Adele. Sean Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ always filled with music. Her mum would play guitar along with her favourite chart tracks and encourage Adele to get up on the sofa and sing.

      It’s easy to forget how young Penny was and these were the years she might have been enjoying college if fate had dealt a different hand. Adele has always appreciated that: ‘She just thought I was amazing. She could have been at university but she chose to have me.’ She once described her as being a ‘hippy mum’.

      Penny never treated Adele as an inconvenience but always as someone to be included in whatever was going on. She always had plenty of friends round to socialise into the night with music and good conversation, and she liked her daughter to be part of these happy times. Fortunately, Adele wasn’t shy and enjoyed staying up.

      On Friday nights, that also meant letting her watch Later … with Jools Holland, which was broadcast at 11.15 p.m. The relaxed and informal mix of big names performing next to virtual unknowns would prove to be an enduring success. The Kinks, for instance, rubbed shoulders with cutting-edge rapper Neneh Cherry and La Polla Records, a Spanish Basque punk-rock band.

      Mother and daughter forged a lifelong bond through sharing so many experiences, especially musical ones. Penny had no hesitation in loading up the Citroën and taking her daughter, then eight, to the Glastonbury Festival were they sat in the mud and watched Radiohead and The Prodigy on the main Pyramid Stage.

      That was by no means Adele’s first experience of a festival. She was an old hand by then. Closer to home, just after her fifth birthday, in June 1993, Penny took her to a one-day pop festival, Great Xpectations, in Finsbury Park. The event was a benefit to support the campaign to grant a permanent radio licence to the XFM station.

      Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon from Britpop darlings Blur sang an acoustic version of the band’s latest single ‘For Tomorrow’. Damon is one of those people who drift in and out of the Adele story, not necessarily in a good way, but this was the first time she came across him. He wasn’t top of the bill, however.

      That honour fell to The Cure, led by the charismatic singer and songwriter Robert Smith. The band are one of the great survivors of British music, still hugely popular thirty-seven years after they began in the post-punk era of 1979. During Penny’s teenage years, they were renowned for their dark and gothic sound that culminated in their most successful recording, Disintegration. Penny went through a Goth stage and was a huge fan of the group. Adele was a little unsure: ‘I used to be really scared of Robert Smith because he looked like Edward Scissorhands.’

      The album provided the soundtrack for Adele’s Tottenham years. In particular, her mother’s favourite track, ‘Lovesong’, stayed with her and reminded her of those days. Ironically, on that unseasonably cool June afternoon, The Cure didn’t perform it, although they did play probably their best-known hit, ‘Friday I’m in Love’, as an encore.

      The number one record that month was ‘Dreams’, the breakthrough hit for Gabrielle, a young black singer from Hackney with a silky smooth voice. Louise Gabrielle Bobb was refreshingly different. She wrote her own songs, had one of the most distinctive soulful voices in pop and was very much her own woman in a male-dominated industry – and she wore a sequinned eye patch to hide a drooping eyelid.

      With her distinctive short black hair, she didn’t look like your average pop star. She built the foundation of her career by singing in nightclubs. She explains, ‘If there had been talent shows like The X Factor in the early 1990s, I would have done terribly! So, when success did come it was a real victory because I don’t think anybody really expected it.’

      Adele loved Gabrielle’s eye patch so much that Penny knuckled down like any dutiful mother and made her daughter one of her own. Adele had a bout of conjunctivitis and when it was time for her to return to school once she was no longer infectious, Penny presented her with her custom-made patch. She had bought one in Boots and sewn on sequins. Adele would jump up onto the table wearing her eye patch and deliver her own version of ‘Dreams’.

      Gabrielle wore her famous eye patch for eight months before abandoning it; Adele wore hers for even less time. Its appeal was greatly reduced when she was teased at school. At the earliest opportunity, it was put in a drawer, only to be worn for special performances at home. Penny encouraged her to sing in front of her friends, even arranging the lighting in the house so it would seem as if the spotlight was on Adele while she sang.

      The story of Gabrielle’s life and career is fascinating, almost spookily so, when compared to Adele’s. Her Dominican-born mother raised her and her three younger half-brothers as a single mum and chose not to name Gabrielle’s father on the birth certificate. Gabrielle had regular contact with him when she was a child, but that dwindled as she grew older.

      Gabrielle always had issues with her appearance, not just because of her eye, but also her weight. She was never a skinny, model type. She had a son in 1995 and subsequently regarded being a mum as more important than fame or fortune, although she is a multimillionaire and would never need to work again if she chose not to.

      She wrote songs that reflected her mood, was discovered when an independent label heard her demo, released only three albums in the first six years of her career and liked to be in control of her own destiny, not at the beck and call of a record company. ‘I was notorious for taking three years between albums. I love making music, but not 365 days a year. I’m probably just lazy, but I can’t force myself to write songs. I have to long to be back in the studio and feel good vibes when I’m recording.’

      Gabrielle never saw herself as a celebrity, preferring to slip quietly out of the limelight when she didn’t have a record to promote – in a fashion remarkably similar to Adele at a later date. Her ‘disappearance’ led to the public wanting her more, so when her third album, Rise, came out in 1999, it went straight to number one, as did the single of the same name. It is a break-up song tinged with sadness, but one that is ultimately uplifting, ‘… ready to rise again’. Most of her songs have an autobiographical edge – ‘diary entries’ as she calls them.

      Adele went to the Coleraine Park Primary School, just round the corner in Halefield Road. She once said she was the only white face in her classroom of thirty local children. That may be a slight exaggeration, but not by much. She may well have been the sole white English child. It was a very diverse community. During Adele’s time in the 1990s, there were some eight major ethnic groups, but by the end of the following decade, there were forty-two ethnicities, with something like twenty-six different languages being spoken in the school.

      Adele was popular, not least because she hated bullies. Marc recalled, ‘Tottenham is a rough place, but if another kid was being picked on, then she would be the one sticking up for them. She was also very protective of her friends.’

      She didn’t stand out in class, and one talent her teachers may not have been aware of is that she wrote a lot, doodling little bits of rhyme and poetry, almost from the time she learned to write her own name. She was forever writing her mother little notes, especially if she had been told off for not tidying her room. Then she would shut herself away and push a note underneath the door to let her mum know that she wasn’t coming out for a year. From a very early age, she was putting her feelings down on paper.

      Every couple of months, mainly in the school holidays, Penny would load up the boot of the Citroën and drive down the M4 so they could stay with Nana and Grampy in Penarth. If she needed a break, Penny always knew she could leave Adele there, and her daughter would be loved and well cared for by her grandparents, whom she adored.

      Grampy John became a father figure in Adele’s life, simply by giving her so much time and attention. He doted on her. Marc explained, ‘Adele would spend much of the summer with my parents and most of that time my dad would be playing СКАЧАТЬ