Adele says staying in sunny LA staves off seasonal depression

Singer, who reportedly bought $58m property last year, says she also gets left alone in Los Angeles

Adele has said she is likely to stick around in Los Angeles because the sunny weather helps her stave off seasonal depression.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, she said the California city’s sunny weather was “good for me”. Los Angeles has an average of about 263 sunny days in the year.

Continue reading...

Beyoncé breaks record for artist with most Grammys in historic ceremony

The singer took home four awards in a night that also saw major wins for Kendrick Lamar, Adele and Harry Styles

Beyoncé has become the most awarded artist in Grammys history during a historic evening in Los Angeles.

The singer, who was a late arrival at the ceremony after being stuck in traffic, won for best R&B song, best dance/electronic recording, best dance/electronic album and best traditional R&B performance. She has now won 32 Grammy awards.

Continue reading...

Grammys 2023: music’s A-list prepares for a potentially historic ceremony

This weekend’s assemblage of the biggest names in music could make Beyoncé the most awarded artist in Grammy history with Adele and Harry Styles also tipped for success

It’s days before the curtain rises on the 65th annual Grammy awards ceremony and producer Ben Winston is putting the finishing touches on the production.

“I was doing the table plans last night, which is always a funny thing,” Winston said during a brief respite in between his obligations at the Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. “It’s like a bar mitzvah or a wedding, only you’re plotting where people like Beyoncé, Adele and the Rock are going to sit. Who’s Cardi B gonna be next to? It’s really fun.”

Continue reading...

‘Bawdy, emotional’: critics gush over Adele’s postponed Las Vegas show

Singer thanks fans for ‘coming back to me’ and says she has never been so nervous as she launches residency

The nerves were all part of the show when Adele launched her long-awaited Vegas residency on Friday night. After the notorious rescheduling of her dates at just one day’s notice in January, it was never going to be possible to ignore the high stakes – even in a town built on colossal bets.

“I’m so nervous and I’m so scared and I’m so happy,” she said. “It might be a bit wobbly at times because my nerves are out of control … It’s a bloody massive week for me this week. It’s the Walking Dead finale on Sunday!” In an Instagram post on Thursday night, she wrote that she had “never been more nervous before a show”.

Continue reading...

‘It’s gonna be so beautiful’: Adele’s postponed Vegas residency begins

The singer’s five-month-long residency is set to kick off with sold-out dates after it was cancelled with one day’s notice in January

After cancelling her Las Vegas residency with just one day’s notice in January, Adele is finally starting her much-anticipated set of concerts this weekend.

Weekends with Adele will stretch over five months at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, a venue that has previously hosted residencies from Celine Dion, Cher, Madonna and Elton John. It boasts a capacity of over 4,000.

Continue reading...

Worthy winners aside, the Brits is struggling to keep pace with modern pop

TikTok voting and gaming stars haven’t altered the music awards’ predictable roster of chart-toppers

News: Adele sweeps gender-neutral Brit awards
Liveblog: Brit awards 2022 – as it happened

The actual Brit awards ceremony has changed its complexion over the years: from the old-guard backslapping of the 80s to the boozy chaos of the 90s and early 00s. Today’s offering is slickly professional – hipper than it once was, less tone-deaf when it comes to representation, but not a hair out of place to the point of seeming faintly uneventful, unless you count the sight of Anne-Marie falling over, or the sound of Ed Sheeran gamely attempting to turn Bad Habits into a metal anthem with the aid of Bring Me the Horizon: even the person in charge of the mute button for swearing had an easy night. There was a lot of talk from host Mo Gilligan about hedonistic behaviour, but not many actual signs of it. Nor did anyone attempt to say anything controversy-stirring or political.

This year, the onus appeared to have shifted slightly again. In what was clearly an attempt to attract a younger audience – an audience that don’t watch music shows on television – there were categories voted for by fans via TikTok; elsewhere, there were “afterparties” starring tweenage favourite PinkPantheress on gaming platform Roblox and the unmissable opportunity to buy Brits-related NFTs.

Continue reading...

‘They just worked’: reports of CDs’ demise inspires wave of support

Format might not have romance of vinyl but its versatility and reliability will never be topped, say supporters

After languishing in his car boot for several years, Jordan Bassett’s CD collection – mostly dating back to his teenage years – will soon be on proud display in his newly converted home office space.

Bassett, a commissioning editor at the NME, has no means of playing the CDs and, in any case, his musical tastes have moved on. But the 100-150 thin, shiny 5in discs have sentimental value – and, who knows, one day they may be part of a revival similar to vinyl among music aficionados.

Continue reading...

Adele shares grief with fans by video call over postponed Vegas shows

Singer extends apologies and tears by FaceTime and social media after Covid delays to her residency dates

Adele has personally apologised to fans after cancelling a series of highly anticipated shows in Las Vegas because of Covid production issues.

The singer addressed disappointed concert-goers, some of who had travelled in from around the world, via FaceTime after her residency was postponed at the last minute.

Continue reading...

‘My show ain’t ready’: Adele postpones Las Vegas residency

Singer announces she is rescheduling Weekends with Adele show as half her crew infected with Covid

Adele has been forced to delay her three-month Las Vegas residency after Covid hit the production.

“I’m so sorry, but my show ain’t ready,” the singer announced in an Instagram post. “We’ve been absolutely destroyed by delivery delays and Covid. Half my crew … are down with Covid – they still are – and it’s been impossible to finish the show.”

Continue reading...

Go easy on me: why pop has got so predictable

Adele, Ed Sheeran, Abba, Lana Del Rey and Drake all found success in 2021 by delivering more of the same – a result of how our chaotic lives, on and offline, are informing our taste

The biggest album launch of 2021 began with a social media statement tacitly assuring fans that nothing had changed. Adele was once more in a state of heartbreak – “a maze of absolute mess and inner turmoil … consumed by my own grief” – and that the contents of her album 30 would reflect that, as mired in romantic misery as its predecessors, 25 and 21. It was the musical equivalent, she said, of a friend who comes over “with a bottle of wine and a takeaway” to discuss the disastrous state of your love life.

The second-biggest album launch of 2021 was preceded by its creators proudly announcing they had written it “absolutely trend-blind”. Abba had traversed a considerable musical distance over the course of their original career, buffeted by the shifting musical trends of the 70s and early 80s – from the clompy Europop of their debut album to the sophisticated, chilly electronics of The Visitors, by way of glam and sleek disco – but Voyage would offer them preserved in amber, exactly as they were in the late 70s, unspoiled by any musical trends from the 40 years since their split.

Continue reading...

Security, intimacy and money: why Adele is going to Las Vegas

Once a place ‘where careers go to die’, in Vegas you can see the big stars up close – and it makes sense for Adele

Las Vegas shows once conjured images of early-bird dinner specials, corny magicians and Cole Porter standards sung to happily clapping coach parties. But with another of the world’s biggest pop stars signing on to perform in the city, namely Adele, the Vegas concert residency is further cemented as a glamorous and lucrative rite of pop passage.

Her fourth album, 30, released last month, became the biggest-selling album of the year in the US after just three days on sale. That is the kind of popularity that warrants a stadium tour – indeed, she played to nearly 3 million punters across the 120-show stretch of her previous 2017-2018 world tour.

Continue reading...

Readers review Adele’s 30: ‘so powerful’ or a ‘depressive black hole’?

It’s the biggest album of the year – and Guardian readers are split on whether Adele’s latest magnum mope-us is raw or overdone

It’s so upfront and honest. You know exactly the story she’s telling, and even if you haven’t experienced divorce yourself, you feel every word of it. Her voice is sounding better than it’s ever done, using so much more of her range – just listen to Love is A Game. Gone are the lofty metaphors that hint at heartbreak, replaced with extremely raw and naked lyrics that welcome you in to her experiences. I think it’s much more poetic than before. Best album so far.

Continue reading...

Adele’s 30 becomes biggest-selling album of 2021 in US after three days

Album also outselling rest of UK Top 40 combined, while Taylor Swift’s All Too Well (Taylor’s Version) becomes longest song to reach US No 1

Adele’s 30 is already the biggest-selling album of the year in the US, just three days after it went on sale.

Using a metric that combines sales of vinyl, CDs and downloads alongside streaming, 30 has sold over 575,000 copies. Adele has overtaken the previous highest seller Taylor Swift, whose December 2020 album Evermore has sold 462,000 copies this year.

Continue reading...

‘She believed in every one of us’: ex-pupils on their inspirational teachers

After Adele’s tearful reunion with a former teacher, four readers recall their own school memories

“So bloody cool, so engaging.” That’s how Adele described her English teacher at Chestnut Grove school in Balham, south-west London, Ms McDonald, when asked who had inspired her.

Answering a question from the actor Emma Thompson during ITV’s An Audience With Adele on Sunday, Adele said: “She really made us care, and we knew that she cared about us and stuff like that.”

Continue reading...

Adele interview bungle leaves Australian TV reporter ‘mortified’ and reportedly costs station $1m

‘This is the most important email I have ever missed,’ Seven’s Matt Doran says after failing to listen to singer’s new album 30

A “mortified” Australian TV reporter has tried to explain how he bungled an exclusive interview with the singer Adele about her new album.

The host of Channel Seven’s Weekend Sunrise, Matt Doran, and a crew flew to London for the chat, which reportedly cost A$1m to secure and would have been Adele’s only Australian interview. After Doran conceded during the interview that he had only heard one track from her latest work, 30, the interview was canned.

Continue reading...

Glennon Doyle: ‘So many women feel caged by gender, sexuality, religion’

Glennon Doyle’s memoir inspired Adele – but do we all need to be ‘untamed’?

The marriage wasn’t unbearable, but it didn’t feel right any more. The lightbulb moment came when she realised she needed to think about what she truly wanted, rather than about what society had trained her to think she wanted. Also, she became aware that remaining in an unhappy marriage meant she wasn’t being the parent she wanted to be: following her heart would cause heartbreak to her family now, but it had a noble purpose. Today, her ex lives within walking distance and they share parenting. She got out, and she wants to tell the world how it’s changed her life.

Who is this woman? Well, it could be Adele, whose new album reveals why she decided to leave her husband Simon Konecki, and what it means for their son Angelo, nine. “It just wasn’t right for me any more… I didn’t want to end up like a lot of other people I knew. I wasn’t miserable-miserable, but I would have been miserable had I not put myself first,” she said in a recent interview.

Continue reading...

Adele: 30 review – the defining voice of heartbreak returns

(Columbia)
While the topic of her divorce is all-consuming, the singer seems to be pushing gently at the boundaries of what people expect of her

There is a sense in which 2021’s biggest single – 84.9m streams in a week on one platform alone; straight to No 1 in 25 countries; a song that received more first-week plays on US radio than any other song ever – wasn’t so much a comeback as an act of global reassurance. The world may recently have lurched from one unimaginable crisis to another, but Adele’s Easy on Me brought with it the message that at least one thing hasn’t changed: Adele Adkins is still heartbroken and belting it out over a gentle piano and tasteful orchestration.

Romantic despair became her global brand from the moment she stopped the show at the 2011 Brit awards with her tearful performance of Someone Like You. It catapulted her from the massed ranks of soul-influenced singers filling a gap created by Amy Winehouse’s inability to follow up Back to Black, to mind-boggling levels of success. There’s always the chance that millions of people might flock to an upbeat Adele album that depicts her full of the joys of spring, but clearly she wasn’t taking any chances last time around: for want of new unhappiness, 2015’s 25 returned to the same failed relationships that inspired its record-breaking predecessor 21. No matter – it sold 22m copies.

Continue reading...

Weight loss, deadlifts and divorce: what we learned from Adele’s One Night Only special

In her TV concert special, the singer got personal in an interview with Oprah Winfrey about her dreams of a nuclear family, fixation with her weight loss and how much she can deadlift

Adele opened up about the pain of her divorce, losing the dream of a nuclear family, commentary over her weight and her strained relationship with her late father in a candid, ranging interview with Oprah Winfrey.

During the sit-down in Winfrey’s rose garden, recorded prior to her first concert in more than four years for the CBS special Adele One Night Only, the singer revealed she felt “embarrassed” that she couldn’t make her marriage to Simon Konecki “work”.

Continue reading...

Adele: Easy on Me review – reliably, relatably Adele-esque

(Columbia)
The first single from her divorce-focused new album 30 is quintessential Adele: piano, romantic recrimination, and soaring vocal work

Adele’s statement announcing the release of her fourth album was published on social media earlier this week. In it, the singer doesn’t talk much about music, more about her emotional state during the album’s making, provoked, one assumes, by the breakdown of her marriage: “absolute mess and inner turmoil … consumed by grief”. She compared the album she made amid it to friends coming over with “a bottle of wine and a takeaway” and offering earthy, if astrologically based, advice: “It’s your Saturn return, babes, fuck it.”

It all sounds thoroughly grim, but it also has a hint of reassurance about it for her fans, who come to Adele in record-breaking numbers for relatable heartbreak – the musical equivalent of an old friend in the pub, tearfully relating the latest chapter in their reliably disastrous love life as they demolish a third glass of pinot grigio. For one thing, it underlines that she has fresh heartbreak to write about, which had been an issue with her last album, 25, on which she was forced to rake over the same relationship that had inspired its predecessor for material. For another, her fans might have cause to be alarmed by what the cover of Vogue refers to as “a new look, a new love, a new sound”. How reliably relatable can Adele now be, with her home in LA, her squad of Hollywood A-list pals, her three-times-a-day exercise regime and, the Vogue profile suggests, an employee on hand with a different pair of shoes should the singer want to change out of her heels? It’s a statement that, consciously or otherwise, sends out a message: “Business as usual babes, fuck it.”

Continue reading...

Meghan launches work initiative for women on 40th birthday

40x40 project encourages people to donate 40 minutes of their time to help women return to workplace

The Duchess of Sussex has used her 40th birthday to launch an initiative to help women back into work after the huge job losses caused by the Covid pandemic.

The project, which was launched with a comedy film featuring a juggling Prince Harry, is called 40x40 and is focused on encouraging people around the world to donate 40 minutes of their time to help women return to the workplace.

Continue reading...