Adele

Tottenham to XL

Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born on 5 May 1988 in Tottenham, London. She spent two years in Brighton from 1997, then returned to London, to Brixton and West Norwood. West Norwood is the district she wrote about in her first song, Hometown Glory. She graduated from the BRIT School in Croydon in May 2006, where Leona Lewis and Jessie J were classmates.

A three-song demo made for a class project was posted on Myspace by a friend, and Richard Russell of XL Recordings rang her. She signed to XL in September 2006. At fourteen she discovered Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald, and she has said that Amy Winehouse's Frank is the reason she picked up a guitar.

19 and 21

19 came out on 28 January 2008 and was named for her age while she wrote it. Chasing Pavements reached number two on the UK chart. In the United States the album climbed to number 11 on the Billboard 200 after she played Saturday Night Live on 18 October 2008, and at the Grammys in February 2009 she won Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

21 followed on 24 January 2011 in Europe and 22 February in North America. She began writing it while still in the relationship that gave the record its subject, and within a day of the break-up she was in the studio with Paul Epworth writing Rolling in the Deep. Rick Rubin produced a round of sessions in Malibu, but she kept the earlier takes with Epworth and Ryan Tedder. Weeks after the Rubin sessions came Someone Like You, written after she learned her ex-partner was engaged. Her label asked for a fuller arrangement. She kept voice and piano.

The album spent 23 weeks at number one in the UK and 24 weeks at the top of the Billboard 200, and has sold more than 31 million copies. Two tours were cancelled in 2011 because of a vocal cord hemorrhage, and she had surgery that November. In February 2012 she won all six Grammys she was nominated for, among them Album, Record and Song of the Year.

25 and 30

After 21 she took time off, and her son was born in October 2012. In between came Skyfall, written with Epworth for the James Bond film, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song on 24 February 2013. The next album was slow to arrive. Sessions with Kid Harpoon and Tedder were largely unproductive, and Rubin told her to go back to the drawing board. The breakthrough came with Greg Kurstin and Hello, which took six months to write.

25 was released on 20 November 2015. It sold 3.38 million copies in its first week in the United States, and she held it off streaming services until 24 June 2016. Six years later 30 arrived on 19 November 2021, led by Easy on Me. It grew out of her divorce and was written to explain the break to her son. It won her a third Brit Award for British Album of the Year, the first solo artist to do so.

On stage

She headlined the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury on 25 June 2016 with a 15-song set in front of 150,000 people, and played eight dates in Australia in 2017. From 18 November 2022 she ran the Weekends with Adele residency at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, which ended in June 2024, and played ten shows in a purpose-built venue in Munich in August 2024. In July 2024 she said she was taking an indefinite break from music.

Of the 435 logged setlists that list songs, Hometown Glory appears in 368, Rolling in the Deep in 314 and Someone Like You in 305. Rolling Stone placed her 22nd on its 2023 list of the 200 greatest singers.