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Adele · S1 E2
Penny Adkins
Her mother is eighteen when Adele is born. She raises her alone, on benefits, in a succession of flats across South London.
May 5, 1988, Tottenham, North London. Penny Adkins is eighteen years old, single, and holding a newborn daughter she will raise alone across half a dozen council flats in North and South London.
Adele, "Million Years Ago" (live on the Today Show, 2015). A stripped-back acoustic performance about walking through her old neighborhood and realizing everything has changed except the streets. Adele has said she wrote it about returning to West Norwood and feeling like a stranger in the place that made her.
Million Years Ago
One of the few Adele songs built on acoustic guitar rather than piano, giving it an almost bossa nova quality that sounds nothing like the rest of 25. The lyric catalogs small losses: familiar faces gone, corner shops replaced, the feeling of returning somewhere that doesn't recognize you back. Adele told Beats 1 in 2015 that she wrote it about walking through her old neighborhood and realizing she'd become a stranger in the place that made her.
The Flats
Penny raises Adele on state benefits, moving between council flats in Tottenham, then Brixton, then West Norwood. The flats are small and the money is tight, but Penny fills the rooms with music: Jeff Buckley's Grace, The Cure's Disintegration, Gabrielle on repeat. She is creative herself, working as a furniture maker, a masseuse, and whatever else keeps them afloat.
Sources
Chas Newkey-Burden, Adele: The Biography (2012)
Adele, Rolling Stone, 2011
TAP TO REVEAL: What music was playing in Penny's flat that gave toddler Adele her first obsession with singing?
“She fell pregnant with me when she would have been applying for uni, but chose to have me instead. She never, ever reminds me of that.”
— Adele
West Norwood, South London
The neighborhood where Penny and Adele settled longest during her childhood. The streets Adele would later write "Hometown Glory" about at age sixteen.
What was Penny Adkins studying when she became pregnant with Adele at eighteen?
Sweetest Devotion
From 25 (2015). The closing track, written about her son Angelo. A hymn to the love between parent and child, and the devotion that doesn't need to be explained. Knowing that Penny raised Adele alone from eighteen, every line gains a second layer.
Sweetest Devotion, Adele (2015)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Adele wrote this about Angelo, but every line works just as well from Penny's perspective. The chorus is where it hits: the devotion Adele feels for her son is the same devotion that raised her.
Penny and Adele
Penny raises Adele alone, but there is another parent in this story. His name is Mark Evans, he leaves when Adele is two, and his absence will haunt every love song she ever writes.
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