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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.
A fourteen-year-old girl from West Norwood walks into a building in Croydon that looks more like a warehouse than a school. She walks out with a place at the institution that shaped Amy Winehouse, Jessie J, and Leona Lewis.
Chasing Pavements -- Adele. Her second single, released in 2008. Inspired by a real incident outside a London nightclub, the song captures the feeling of pursuing something everyone else tells you is hopeless.
Chasing Pavements
"Chasing Pavements" is co-written with Eg White and produced by Jim Abbiss. The production builds from a spare piano intro into a full arrangement with strings and drums, but the vocal stays intimate throughout. Listen for how Adele handles the chorus. She resists the temptation to belt, keeping the melody conversational even as the instrumentation swells around her. That discipline, learned from years of absorbing Ella Fitzgerald records, is what separates her from every other singer her age. The song earned her a Grammy for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 2009.
The BRIT School
The BRIT School for Performing Arts and Technology sits in Selhurst, Croydon, and is nothing like the stage schools in films. It is state-funded, completely free to attend, and the only entry requirement is talent. Adele enrols in 2002 at fourteen to study a BTEC National Diploma in Performing Arts. She later says it is the first place she doesn't feel like the odd one out.
TAP TO REVEAL: What did Adele originally want to study at the BRIT School?
“I didn't go to the BRIT School to be famous. I went because it was the first time anyone said: what you do matters.”
— Adele, Vogue, October 2011
Bonus Listening: Right as Rain
A defiantly upbeat track from 19 about being perfectly happy with your own messy life while everyone else insists something must be wrong. It captures the BRIT School-era Adele: confident, funny, and completely unbothered by anyone else's expectations.
The BRIT School has produced many successful artists. Which of these was NOT a BRIT School student?
She has the school, the classmates, and a voice that turns heads in every corridor. But nobody outside Croydon has heard her sing yet. Next: a MySpace demo, a stunned record executive, and the deal that arrives before Adele is old enough to sign it herself.
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