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Adele · S1 E3
Mark Evans
Her father leaves when she is two. He reappears in the tabloids decades later. The absence defines more songs than the presence ever could.
Sometime around 1990, a man named Mark Evans walks out of a flat in Tottenham. His daughter is barely old enough to remember his face, and the empty space he leaves will echo through every record she ever makes.
Adele, "Rumour Has It" (live at the Royal Albert Hall, 2011). A song about gossip, betrayal, and the feeling of being talked about by people who don't know the full story. Adele co-wrote it with Ryan Tedder about the tabloid interest in her personal life.
Rumour Has It
Co-written with Ryan Tedder, "Rumour Has It" is about the frustration of having your personal life picked apart by people who know nothing about it. The stomp-clap percussion sounds like a crowd gathering to whisper. The verses are delivered like accusations, rapid and pointed, before the chorus opens up into defiance. The song captures the frustration of having your private relationships treated as public property.
The Absence
Mark Evans is from Penarth, a small seaside town near Cardiff in South Wales. He and Penny split when Adele is a toddler, and he returns to Wales, crossing the Severn Bridge back to the country he came from. For years, Adele's relationship with her father is a quiet absence rather than a public wound.
Sources
Adele, 60 Minutes, CBS, February 2012
“I had absolutely zero expectations of anybody, because I learned not to have them through my dad.”
— Adele
TAP TO REVEAL: What did Mark Evans do in 2011 that Adele said hurt more than him leaving?
Where in the UK is Adele's father Mark Evans originally from?
Dance with My Father, Luther Vandross (2003)
Luther Vandross wrote this about his own father, who died when Luther was a teenager. A grown man wishing he could go back to being small enough to stand on his father's shoes while they danced in the living room. In an episode about Mark Evans, this song asks the question Adele has never put into her own lyrics: what would it have been like if he had stayed?
Dance with My Father, Luther Vandross (2003)
Read the lyrics while you listen. Luther Vandross wrote this about his own father, who died when Luther was a teenager. A grown man wishing he could go back to being small enough to stand on his father's shoes while they danced.
Penny's records introduce Adele to Jeff Buckley and The Cure, but the girl finds her own obsessions. One is a five-piece pop group from London, the other is a jazz singer who died thirty years before Adele was born.
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