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Kitabı oku: «Adele», sayfa 3
3
The Miseducation of Adele Adkins
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.
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.’
