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Kitabı oku: «Adele», sayfa 4
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.’
5
Missing the Train
One of the secrets of the BRIT School was that it made students feel comfortable in their own skin – happy with who they were. Physically, Adele changed a lot when she became an adolescent. She was tall, a characteristic she inherited from both her mother and her father, eventually ending up at 5ft 9in. But whereas Penny was always slim, Adele was big boned like Marc, becoming a comfortable size 14–16 as a teenager. Sometimes she would need to reach for the size 18 in a fashion store.
She didn’t help her figure by having a predilection for chocolate digestives and pizza, providing it didn’t have anchovies on the top. ‘I can’t stand to have anchovies in my mouth,’ she declared. ‘I think they are disgusting. They remind me of sea monkeys. When you are a kid and you can go and buy them dry little fish and you can put them in some water and they survive for a little while. Not that I have ever eaten a sea monkey, but anchovies are just salty and yuk! I don’t like them.’
She was unbothered by her size, however, and never threw herself into PE or a faddy diet to be MTV thin. She was content eating lunch rather than going to the gym, as long as it didn’t affect her health or any potential relationship. None of her close girl friends was obsessing over their weight. In fact, it was the boys in her set who were most conscious of the way they looked, favouring lettuce leaves over pasta. She exclaimed, ‘And they’re not even gay, they’re straight. Trying to be skinny indie boys …’
Adele was very interested in the latest fashions and would spend many happy afternoons scouring vintage shops with her mother to find a bargain they could afford. One of the reasons she enjoyed reading glossy magazines was to see what the celebrities were wearing. She enjoyed getting dressed up, but chose clothes more for comfort than anything else, even though she was surrounded by fashion plates at the BRIT School.
The short walk to the school from Selhurst Station was like an elongated catwalk in suburbia. One writer memorably described it: ‘Follow the teen wearing bright yellow drainpipe jeans, a leather motorcycle jacket and bird’s nest hairstyle. The school is no more than a five-minute strut from the station.’
One of the advantages of being a big girl was being able to get into places when she was underage. She had no trouble gaining admission to a club in Holborn, where she used to go with her friends. After a night out when she was fourteen, she came up with the idea for ‘Hometown Glory’, now a classic, but then the idle ramblings of a drunkenly swaying girl trying her hardest not to step on the cracks in the pavement. She told Q magazine, ‘I was really pissed, wobbling all over the place. This French woman comes up to me and goes, “You need help, dah-ling?” And I went, “Nah, it’s me hometown, luv.”’
At this stage, she filed away the promising song to bring out again at a future date. She wasn’t yet fully focused on songwriting and many of the thoughts she had at this age would have to wait to be developed. Another one became the 2016 single ‘Send My Love to Your New Lover’, which she first sketched out when she was even younger – only thirteen.
Adele may have looked mature for her age, but she was more a schoolgirl than a music student. She was enjoying herself. She still couldn’t get out of bed in the mornings, which almost led to the ultimate reprimand. The teachers were despairing of her commitment when she rolled up to classes four hours late, even though she always said that she wasn’t ‘bunking’, just sleeping. She genuinely wanted to go to school each day.
The final straw occurred when she was selected as one of the twenty most promising students to travel to Devon to perform at a West Country festival. They were all due to meet at Clapham Junction to catch the 9.30 a.m. train to Exeter. Adele was one of the closest to the station, just a short hop from West Norwood, but as departure time approached there was no sign of her. The teachers weren’t surprised she was late. She was always late. The Director of Music, Tony Castro, phoned her and asked, ‘Are you on the way?’, expecting a ‘Yes, sorry’ response, but she had only just woken up. She had no chance of making the train. She told Rolling Stone, ‘My heart exploded in my chest. It was pretty horrible. I almost did get kicked out of the school for that.’
Liz Penney had thought she would turn up at the last moment. She confirms, ‘She was so upset.’ A few years later when Liz saw Adele, her former student remembered the day clearly and was still distressed about it. ‘I am so gutted,’ she said.
It was literally the wake-up call Adele needed. She was beginning to understand the massive opportunity she had. Superficially, she was still the same old Adele, always the life and soul, but her older friends were contemplating what they might do when they left school and she, too, was beginning to think about her future.
The BRIT School was becoming famous. For more than a decade, nobody really knew it existed. That changed for ever when Adele was in her second year. At last a pupil had achieved enormous success and would test the school’s policy of playing down the desire for fame.
The breakthrough was achieved, not as many now think, through the efforts of Amy Winehouse or Leona Lewis, but thanks to a stunningly pretty girl from Eastern Europe called Ketevan Melua. The record-buying public knew her better as Katie Melua.
Katie was another example of the diversity of the BRIT School. You could find yourself sitting next to a streetwise girl from West Norwood living with her mum or a middle-class daughter of a heart specialist from Georgia. Their artistic talents brought them together under one roof.
Katie, whose mother was Irish, spent her early childhood in Georgia, then part of the Soviet Union, before her parents moved to Belfast and subsequently to Surrey. A bright, studious girl, she began attending the BRIT School, aged sixteen, after taking her GCSEs.
At one of the school’s showcases, she was discovered by the multi-talented songwriter and producer Mike Batt, a man who has never lived down forming The Wombles pop group. He remortgaged his house to release Katie’s debut album Call Off the Search in November 2003 on his own Dramatico label. His gamble proved to be a shrewd move, because the record went to number one and sold more than 1.2 million copies in the UK within the first five months of release.
Much of Katie’s apparent ‘overnight’ success was due to the enthusiasm of Terry Wogan, who played her enchanting first single on his Radio 2 show. ‘The Closest Thing to Crazy’ was a slushy love song that was unlikely to feature on Adele’s mixtape.
Katie Melua was the biggest-selling female artist in the country in 2004 and 2005. Her teachers were amazed at how quickly it had happened. One minute she was one of the most academic pupils at the school, happily studying for her A Level in music; the next she was sharing a stage with Brian May at a Nelson Mandela benefit in South Africa.
This was a huge deal for the BRIT School. Katie was an ideal role model for students – an accomplished musician writing much of her own material. She also became very wealthy, and was listed as the seventh-richest musician under thirty in The Sunday Times Rich List of 2008. Her fortune then, at the age of twenty-three, was said to be £18 million.
Katie’s boyfriend at school was Luke Pritchard, who formed the successful indie band The Kooks with two other former pupils, Hugh Harris and Paul Garred. She wrote the poignant title song of her second album, Piece by Piece, when she and Luke broke up.
Adele was too young to know Katie, who was nearly four years her senior. She has never cited her as an influence on her singing or her career, but did once say she thought her ‘lovely’. Katie’s melodic combination of jazz and blues owed more to the legacy of Eva Cassidy than to the powerful voiced, soulful or in-your-face singers that Adele preferred.
Amy Winehouse, however, was an altogether different matter. This was a young woman constantly on the edge of pain and regret, with the most emotive voice of her generation. Oddly, Amy and Katie never had much to do with one another, despite being at the BRIT School at the same time, probably because Amy studied musical theatre, whereas Katie stuck to music.
Their debut albums came out at the same time, but while Katie was number one, Amy’s Frank languished in the lower reaches of the charts in January 2004. It was a slow burner, eventually selling a million and becoming hugely influential.
They were almost polar opposites as stars. Nick Williams observes, ‘The one thing Kate and Amy have in common is that there isn’t anyone exactly like them. They’re not factory farmed. What we do is attract people into the school who are creative – that means things will happen.’
Superficially, Adele was treading a similar path to Amy. Both were working-class girls from North London. Amy’s father Mitch was a taxi driver. Both were influenced in their vocal style by black big-band singers: Adele by Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald; Amy by Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington. And both wrote songs that honestly conveyed love and loss – as the title declared, they were both frank. Adele was nearly five years younger than Amy, and her personal life had still to develop, but the choices she made were never remotely as bad or shambolic as the ill-fated legend.
If you were in the mood for angst-ridden reflection, you wouldn’t choose the romantic sounds of Katie. For Adele, it would always be Frank, an album she admired hugely, claiming it was this ‘amazing’ record that ‘made her pick up a guitar’. That statement shouldn’t be taken too literally. Adele gushes about so much music, it can be difficult sometimes to find something that she doesn’t like.
She could, of course, already play the guitar, but it would be increasingly important to her when she took writing songs more seriously. That coincided, at sixteen, with becoming a full-time music student. Eighty per cent of her school time would be devoted to music once she waved goodbye to the national curriculum.
Although she had no trouble with her GCSEs and had achieved a distinction in her music GNVQ (General National Vocational Qualification), she still had to go through another audition process at school in order to be allowed to continue at what was its equivalent of a sixth-form college. If accepted, she would study for a BTEC qualification in music. Existing students, like Adele, were competing with a fresh set of applicants from outside. Fifty places were available to 400 hopefuls.
Again, Liz Penney was in charge of the audition, but other teachers were on the panel this time, which made the process more nerve-racking. They listened to Adele sing before she joined rival students to sit a written exam on ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ by The Beatles. Two weeks later, she was relieved to learn that she had been accepted, although in her case it had been a formality.
The very first day of what was, in effect, a new school, clearly demonstrated that Adele had a fresh determination about her and provided a rare insight into the character and dedicated mindset that would sometimes stay hidden behind her larger-than-life image. The music students were now split into two classes of twenty-five. Each of them, in turn, had to get up and perform something – a guitar solo, violin piece, saxophone break, some jazz on the piano. Adele sang, of course. One of her classmates remembers, ‘She did a great performance and then sat down in her chair and was furious because she thought she had done a really bad job. That was our very first day performance.
‘Adele was kind of, you know, an absolute perfectionist. She always had one thing on her mind and that was succeeding over anything else – over social life, over everything like that. That was her main focus.’
Adele has given the impression that she had a carefree attitude at the BRIT School. In reality, that was not the case.
In the canteen, there was a jukebox that had an eclectic mix of 45s for the students – anything from the Beach Boys to Mary J. Blige and Will Young.
One of the favourites during Adele’s first senior year was a forgettable pop song called ‘Leave (Get Out)’ by American singer JoJo. Whenever the track came on the ‘artists’, as Stuart Worden liked to call the students, would break into song.
Everyone seemed to know the words of this particular cheesy break-up song about a cheating dog of a boyfriend, especially the anthemic chorus. One of Adele’s friends and contemporaries observes, ‘It was a bit like Glee but less contrived. It was just a case of jamming together – all of us. It was a very creative place.’
Adele would join in, as would another shining talent, a fantastic dancer and actress called Jessica Cornish, from Romford. At the BRIT School she was known as Jessica, although some of her class in musical theatre called her Jess. Now the whole world knows her as Jessie J.
She wasn’t a bit like the superstar we all know today. One of Adele’s smoking buddies recalls, ‘She was very, very quiet. She would sometimes come and stand in the music room during breaks and stuff. I often thought it was a bit strange, because she was so quiet all the time and didn’t make much of an impact. It’s really weird to see her now; how big and confident and out there she is, because she wasn’t like that at all. Adele, on the other hand, comes across very much as she did at school.’
In fairness, Jessie J was one of those students who lit up like a streetlamp when she was performing. She was already a practised performer in West End musicals, including the role of Brat in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down the Wind when she was eleven. But, although she was a very fine singer, she wasn’t as accomplished vocally as a specialist like Adele.
Jessie J literally found her voice at the BRIT School. She had to change from being a stage singer to being natural and relaxed in front of a microphone. She explained in her autobiography that her time as a student was all about ‘gaining confidence, character building and finding out about myself’.
She and Adele did know each other at school, but weren’t part of the same set. Occasionally, they would join forces in the canteen for a little jam and a song. Sometimes Ben Thomas would play guitar. Jessie J recalls those times with affection: ‘We’re so common when we’re together. It’s hilarious.’ Best of all, she remembers the Adele laugh, which already was becoming her trademark: ‘You could hear her laugh from a mile down the corridor. She was very kind of loud and everyone knew her, and she was the girl everyone loved and was up for a laugh.’
One of the myths about the BRIT School is that all its stars were there at the same time and all sat in a row in a classroom. Most of the better-known former students barely knew one another. Adele did know Kate Nash, whom she thought hilarious. She also knew future star Katy B (Kathleen Brien), who spent four years at the school, but specialised in theatre, in the year below. Soon after Katy joined the school, the Year 10s and the Year 11s were put together in groups for practical music classes. Adele and Katy were in the same group, although the older children would boss around the uncool newbies. When Katy was asked what she could do, she nervously said she could sing and proceeded to demonstrate that she could. ‘You can sing.’ Adele shouted to Liz, ‘Miss, she can sing!’
Adele didn’t remember The X Factor winner Leona Lewis: ‘That Leona Lewis must have been a quiet horse as I can’t remember her at all, and I know everyone there.’ In fact, Leona had already left by the time Adele arrived. Only Jessie J, of the more famous alumnae, was in the same year.
Liz Penney, who was the musical director for her end-of-year show, the musical Sweet Charity, recalls that she cast Jessica as Charity: ‘She was an incredible performer. But she was like Adele in that she wanted to learn. She would watch me do a vocal warm-up before her class and, at the end, she would be the one who came up to ask me to show her again so that she had it right. She was the consummate professional – and so was Adele.’
Both Adele and Jessie J thrived in the relaxed environment of the BRIT School. Jess is famously bisexual and there has never been any indication she hasn’t been comfortable with her sexuality. Adele has surrounded herself with many gay friends and can be camp in a theatrical way, made charming by her persona as the cheeky chapette from Tottenham.
A mutual gay friend explains, ‘It was all to do with making the space comfortable and safe. It wasn’t a big thing to come out at the school. There were just as many gay boys as there were straight boys – and gay girls as there were straight girls. For the first time, you were able to look around and think, oh, I could date you and I could date you.
‘You had the freedom to develop as a person and that is hugely important in creative arts. It was such an eclectic range with great personalities but no edge. Some of the people were suburban and some of them were real London urban kids with no money, did terribly at school but had an amazing singing voice or could draw like no one else could draw, an amazing graffiti artist or a brilliant actor.
‘You put all these people together – black, white, fat, thin, gay or straight – and this safe, unthreatening setting taught you how to make friends with people you might not necessarily ever meet. From that point of view, it wasn’t a normal environment at all.’
Adele made many of her friends in the smoking area. It wasn’t cliquey. She liked nothing better than chilling behind the canteen, where there were a couple of tables and benches to sit, chat and enjoy a rollie – or sometimes just lark about. Wherever she was, Adele was mouthy and full of laughter and spirit. Another classmate, Allan Rose from Wandsworth, recalled, ‘She was bubbly, fun and very outgoing. She was very popular.’
It suited Adele that there was hardly a drug culture at the BRIT School. A few smoked weed, but any bad behaviour was more likely to be caused by drink. ‘Everybody was pretty well behaved,’ observed a friend. ‘We all pretty much wanted to be there, so there wasn’t much cause for discipline.’
At lunchtimes, she would join in when the students trooped into Sammy’s café for a bacon and egg sandwich, and after school it would be down the White Horse for a pint before catching the train home or grabbing a lift if someone was heading back into town. According to a drinking pal, the White Horse was an ‘absolute dump’. ‘It was a really rundown, horrid pub, but we would go in there because we could get served, even though we weren’t eighteen.’ Adele wouldn’t socialise there that much, preferring to hook up with friends away from the small world of Selhurst.
Closer to home, she would join her older friends for a smoke in the park or go swimming at the Latchmere Leisure Centre in Burns Road, Battersea – a particular favourite because it boasted a wave machine. ‘It was a huge part of my youth,’ she observed.
When she was sixteen, she used to go to watch a newly formed South London indie band called The Maccabees play at the now defunct Bug Bar on Brixton Hill. They had mutual friends, which always makes a gig more fun. Adele was given one of their early CDs in a cheap and cheerful photocopied and stapled-together packet. One of the songs was called ‘Latchmere’ in honour of the pool.
The following year, the song was the band’s second single release and last year, in 2015, she was thrilled to see them again at the Glastonbury Festival. They performed ‘Latchmere’, which brought some happy memories flooding back. It reminded Adele of how everyone had to swim in lanes and boasted the easy-to-remember chorus ‘Latchmere’s got a wave machine’. ‘They’re lovely boys,’ she said.
Throughout most of her teenage years, Adele needed a Saturday job to fund her nights out, tobacco and the odd bottle of cider for drinking with friends in Brockwell Park on a warm summer evening. She worked weekends for her Auntie Kim in the Riverside Café, next to the River Lea in Stamford Hill, a couple of miles from her old Tottenham stamping ground. It was in a lovely location and popular with ramblers taking a walk by the river.
Adele had little opportunity to admire the view, however, as she was stuck in the kitchen most of the time, doing the washing up and complaining her hands were becoming prunes. Kim did the cooking and sometimes her daughter Cema-Filiz would help out as well, which made it jollier. The two teenagers remained very close chums and always had a laugh together.
Adele loved it. Every Sunday they would listen to the chart rundown, singing along and dancing around the tables as they cleared the plates. It could have been the setting for a sitcom.
When she decided she needed more money to save for a handbag she had her eye on, Adele started working as a shop assistant at a Gap store. ‘I thought I’d be on the till or something or in the changing rooms helping people find their clothes. But all I did was fold jumpers for twelve hours a day.’ She hated it and walked out after four days without even collecting her first pay packet.
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