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Adele · S1 E1
Tottenham
Born in Tottenham, North London, to a teenage mother. No money, no connections, no plan. Just a girl who can sing.
Tottenham, North London, 1992. A four-year-old girl is standing frozen in front of the television, not watching the pictures but listening to the voices, mimicking every singer who appears on screen with an accuracy that makes her mother stop what she's doing and stare.
Adele, "Daydreamer" (live on Later... with Jools Holland, 2007). Her television debut at nineteen, performing the opening track of her debut album with just an acoustic guitar. The song is about a boy she loved who was bisexual, written with the directness and emotional clarity of someone twice her age. This is the voice that started in a council flat in Tottenham.
Daydreamer
The opening track of 19, written about a boy Adele fell for who was bisexual. Over a simple acoustic guitar pattern, she catalogs his contradictions with tenderness rather than judgment: he is a "jaw-dropper" who looks like he is thinking about love when he is thinking about nothing. The lyric is a character sketch, specific and unromantic. She doesn't tell you how she feels about him. She shows you what she sees, and lets the observations do the work.
Tottenham, 1988
Adele Laurie Blue Adkins is born on May 5, 1988, to eighteen-year-old art student Penny Adkins. The flat is small, the neighborhood is rough, and the nearest thing to a music industry is the record shop on the high street. But Penny fills the rooms with sound: Jeff Buckley, The Cure, Gabrielle on repeat.
Sources
Chas Newkey-Burden, Adele: The Biography (2012)
TAP TO REVEAL: What childhood obsession first hinted that Adele was different from other kids?
Tottenham, North London
The neighborhood where Adele spent her first years. Before the BRIT School, before any of it, there was a council flat in N17 and a girl learning to listen.
What was unusual about the way toddler Adele responded to music on television?
Cry Me a River, Julie London (1955)
The original torch song, stripped to a voice, a guitar, and nothing else. Julie London recorded this in a single take. This is the kind of record that teaches a four-year-old what a voice can do when everything else is taken away.
Cry Me a River, Julie London (1955)
Read the lyrics while you listen. One of the most intimate vocal performances ever captured. Julie London recorded this in a single take, standing in the corner of a studio because she was too nervous to face the microphone head-on.
The girl can hear things other children can't. But she didn't raise herself. Next episode: Penny Adkins, the eighteen-year-old single mother who filled a council flat with music and changed everything.
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