’t judge or interfere when her daughter was, at various time, a grunger, a rude girl, a skater and a nu-metaller. She was more concerned when Adele was sent home from school for fighting – a spat about Pop Idol of all things.

The autumn of 2001 saw the first series of the talent show that launched Simon Cowell on the nation. Unusually for a young teenage girl, Adele was instantly a huge fan of Will Young, not Gareth Gates, who had pin-up looks and was clear favourite to win. She recalled, ‘I was obsessed. Will Young was my first proper love.’

Tensions were running high in the corridors of Chestnut Grove, especially as Adele seemed to be in a gang of one where Will was concerned: ‘The Gareth Gates fans were horrible to me and I wasn’t having any of it. We had a fight and I was called into the head teacher’s office and sent home. It was serious.’

At least Adele had the satisfaction of seeing Will pull off a surprise win in the competition. She eventually met him when they appeared on the same bill in 2007: ‘It was so embarrassing. The first thing that came out of my mouth was “I voted for you 5,000 times.”’

Adele was in danger of drifting aimlessly through her teenage years, her future threatened by poor attendance at school and a lack of direction and purpose. All she knew was that she wanted to pursue music professionally.

She had no desire to follow in Will Young’s footsteps and try to win Pop Idol. She may have thought he was terrific, but she was unimpressed by much of what she saw on the show. The problem, as she saw it, was that kids were being given false hope by their parents. It even made her mistrust the nice things Penny was saying about her singing.

‘You’ve got all their parents, and they’re like, “Yeah, she’s the next Whitney, the next Mariah.” And then they go on and they’re shit. So when my mum was saying that, I was like, “Oh yeah, you’re trying to con me. You’re trying to get me to make a fool of myself.”’ In any case, as the rules stood at the time, she was too young and would have to wait a couple of years.

Adele was still only thirteen, and doing her best impression of a bolshie teenager, when someone whose opinion she valued praised her. A friend of her mother’s, who, according to Adele, was an ‘amazing Faith Evans-type singer’, heard her singing one night at the flat. She was sufficiently impressed to insist that Adele should pursue her singing seriously. Adele didn’t need much persuading. She was well aware that music was the only career she wished to have.

Penny was enthusiastic, but wasn’t sure how to proceed. As Adele explained, ‘While my mum is the most supportive mum on Earth, she wouldn’t have known how to channel me. With her I’d probably have gone the classical music route, or maybe Disney, or musical theatre.’

Fortunately, the solution was a short train ride away in a suburb of Croydon called Selhurst. The BRIT School was the only free performing arts school in the country and it would change Adele’s life for ever.