Kitabı oku: «Adele»

4
True Brit

Adele’s reaction was forthright when it was first suggested she might apply to the BRIT School for Performing Arts & Technology. ‘I’m not going there!’ she bellowed. ‘It’s a fucking stage school. I can make it on my own.’

She might, at a pinch, have considered going to the Sylvia Young Theatre School on the grounds that Emma Bunton had blossomed there. That was a non-starter, though, because her mother couldn’t afford the fees. Further investigation revealed that the BRIT School cost nothing, although you needed to pass an audition to be accepted for a place. It was basically a state comprehensive with a twist. It would mean she could leave Chestnut Grove – and that was certainly a good thing as far as she was concerned.

The BRIT School was founded in 1991, but, a decade later, was hardly the household name it is today. It was the brainchild of an educational entrepreneur, Mark Featherstone-Witty, who saw the possibilities for a charitable performing arts school in London after watching the Oscar-winning 1980 film Fame. Alan Parker’s invigorating and inspiring tale of life in the New York High School of Performing Arts was so popular that it gave rise to a TV series that ran for five years. Cast members formed The Kids from Fame and had a number one album.

Featherstone-Witty persuaded George Martin, the celebrated producer of The Beatles, to back his idea. Martin’s support and enthusiasm proved so influential in getting things up and running that he was described as the ‘Godfather of the BRIT School’.

The other key figure was Richard Branson, whom George Martin brought on board. In the early days, the boss of Virgin was the public face of the project, initially called the London School of Performing Arts and Technology. He insisted that other record companies, as well as his own, contribute to the new venture.

Politically, the time was right for such a school and the Conservative government backed the idea for state funding as part of their City Technology College (CTC) scheme. The impetus it needed came when the record industry signed up as its sponsor.

The British Record Industry Trust (BRIT) gave the school its catchy name and has contributed in excess of £7 million during the last twenty-five years. The school is partly funded from the profits from the annual BRIT Awards, which makes it rather fitting when old pupils clean up on the night. It also raises a great deal of money through student performances at venues including the Roundhouse in North London, a favourite of Adele’s because it was close to the vintage stalls of Camden Market.

The school principal when Adele submitted the long and detailed application was Nick Williams, a career educationalist who mostly left the teaching to his artistic faculty. His task was to disprove the famous observation of Margaret Thatcher that she didn’t want a ‘school for unemployed artists’.

Perhaps perversely, his job at a school that many perceived to be a fame academy was to dampen aspirations: ‘Students think that you expect them to want to be famous. It’s just a view that has something to do with celebrity culture or with what a fame school is, and we aren’t any of these things. We almost have to say to pupils, “We don’t expect you to be successful.” We get their feet on the ground and make them realistic.’

The priority for Penny Adkins was to make sure her daughter was happy and had the opportunity to do what she wanted. The BRIT School might be the answer, but first Adele had to be accepted. Competition was fierce even before it could boast of alumni who were household names. Her application was strong enough to be selected for the next part of the process. The school had been impressed by the articulate and mature way she described herself as ‘someone who is dedicated to music purely through love and passion for it’.

She wrote that she was willing and able to explore different styles of singing, playing and performing. She told the school that she was interested in arranging music, because it would ‘help me to build on my songwriting both musically and lyrically’. This was not the work of a typical thirteen-year-old. Her personal insight shone through when she described herself as someone who will ‘keep trying until I am completely satisfied with what I have created’.

She was invited to an open day in the autumn of 2001. The BRIT School then consisted of two main buildings. A red-bricked former high school for girls, built in 1907, housed the classrooms for the core curriculum subjects, such as maths and English. The music department was across the recreation ground in a more modern pavilion with an inviting glass-fronted atrium, which students would drift into at 9 a.m. to start the day.

As is often the case with open days, Adele was assigned a student in the year above to look after her and chat about life at the school. She was shown around by an aspiring singer called Beverly Tawiah, from Battersea, who filled her with enthusiasm. ‘She really encouraged me and she was a brilliant singer. I thought, “That’s it. I’m coming here.”’

Tawiah may not yet be a star, but she is a much-in-demand singer, working with, among others, Mark Ronson. It is a fact of the music business that it is far harder to be noticed as a black female soul singer, however excellent, than it is as a white one.

The open day was one part of the process; her audition interview was the next. A couple of hundred applicants were chasing twenty-four places. The new deputy head of music, Liz Penney, remembers that Adele, thanks to alphabetical order, was the first prospective student she interviewed when the admission process began in January 2002. She had no idea what general standard to expect.

Adele, who was not yet fourteen, sang ‘Free’ by Stevie Wonder, one of the lesser known, soulful ballads on his 1987 album Characters. It’s not an easy song to perform, requiring vocal dexterity and a strong lower register. She then played ‘Tumbledown Blues’ by James Rae on the clarinet, a classic study piece. She wasn’t in love with the instrument, even though she had progressed to Grade 5. This was a decent achievement, but nothing that made her stand out from the crowd.

‘I didn’t see her play the clarinet after that,’ says Liz, ‘but I remember thinking she can play as well, so she must have had a little tuition. But when she opened her mouth to sing, I thought, “Well, that’s a larger voice than you would expect from a thirteen-year-old.” I immediately said to myself, “Oh yes, she’s in.”’ Liz asked the teenager why she thought she should be given a place at the school. ‘Because I am creative,’ responded Adele.

Penny came along to support her daughter and immediately impressed Liz: ‘I remembered meeting her mum on that first occasion because she is called Penny and my surname is Penney. So we were the two Pennies. And she is, I think, exactly the same age as me, so it was a bit like, “This could be my daughter.” It was clear she was going to be a supportive parent. She knew exactly what Adele was applying for. It wasn’t just an idea of “Oh, I want to go to the BRIT School”. Her daughter was here to learn her craft. Sometimes you sort of build a relationship with some parents and not with others. Penny was one of the former. She came to every show.’

Adele’s stepfather Simon would join them for parents’ evenings and he encouraged her throughout her four years at the BRIT School, even though his relationship with Penny was coming to an end. The teachers always thought he was Adele’s real father.

The BRIT School takes pupils either at fourteen or two years later. For Adele, it would mean two years of mostly ordinary school, with Thursdays devoted to pursuing her specialist strand. The options included theatre, musical theatre, dance, film and media or visual arts and design. For Adele, the choice was always going to be music.

She began the new phase of her life in September 2002. On the home front, there was change as well. Penny and Simon split up and she and Adele moved to West Norwood, no more than one and a half miles away, two minutes round the South Circular Road. Simon was still very much part of their lives, but he and Penny no longer lived together.

West Norwood is one of those districts of London that you need a sat nav to find. Nobody really knows where it is, although it is in the main catchment area for the BRIT School. It’s actually between Streatham and Dulwich in SE27. Soon after Penny and Adele moved to the area, there was some amusing banter in the newspapers about local residents pretending that they lived in Dulwich Village, less than a ten-minute walk away. Nothing could be further from the truth. All over London, million-pound neighbourhoods stand shoulder to shoulder with impoverished streets and bleak estates. Nowhere is this more starkly evident than in this enclave of south-east London.

Tom Utley of the Daily Mail, who has lived there for many years, described West Norwood as reeking of ‘failure and frustrated hopes’. He continued, ‘Everything about the place – its uneven pavements, carved up by the cable-television companies, its net curtains, peeling paintwork, weed-infested gardens and its whiffy kebab shops – is shabby and suburban.’

Penny first found a flat in a building containing four apartments in Chestnut Road, one of the streets of large detached houses off the Norwood Road. These were the streets that appealed to young couples with growing families who had aspirations for something better. One attraction of their new neighbourhood was that they were close to the overground station and it was easy for Adele to commute to school.

They stayed only a few months before Penny found a larger flat above the Co-op on the main road. It wasn’t exactly a step up. The security guard at the store told women in the neighbourhood to take care at night because the area was a ‘war zone’. He wasn’t exaggerating.

The gangs would drift down to the main road from the notorious York Road estate to deal and take drugs outside the Texaco petrol station next to Adele’s building. On any given day, a local shopkeeper might be the subject of ‘steaming’, when one of the gangs would rush into a shop, stripping it of everything they could lay their hands on.

The seedier side of the neighbourhood was represented by a ‘massage parlour’ close to the railway station. Always there was the undercurrent of violence and menace. In one grisly incident that became the subject of local legend, someone was stabbed to death in a fast-food restaurant and his body left in the freezer.

On any given morning, commuters waiting on platform 1 at the overground station in West Norwood would see a young teenager in a Goth studded collar and parachute pants giving her full concentration to heat magazine or the latest edition of i-D, the style bible for modern youth culture. It was Adele on her half-hour commute to school.

You wouldn’t see her every morning. In the aftermath of her unhappy time at her first high school, she still had trouble getting out of bed. Gradually, the BRIT School and, most importantly, the other students won her round. She explained, ‘Whereas before I was going to a school with bums and kids that were rude and wanted to grow up and mug people, it was really inspiring to wake up every day to go to school with kids that actually wanted to be productive at something and wanted to be somebody.’

Her favourite day of the week was Thursday, when five solid hours were dedicated to music. At the BRIT School, it wasn’t simply a case of there being no fees: all the equipment, the musical instruments and the rehearsal rooms were free as well. So when classes were over for the day, it meant personal time to get on with projects and practice.

Liz Penney noticed Adele’s commitment right from the start. Liz was forever passing her in the corridor ‘working by herself, writing lyrics, picking up her guitar and learning to accompany herself’.

Simon had bought her a ‘really nice’ Simon & Patrick acoustic guitar. Hand-crafted at the Godin factory in Quebec, Canada, it was a superior instrument. Pete Townshend, one of the greatest of all pop guitarists, strummed a few chords when she let him try it a few years later. ‘It’s a beautiful guitar,’ he told her.

She wasn’t sorry to give up the clarinet, and for a while took up the saxophone, which she found easy to play. She enjoyed belting out a tune and would take it home to practice. Her next-door neighbour, who happened to be a singer, was impressed when she heard Adele rehearsing.

Shingai Shoniwa, by coincidence, was a former BRIT School pupil. She had studied theatre, but switched to music when she joined forces with another student, guitarist Dan Smith. Together they formed a band called Noisettes. They built up an enthusiastic live following before landing a record deal in 2005 and finally releasing their first album two years later. They had a chart breakthrough in 2009, when the single ‘Don’t Upset the Rhythm (Go Baby Go)’ reached number two.

The two South London girls became firm friends, sharing a love and enthusiasm for music, even though Shingai was more than six years older than Adele. Shingai looked like an African supermodel. She was fashionable and flamboyant, but had a voice that Adele thought was terrific: ‘When she was rehearsing, I used to press my ear against the wall to listen.’ When opportunity allowed, she would pop next door to see Shingai and they would spend the evening jamming together. By this time, Penny and Simon had bought Adele a piano and sometimes Shingai would bring some drums over to hers. It was part of Adele’s musical education. The older woman joked, ‘Awesome days. They should put up two blue plaques!’

Adele stopped playing the saxophone when she found too many rollies weren’t helping her breath control. In any case, she preferred using her guitar to compose her own songs, which pupils at the BRIT School were encouraged to do.

Liz Penney was by no means the only teacher who appreciated that Adele had something extra. Stuart Worden, the current principal, but then assistant to Nick Williams, recalls noticing Adele for the first time in a Year 10 history class: ‘I popped my head in to see what was going on and they were studying the civil rights movement. I mentioned Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” and this girl said: “I love Billie Holiday.” No fourteen-year-old loved Billie Holiday! I wondered who this girl was, listening to such sophisticated music at such a young age.’ Adele then engaged Stuart in conversation, telling him she was also a fan of Eminem. He thought it was a nice mix for her to be a fan of classic jazz and ‘a rapper with a spark and anger about him’.

As a teenager, Adele was far more intelligent and culturally aware than she likes to let on. One of her classmates observes, ‘She was very smart!’ Liz confirms, ‘She was very bright. She always looked older than she was, so it was easy to forget that she was pretty much the youngest in her year. You might think she’d struggle and be behind the others, but she did not struggle at all. She is very quick witted. Some of the students were very able performers but struggled with the academic, literacy side of things, but Adele didn’t.

‘The thing about Adele is she was quick. She didn’t need telling loads of times. She would just go off and, you know, do it. She also had very grown-up handwriting. Her work always looked like a sixth-form student rather than a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old.’

Adele didn’t turn into a nerd the moment she went through the doors of the BRIT School. As Liz Penney tactfully put it, ‘Sometimes she worked hard and sometimes she worked not so hard.’ In other words, she embraced being a teenager with gusto.

She made friends easily with other students who were older than her. She already knew Tawiah from the open day and the elder girl would try to watch out for her: ‘Adele was always cool and shit. She was like my little one.’

Tawiah would look for Adele at Clapham Junction when they changed trains in the morning. Often she would be with another girl, Kate Nash, who was also in the year above but specialised in theatre. She would be destined for great things in a career that mirrored Adele’s for a while. At this stage, the two girls, who were only nine months apart in age, simply made each other laugh.

Adele’s best friend, however, was an extroverted teenager from Brixton, down the road from her old stamping ground. Laura Dockrill, also a close friend of Kate’s, is two years older than Adele, but they shared the same approach to urban life and embraced its unpredictability. Laura observed, ‘I love the pure mix-up of people; you can never stereotype a road in South London.’

Laura’s favourite childhood memory was of her father driving the family to Battersea Park, where everyone would ‘pour out with bikes and breadsticks’. Her father was a prop man and she loved the ever-changing view of people as he whizzed about collecting and picking up all manner of objects around central London, people watching and eating crisps in cheap cafés.

Laura had an imaginative view of the world and, crucially for her friendship with Adele, the two teenagers weren’t in competition to become the world’s greatest singer. Laura studied theatre with Kate. She is a talented artist, performance poet and writer, and an example of the diverse nature of students at the BRIT School. She found her inspiration walking around her beloved hometown, declaring, ‘I love watching, listening and thinking.’ It’s easy to imagine such an outlook on life having a significant influence on her younger friend.

The two teenagers shared a love of vintage clothes and big dangly earrings – the kind made famous by Pat Butcher in EastEnders. They didn’t agree on everything, however, particularly where designer labels were concerned. Adele, for instance, loved Burberry, but Laura preferred clothes that were one-offs.

With her new set of friends, Adele enjoyed what London had to offer. A trip to watch the first UK tour by the American singer Pink at the Brixton Academy proved an eye-opener. It was the first time she was impressed by the sheer power of a live performance. Pink had a fine voice but sang songs that were accessible to chart followers. Adele explained, ‘I had never heard, being in the room, someone sing like that live. I remember sort of feeling like I was in a wind tunnel, her voice just hitting me. It was incredible.’

While the Pink show had a profound effect on Adele’s understanding of performing live, an even more significant event in her musical development occurred when she was mooching around Oxford Street one Saturday afternoon and drifted aimlessly into the HMV store.

She received £10 a week pocket money from Penny, so, after investigating the new chart CDs that she couldn’t afford, she rummaged through the bargain bin, emerging with two for a fiver. She didn’t know it then, but one of them would be of huge importance to her.

The first CD was by jazz great Ella Fitzgerald and the second by Etta James. Etta was one of the most lauded and influential female singers of the past fifty years, but Adele had never heard of her. She chose it for two reasons: first, she was careful with money and loved a bargain – a trait she had inherited from her mother when they had to watch the pennies; secondly, she thought Etta had beautiful cat-like eyes and fabulous hair, although it was one of the blonde wigs she invariably wore.

Adele pictured herself with hair like that and figured that if she took the cover photograph into the hairdresser’s, they could copy the style. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but when she got home, she idly tossed the albums onto a shelf and forgot all about them.

About a year later, when she was fifteen, she finally got around to listening to them. She liked Ella, because it was impossible not to, but she absolutely loved the rasping, raw power of Etta James: ‘I found that her delivery was just so sincere that she really could convince me she was singing directly to me. Which is something I had never ever found in any other artist.’

Adele looked at the ordinary London girls she loved growing up, such as Gabrielle and Emma Bunton, and believed she could be them. There wasn’t much she shared with Jamesetta Hawkins, who changed her name to Etta James when she recorded the defiantly risqué and subsequently banned ‘Roll with Me, Henry’ in 1955.

Etta never knew her father, although she suspected he was the famous pool shark Minnesota Fats. Her fourteen-year-old mother gave her up for adoption, but when she re-entered Etta’s life, she turned out to be a hustler who ended up in jail. Violence, prejudice and serious drug abuse became the staples of a hard life. It didn’t help that Etta was continually ripped off by unscrupulous record company executives. As the Guardian put it, ‘She was addicted to heroin and bad men.’

By the time Adele listened to Etta, the latter had finally received the acclaim she deserved for some classic songs, including her signature ballads, the sensuous ‘At Last’ and the emotional ‘I’d Rather Go Blind’. But it was the despairing ‘Fool That I Am’ that had a profound effect on Adele.

It wasn’t just the sentiment of regret and final parting – ‘This is goodbye, but I still care’ – it was the way she conveyed her feelings. Adele became obsessed with the sincerity in her voice: ‘It was the first time a voice made me stop what I was doing and sit down and listen. It took over my mind and body.’ Surprisingly, perhaps, Etta didn’t write the song, she just had total empathy with it. It was written in 1946 by Harlem-based songwriter Floyd Hunt and recorded initially by his own quartet, featuring jazz singer Gladys Palmer. The peerless Dinah Washington recorded a smoky interpretation a year later, but it suited Etta’s distinctive vocal style perfectly and she released her definitive version in 1961.

When Adele came home from school at night, she would chill out on her bed listening to Etta for an hour. She knew nothing of Etta’s troubled personal history or her feisty personality. While she was cosseted in the comfy world of the BRIT School, Etta, at a similar age, was a hard-drinking delinquent teenager with a penchant for smoking weed and skipping school.

Adele was by no means the first artist to be influenced by the style of Etta James. The famous white soul singer Janis Joplin copied her raucous quality, as if she were always singing with a chronic complaint, but it is Adele who does Etta most justice.

‘Fool That I Am’ is the blueprint for Adele’s vocal style. The two women have a very similar pitch with a deeply resonant lower register. Adele extends the end of a note in an identical way to Etta, making one word become two. Unsurprisingly, she sang ‘Fool That I Am’ so much that it became a staple of her early live performances and featured on the B-side of her re-released single ‘Hometown Glory’.

Adele could match the intensity of an Etta James vocal, but perhaps at this stage in her life, she couldn’t convey the same inner anger that one critic described as a ‘raging bull quality’. That would change dramatically once Adele had experienced her share of unhappy relationships.

Etta won six Grammies, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was portrayed memorably by Beyoncé in the film Cadillac Records. She wasn’t impressed when Beyoncé sang ‘At Last’ at the inauguration of President Obama in 2009, publicly stating that she should have sung it and would have done a much better job. A year later, Adele finally saw her live at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill in Times Square, New York, when the seventy-one-year-old Etta could still belt out a song with attitude. She was scheduled to appear with Adele at the Hollywood Bowl, the last night of the An Evening with Adele US tour, but cried off at the last minute.

When she died in January 2012, Adele wrote a personal thank you in an online blog, graciously praising Etta’s originality and breathtaking voice. Her true feelings are better described in this poignant observation about her biggest influence: ‘I feel her pain.’