Name: Adele.
Age: 27.
Appearance: Words on a screen, man. Just words on a screen.
What? Has Adele been eaten by the Matrix? Quite possibly. The truth is that, right now, nobody knows.
Is she back? Let’s assume she is, based on the advert that ran in the middle of The X Factor on Sunday night.
Wait, I watched The X Factor on Sunday, and I didn’t see Adele. But did you see an advert with text on a black screen, and a woman singing?
Possibly. What were the words? They went: “Hello, it’s me / I was wondering if after all these years / You’d like to meet to go over everything / They say that time’s supposed to heal ya / But I ain’t done much healing ...”
Oh, wait, I did see that. The song was so unrelentingly maudlin that I thought it was a teaser for the new John Lewis Christmas campaign. It might have been that. Or, if rumours are to be believed, it might have been Adele’s way of announcing the imminent arrival of a new album.
Really? That’s exciting. It certainly is for some people. Adele’s last album, remember, is the biggest-selling album of the millennium so far.
What an achievement! She must have spent all those intervening years partying like crazy. You might think so, but it’s doubtful. Look at those lyrics. They’re miserable.
They are pretty sad. Who do you think she’s singing them to? Maybe the taxman, given she once joked about wanting to “buy a gun and randomly open fire” when she received a large tax bill.
Don’t be a cynic. Then maybe it’s the subject of her song Someone Like You. Maybe Adele has dedicated her entire life to stalking an ex-boyfriend, and she’s less a recording artist and more a comprehensive diarist of her own compulsively antisocial behaviour.
Hard to say, isn’t it? We’ll have to wait for the video to find out. If she’s singing those lyrics in the guy’s doorway, drunk on Lambrini at 3am with mascara all over her face, we’ll know.
That it’s definitely the new Adele song? Or the John Lewis Christmas campaign. They’re pretty much interchangeable, tonally.
Do say: “Look out for Adele’s new album soon.”
Don’t say: “It’s called Happy Time Party Fun Everything’s Great 100%.”
