Hello. It’s me. I was wondering if you’d like to know where Adele isn’t No 1 in the world right now? Kyrgyzstan, Niger, Anguilla and Burkino Faso. And that’s more or less it. 119 countries have an iTunes chart. Adele is at the top of 110 of them. And this is just one of any number of records that she broke last week: the fastest-selling album in Britain, ever. The fastest-selling album in America, ever. The video of Hello has already garnered half-a-billion views; she’s even shifted a million CDs – CDs! Who even knew they still existed?
It is, by any measure, a breathtaking, astonishing feat. Adele, a 27-year-old, who grew up in and around some of the poorer areas of London, raised by a single mother, is Britain’s greatest cultural export since the Beatles. She’s not a boy band or a supergroup – she’s a singer-songwriter who sings the kind of songs that lesser talents churn out on an industrial scale and yet she, uniquely, has touched, and been embraced by, people, young and old, hipsters and their parents, here, there, everywhere.
What is about Adele? It’s an intriguing, elusive question that you’re unlikely to encounter if you read her British reviews. “Five years on, Adele is still, metaphorically speaking, planted on her ex’s lawn at 3am, tearfully lobbing her shoes at his bedroom window,” said the Guardian. “That 25 is as innovative as a flip phone isn’t a reason to criticise it,” said Time Out. “So here’s one: it’s a bit dull.” And the Independent: “A slew of plodding piano ballads… indulgent heartbreak, writ billboard-large in songs like the frankly terrifying single Hello, where her phone-stalker pesters an old flame for the chance to meet up and ‘go over everything’, three words guaranteed to make a man’s blood run cold.”
They’re all male, mostly middle-aged, rock critics but then I don’t have to tell you that, it’s right there in the copy and in the comment threads of every article that’s been written about Adele recently. She’s “tearfully lobbing her shoes” at her ex’s bedroom window. She sings words guaranteed to “make any man’s blood run cold”. But then, perhaps the most astonishing thing of all about Adele’s success is that she’s a loud, powerful voice articulating lived experience.
And she’s a woman. And not just that, she’s a woman born working class. Who hears from them, ever? Music is the only bit of public life where we permit it. Where we still hear the kind of voices that are now absent elsewhere. Young black men. Young working-class women.
What’s so interesting about Adele, at the heart of her appeal, is that she gives an authentic voice to what are universal emotions: loss, regret, pain. We all feel those, men and women both, but there’s something about her femaleness, that is, for a certain audience, unpalatable. There’s a particular kind of contempt that’s reserved for women in public life. And if you don’t believe me, read the comments that will appear online beneath this article.
Adele has defied all odds. She shouldn’t be No 1 in 110 countries, she should be stacking shelves at Tesco. She should be working as a nanny, the job she chose for her alter ego recently when she appeared as an Adele lookalike and auditioned with a bunch of other Adele lookalikes for a sketch on the Graham Norton special dedicated to her on the BBC, a spoof so warm and funny it would take a stone-hearted rock critic to be left unmoved.
Working-class girls from West Norwood don’t become global superstars, they don’t even become solicitors or journalists or accountants. Areas of life that were once open to children from working-class backgrounds are open no longer.
Acting has become the preserve of the middle classes. Even sport has been gentrified: a third of medal winners at the 2008 Olympics were privately educated. The story of Adele’s success, the working-class girl made good, the hardscrabble rise from the streets of south London, just doesn’t happen any more.
And if you’re allergic to what you think are the sentiments of Adele’s songs, think about that. About how it was the Brit school in Croydon that made it all possible. Adele received a brilliant, world-class education part-funded by the British government. “The kids were passionate about what they were doing there,” she’s said.
It’s not rocket science, it’s money. It’s taxes. It’s public services. It’s a capital city that functions for all its residents including the poorest. It’s opportunities for all.
And it doesn’t exist any more. The narrative that we’ve carried with us since the postwar settlement, since the NHS and the welfare state, since the 60s and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and A Taste of Honey and Ken Barlow going off to university and coming back with a taste for poetry and red wine, that narrative is dead.
And that, perhaps, is where Adele’s true power lies. The raw emotional energy that’s propelled her to global success. The wistful nostalgia. The elegiac tones of When We Were Young. Adele has experienced life lived at a turbocharged pace that few of us will ever know. It’s just 11 years since she was a teenage nobody. That was a million years ago, she sings. And it could be.
Regret, loss, pain, we should all feel it. We’re losing the Britain we love. Adele isn’t lobbing shoes at her ex’s window. She is the thing of which she sings. She embodies a social mobility, a narrative of transformation, a story of talent overcoming the circumstances of one’s birth, of a time that is now gone. You want nostalgia? Think of a 16-year-old girl from West Norwood and what awaits her now.
