Adele. Sean Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ