How did a girl from Tottenham end up playing Caesar’s Palace for a reported $3 million a time? As the singer adds another 32 nights to her run, Matt Rudd buys a ticket and asks her audience for answers.
Darrell and Cindy moved to Dripping Springs, Texas (population 4,650), in 2017 after their home on the other side of the state got flooded, with water and then snakes, during Hurricane Harvey. Darrell has a convincing Texas drawl, so I ask if he has a cowboy hat and a truck. Cindy answers for him — yes, yes and the truck is huge.
“Because in Texas we don’t always have roads where you need to go,” Darrell adds defensively. “Not like you do in London, England.”
Tonight we’re not in Texas or London, England. We’re five rows back in the third tier at the Colosseum, a 4,300-seat concert hall in Las Vegas modelled on and with better air conditioning than the 65,000-seat Colosseum in Rome. I’ve flown ten hours, Darrell and Cindy have flown three. I’ve paid US$1,000 ($1,700) for my ticket on StubHub, the reselling website. Darrell and Cindy “won the opportunity to buy tickets” as verified fans and paid US$1,600 ($2,700), Cindy whispers in my ear, for two.
Most of the other husbands I’ve spoken to have the disconsolate air of the long-suffering plus-one, dragged from Minnesota or Michigan or Wisconsin or Wyoming so their wives can karaoke along to Adele’s many, many break-up songs. “All of you have an ex you don’t like, otherwise why would you be here,” Adele jokes later. She is nothing if not self-aware. But Darrell is not disconsolate. Tomorrow will be his 58th birthday and this was Cindy’s gift to him. That’s why she whispered.
“We watched the CBS show of her performing live at the Griffith Observatory in 2021,” Darrell says. “Did you see it? She sang When We Were Young and I cried like a baby.” About an hour later Adele sings the song that made the cowboy cry and, sure enough, Darrell is blinking furiously. I’m also on the verge of tears. I just paid US$20 ($35) for a can of beer.
A cynic might suggest that a Vegas residency is no more than a money-making exercise for stars who are past their best. Céline Dion did 427 shows right here at the Colosseum between 2011 and 2019. Over at the Westgate, Barry Manilow, 80 and still alive, just eclipsed the Vegas record of Elvis Presley, presumed dead, with his 637th performance.
Adele, 35, is not past her best, a fact that becomes immediately apparent when she walks on stage. It’s just her under a single spotlight accompanied by the pianist Eric Wortham II — and she’s tiny because she’s all the way down there. I’d need to have paid upwards of US$10,000 ($17,000) to be in the front rows. But as soon as she opens her mouth to sing Hello, we are all — even the bargain hunters who’ve stumped up only US$600 ($1,000) for the nosebleed fourth tier — spellbound. She once asked a couple who got engaged during the show how they could hear each other over her “wailing” but to hear her soulful mezzo-soprano sweeping a room that many singers would be lost in makes the ten hours in economy absolutely almost worth it.
Before the show I ask several fans ransacking the Adele gift shop how far they’ve come and why. The responses are all the same: miles and “she’s so authentic”, miles and “she’s just real”, from Spain and “she’s amazing and real and authentic”. How they square that with a US$22 ($37) Adele fridge magnet or a US$40 ($69) Adele umbrella is different mathematics.
Adele is therapy then and we’re in the land of therapy. Guns too but therapy. She’s sincere and real and just so authentic, all things people — and perhaps Americans in the post-truth era most of all — crave. She’s the singing couple’s counsellor. She’s the bard of break-ups. Just across the street you can see U2 inside the Sphere, the world’s largest video screen, which opened last month — and tickets start at a mere US$200 ($340). Ed Sheeran is yours at the Las Vegas Raiders’ football stadium from US$100 ($170). But the girl from sarf London is in her own league.
She has just added 32 nights to the previous 68 of her residency, which were due to finish next week. But Weekends with Adele got off to an inauspicious start. Originally scheduled to begin in January 2022, the concerts were postponed with just a day’s notice. “I’m so sorry. My show ain’t ready,” Adele sobbed on Instagram to the thousands of people who must have been checking into their hotels. “Half my team are down with Covid and it’s been impossible to finish the show.” Reports suggested she was also annoyed by an overly extravagant bit of staging involving a swimming pool.
Whatever the reason, the run of sold-out performances was rescheduled to begin in November 2022. When tickets for the 34 shows went on sale that August, every single one of approximately 138,000 sold out in minutes. Priced “dynamically” from US$85 to US$680 ($145 to $1,165), they then immediately began reselling for as much as ten times their value on the secondary market. It was the same story when Adele announced that the run would extend for another 17 weekends and 34 shows. The organisers were said to be “desperate” for her to stay longer still, reportedly offering to improve the US$1.75 million ($3 million) she already receives each time she sets foot on stage. Whatever deal was struck, they have got their way. Adele’s 100th Las Vegas gig will take place in June 2024.
Diva money and flaky diva behaviour then, but tonight no one cares. A thirtysomething marketing executive from Brazil tells me this is her fourth time (“because I love her”), a restaurant manager from London is back for a second time (“because she’s so funny”). The family behind me have been brought along by their son and his boyfriend, both of whom describe themselves as her No 1 fan. Prove it, I’m tempted to say, but resist. I don’t want to spoil their special night. None of them or anyone else I ask actually likes Las Vegas but they’re all prepared to suffer it for their heroine.
For the hundreds of Adele fans who’ve made a weekend of it from the UK, the show begins at an unhelpful 4am GMT. If she was even remotely patriotic, she’d do a show at 9am Nevada time as well. I try to get on Vegas time but on Friday I’m wide awake and walking up the Strip before dawn. The only other people out are the joggers (a few) and the gamblers and drinkers who’ve pulled a Thursday all-nighter (a lot). I turn right at a Statue of Liberty so realistic they once used it on a stamp by mistake. I pass great neon billboards for the magicians and the crooners, smaller boards for bottomless mimosas and topless girls, smaller still for the marijuana dispensaries (“10 per cent retail excise tax”), Injuredinahotel.com (“one of the most unexpected injuries in a hotel is a fall or an injury from defective or overused chairs”) and VIP Plastic Surgery (“together, things get better”). If you keep going past the half-size Eiffel Tower and an approximation of Venice’s Grand Canal you get to Battlefield Vegas on the right, where you can pay US$300 ($515) to fire 100 rounds from an M134 Minigun (one and a half seconds on full auto), and, on the left, the Little Vegas Chapel, where you can make an even bigger mistake.
I’m not going that far. I’m stopping for a breakfast-time lunch and the chance of a pre-concert glimpse of Adele. She’s staying at the Wynn, the luxury hotel she chose because reportedly she preferred it to Caesars Palace, the resort where she performs. I don’t blame her. For a start it doesn’t have a theme — “we’re not trying to copy Rome or Italy or New York,” explained Steve Wynn when he opened it in 2005. It is huge, though — in 2004 it had 2,700 rooms, now it has almost 5,000. It takes a long walk past exclusive shops, extravagant restaurants and several more acres of casino to reach the entrance to the golf club (US$550 a round) and a separate door leading to the exclusive part of the hotel reserved for the rich and famous.
I don’t, of course, see Adele. She will arrive on her private jet from what a tabloid exhaustively describes as a “US$58,000,000, outrageously huge, 18,587 sq ft, 8-bedroom, 12-bathroom Beverly Hills love nest”. She moved to California in 2016, five years after telling Q magazine how mortified she was at having to pay 50 per cent tax in the UK. “I use the NHS, but I can’t use public transport any more. Trains are always late, most state schools are shit and I’ve got to give you, like, four million quid — are you having a laugh?” she ranted in 2011. “When I got my tax bill, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire.”
Sorry, where was I? Ah yes, the private jet. A limo will then whisk her straight to her outrageously huge 3,224 sq ft, two-bedroom, two-bathroom bungalow overlooking a golf course, one of the few pieces of greenery in Las Vegas, via an entrance away from any prying eyes, including mine. She’ll perform on Friday and Saturday, then fly back to LA straight afterwards. Good for her, I think, as I wander back down the Strip through the smoke-filled gaming rooms (Nevada’s clean indoor air act excludes casinos).
Three songs in, Adele tells us how nervous she gets before a show. This comes up a lot — her stage fright and her accompanying back problems. When she was 15 she slipped a disc sneezing in bed and has lived with back pain most of her adult life. Stress can cause her sciatica to flare up — “I have to waddle these days,” she told an audience last year after having to take a break mid-performance. Tonight she’s not waddling but she isn’t exactly dancing either. And there are no costume changes.
Her act is her voice, which only adds to the pressure. “Don’t worry guys,” she tells us, sipping from a mug of tea she balances under the lid of Eric’s grand piano. “It’s not just me and Eric all night. The show starts small, then it gets bigger, then it’s absolutely massive.” The audience whoops and Adele laughs. It’s more of a cackle than a laugh. On the way to a guffaw. If Eliza Doolittle missed the lesson on how to laugh like a lady, she’d sound like this. There’s Singing Adele (angelic, soulful, a gift) and there’s Talking Adele (clean your mouth out, young lady) and they’re two different people entirely, except perhaps in Rumour Has It, a song about another woman “half your age” — “She, she ain’t real / She ain’t gon’ be able to love you like I will.” That’s the most Vicky Pollard that Singing Adele gets.
The dirty laugh returns with a gun that fires souvenir T-shirts into the audience and then again when she tells us we’re less raucous than last Saturday’s crowd. “It was Mexican Independence Day,” she says. “A woman right here in the front row kept sipping from a bottle of tequila. She thought I didn’t notice but every time she leant forward her boob fell out.” The cackle again. “Is anyone here drunk? Keep drinking because the more you drink, the better I sound.”
One (US$20) can of beer in and she does sound great. The band and the backing singers are on now and the stage has expanded. Set designers have used state-of-the-art panels and intricate rollers to allow the performance to grow or shrink — 40ft walls close in and move out to create intimacy or spectacle. From floor to very high ceiling, the Colosseum has been lined with a “super-grey” fabric that can reflect 4K resolution images crisply. The result is pin-sharp projection — a light show that escapes the confines of the stage. When the piano refrain of Skyfall begins, Adele stands alone in the foreground as Daniel Craig’s Bond sinks in water on the Imax-enormous wall behind her. The song builds to the chorus, the fabric becomes transparent and, behind it, we see a live 24-piece string orchestra arranged in a giant three-by-eight vertical grid. Adele was right — the show does get bigger.
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born in Tottenham, north London, in 1988 to Mark Evans and Penny Adkins. Her parents’ relationship dissolved and Evans, an alcoholic who said he “put away two litres of vodka and seven or eight pints of Stella a day”, left when Adele was three. From Tottenham, the mother and daughter moved to Brighton where Penny found work as a furniture-maker and adult literacy organiser. When Adele was 11 they returned to London, first to Brixton, then to West Norwood. She attended the Brit School of Performing Arts and Technology with Jessie J and Leona Lewis, graduating in 2006, then was quickly discovered after posting a demo on MySpace.
She sang Chasing Pavements, the first single from her debut album, 19, into her phone while walking home from a bar in which she’d just punched a boyfriend who had cheated on her. She arranged the chords at the piano when she got back. A few months later, in October 2008, she sang it on Saturday Night Live and the show got its highest ratings in 14 years. It helped that it was also the night the real governor Sarah Palin appeared in a sketch with her impersonator Tina Fey, but Adele had her first hit — and her first Grammy. The second album, 21, was supposed to be more upbeat but sadly (or perhaps fortunately, given that it is the bestselling album of the 21st century), the recording sessions coincided with another break-up.
She collaborated with a selection of established songwriters to get the latest romantic disaster off her chest — penning Someone Like You weeks after the main sessions when she found out her ex was engaged. Some critics were sniffy, noting the more commercial tone — the power ballads “try too hard”, decided Rolling Stone. The New York Times compared her to Dusty Springfield and Annie Lennox — she can “seethe, sob, rasp, swoop, lilt and belt, in ways that draw more attention to the song than to the singer”.
Once again Adele had used the recording studio to cope with the highs and lows of young love. What she came to understand only later was that her father’s absence exacerbated those highs and lows. “I was definitely always trying to fill that void. But at the same time I would expect it to hurt at some point [in a relationship], so I would hurt them first. It wasn’t malicious, it was just that I had zero expectations of anybody,” she told Oprah Winfrey in 2021. “It [alcohol] took my dad from me. Once I realised that, I had to do a lot of work on myself. I stopped drinking and started working out a lot.” She lost 7st in the process. She met and reconciled with her father shortly before his death from bowel cancer in May 2021.
The third album, 25, was not easy, as third albums tend to be. Notes on its creation mention writer’s block, unproductive recording sessions and procrastination, but could it simply have been that Adele simply didn’t have a cheating ex to punch in a pub? In 2011 she began a relationship with Simon Konecki, the British Lehman Brothers trader turned charity entrepreneur, and their son, Angelo, was born a year later. The album — a “make-up record” from the queen of break-ups — was eventually released in 2015 and despite being less angst-ridden than 21, it quickly became the world’s bestselling album that year. It took just 87 days for the YouTube video of Hello to be watched a billion times.
The accompanying world tour broke records for attendance and took US$280 million ($480 million) in ticket sales but it was also her last to date. At the time she told Vanity Fair she didn’t understand why people were addicted to touring. “I’d still like to make records, but I’d be fine if I never heard [the applause] again,” she said. The list of musicians who love performing much more than making (and promoting) albums is quite long. I can’t think of another performer who thinks the opposite. “I’m on tour simply to see everyone who’s been so supportive,” she said. “I love being famous for my songs, but I don’t enjoy being in the public eye.”
Why do something you don’t enjoy if you don’t need to? Thirty minutes before headlining Glastonbury in 2016 Adele had to pause her pre-show interview with Jo Whiley. “She was just so stricken with nerves, absolutely panic-stricken,” Whiley said afterwards. “It was amazing to see somebody like that, then to witness her walking out on stage and doing the most incredible set… to know that half an hour before she’d been in tears at the thought of walking out there.”
Back in Las Vegas we’re 90 minutes in — about US$750 (for me) and about US$1.3 million (for her) — and instead of tears and stage fright, Adele is in full command and Eric’s piano is on fire under a curtain of rain. The song is called Set Fire to the Rain and the producers have taken that literally. The audience can’t decide whether to scream or sit in awestruck silence. They do a bit of both, having quickly recovered from the earlier disappointing news that, tonight, Adele is not hugging.
Adele’s walkabout has become one of the most talked about parts of the show. Armed with a microphone and flanked by security, she sets off into the first and sometimes second but never third tiers, stopping to chat with her fans, posing for selfies and hugs along the way. On message boards thousands of words have been exchanged as fans debate the best places to sit for a chance of contact. They map all her routes with military precision: in show 14, the one where she helped an expectant mother choose a baby name, she walked that way but in show 19, the one where she called that lady’s fiancée, she went that way. And so on and on and on. But not tonight.
“Normally I would absolutely stop and chat and hear all about your life and be the nosey person that I am,” she says. “However, I’m hanging on by a thread trying not to get Covid. Everyone that I work with has f***ing Covid, so it’s a miracle that I haven’t had it yet. I just can’t risk getting ill. Honestly, my immune system is in the gutter and I want to be close to you and stuff like that, but I just can’t risk it.”
But it’s fine. The piano’s on fire and then it’s disintegrating with poor Eric still playing — no idea what’s happened to the cup of tea — and then the auditorium fills with lanterns and then confetti, and the cowboy and the restaurant manager and the couple who’ve watched the whole show through their iPhone screen are all applauding.
Sadly, or fortunately, Adele’s marriage to Konecki in 2018 ended in separation that year and came to a formal end in 2021. Shockingly, her fourth album, 30, was inspired by the divorce. Rolling Stone called it her “toughest and most powerful album yet”. Happily, or unfortunately, she is now in a relationship with Rich Paul, the American sports agent and cohabiter of the aforementioned love nest. They may or may not be married — she referred to him in one of her recent walkabouts as “my husband”. Maybe we’ll find out now that his memoir, Lucky Me: A Memoir of Changing the Odds, is published in the US this month. We probably won’t.
What bliss, marital or not, means for the fifth album is unclear. Will her 13th album, 74, still be inspired by romantic torment? Adele is one of the world’s most successful musicians, driven creatively by childhood trauma and relationship angst. She is also rich enough to retire from the stresses and strains of stardom and to focus on what matters to her — her 11-year-old son, family, normality. Usually the intoxication of stardom wins out over the craving for the quiet life and it all ends in tears. But perhaps Adele is different. She is, as Jonathan Dickins, her manager since she was 18, once put it, “completely her own woman”.
Whatever she does next, I’m not thinking about that right now. As I file out of the Colosseum at 10pm Vegas time, 6am my time, sob, a huge swathe of humanity is pushing in the other direction. Thousands of young clubbers, all dressed to the nines, are queueing to get into the building as the multigenerational Adele fans, also all dressed to the nines, queue to get out. The Swedish superstar DJ Alesso is playing a set at Omnia, the Caesars Palace nightclub, and the night, for them, is not young, it hasn’t even started yet. I have more important matters to worry about — is it worth paying £50 to upgrade my economy seat home to “Economy Delight”? Or should I get another can of beer instead?
Written by: Matt Rudd
© The Times of London