London,

Forget the Meluas ... Adele's the real thing

By John Aizlewood, Evening Standard  30.01.08

From the streets of West Norwood to national consciousness in a few heady months, it's been a short, sharp rise for 19-year-old Adele Adkins. And she knows it.

"It's been amazing," she told the sell-out crowd of her first major London show. "A year ago I was playing to literally two people at a pub in north London. Now ... this."

That rise, via unquestioning critical adulation, an appearance on Later and a Brit, may have been swift, but it has not been wholly easy.

Suspicions were raised when it slipped out that, like Katie Melua, Kate Nash and Amy Winehouse (all of whom she intermittently resembled), she is a former pupil of Croydon luvvy factory, The BRIT School For The Performing Arts And Technology. Those suspicions were partly dispersed when it transpired that she is not, by any yardstick, a stick-thin glamourpuss and she still lives with her masseuse mother.

If her unashamedly estuary tones, her mangled introductions ("It hasn't got a chorus or nothing," she explained of First Love) and her decision to dress for an afternoon in front of the television suggested one of Catherine Tate's more lazily observed characters, only the flintiest of hearts could fail to respond to Adele's wideeyed, boundless enthusiasm as, to celebrate its release this week, she performed her debut album 19 from beginning to end.

So far, so south London barmaid who sings for a hobby. But this potential empress does have clothes and, just like her perceived rival Duffy (they need not be gladiators: there's more than enough room for both), it's all about the voice. Adele's exudes grief with a believability unheard since Tammy Wynette, the most desolate female singer of all.

Last night it was showcased most magically on 19's sole cover, Bob Dylan's rarely tackled Make You Feel My Love. Sitting on a stool, backed by piano and string quartet, she wrung every last nuance from the song's doomed adoration. If doubts remained, this was the moment to shed them.

Her youth occasionally betrayed her songwriting, especially on her Melua Moment, the slender Crazy For You, but in the epic Hometown Glory she has written the first great London song of the 21st century.

Elsewhere though, she was a knowing but bereft chronicler of affairs of the heart. The opening Daydreamer concerned a bisexual boyfriend, but the remaining 10 songs detailed another relationship.

All oozed melancholy, even the up-tempo Right As Rain ("about when you feel really, really rubbish") and the Mark Ronson collaboration Cold Shoulder, but by the time she garbled her final farewell and tottered into the night without so much as an encore, the jury was no longer out. Adele Adkins is the real thing.

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