Adele's interview with Oprah Winfrey has many asking, has she been 'ruined' by Hollywood?

During the CBS interview Adele unburdened herself to Oprah about her recent divorce and her weight loss. Photo / Getty Images

Adele's One Night Only extravaganza (broadcast by CBS in the US on Sunday night) proves she's at the very top of the showbiz firmament. Only the biggest of stars can command a primetime concert show, and the two-hour special underlined her status by having her sing her heart out from the steps of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles to an audience that included Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen DeGeneres and Lizzo.

That, though, was only part of the evening's entertainment. As well as performing songs from her upcoming album, 30, alongside previous hits like Rolling in the Deep, One Night Only featured Adele having an intimate sit-down chat with Oprah. That's an honour that puts her on the same level as royalty: Oprah's last special was her conversation with Harry and Meghan.

As part of the CBS special, Adele performed from the steps of the Griffith Observatory in LA to an audience that included Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen DeGgeneres and Lizzo. Photo / Getty Images

It's a very long way for a girl from Tottenham, north east London, to have travelled, but Adele's particular glamour has always stemmed from her ability to be both at once: the big-haired, high-glam diva with the belting voice delivering epic songs of heartbreak, and the down-to-earth Londoner with the dirty mouth. In the trailer for the special, she promised: "It will look really elegant, and then I'll tell a load of filthy jokes."

But while she delivered on the first part – wearing a lavish off-the-shoulder fishtailed black gown for the concert and a sleek white suit for the interview, with her trademark cat-eye makeup – there was a sad lack of smut in the chat. What we heard instead sounded suspiciously like La-La Land therapy talk, as Adele unburdened herself to Oprah about her recent divorce and her weight loss.

Asked about how she coped with the heartbreak of deciding to end her marriage, Adele talked about "the process of arriving to yourself every single day, turning up to yourself every single day". She described how she was "trying to move forward with intention". And she commented on the importance of "really sitting in my feelings ... Whenever I noticed how I was feeling, I would sit down and I'd sit in it."

As well as making emotional states sound unpleasantly like the contents of a nappy, Adele's vocabulary has all the hallmarks of someone who's spent much of the six years since her last record "processing". And she's had a lot to process: as well as going through divorce and navigating the move to co-parenting her 9-year-old son, Angelo, with ex-husband Simon Konecki, Adele has also had to deal with the death of her father, from whom she'd been estranged since she was 3. (They reconciled shortly before he died.)

Her face when Oprah said River Lea 😂😂😂😂😂 omg #Adele #AdeleOneNightOnly pic.twitter.com/1R8dG5BWLw

— LiLi :) ³⁰ (@Anateleta) November 14, 2021

No wonder, as Adele told Rolling Stone in a recent interview, she found herself looking for consolation in "intention-setting rituals" and thoroughgoing gym sessions. These are totally reasonable ways of negotiating painful personal experiences, but there's no getting around the fact that they're also very Hollywood ways of dealing with painful personal experiences. Adele's persona is of someone who's just like us – but inevitably, massive success means she's becoming one of them.

There's a possibly telling moment in a video she made for Vogue recently. The concept is perfectly Adele: she's in a café, blindfolded, trying to identify classic British delicacies by taste. She gets the pork pie and cockles, but when she's given a plate of chips she identifies them as "fries". She quickly corrects herself, but it's a small giveaway of where her heart is now: less north London, more West Coast.

This is, of course, an unavoidable consequence of the kind of spectacular fame that Adele has achieved. She isn't just a major figure in popular culture – she's one of the very last of the old-school pop stars. The promotion plan for 30 looks very much like a traditional album release: a single (Easy On Me, released on October 16), then a gap in which she's undertaken various profile-raising duties (Oprah, simultaneous Vogue covers on both sides of the Atlantic, radio appearances), and eventually the full LP (30 will arrive on November 19).

Nothing so remarkable about that. Or there wouldn't be, if this was 10 years ago. The business of pop music has changed drastically since she began her career. Now, a big album release will arrive as an overnight drop – look at how Taylor Swift delivered her new version of Red this weekend – and a months-long campaign like Adele's, let alone such a large vinyl run, is unheard of.

What artists will do instead to gain publicity is take part in collaborations with other artists: see Nicki Minaj, who seems to make as many "features" as records of her own. But Adele also doesn't do that. She's always the headliner, never the co-star. She might not be the biggest artist in the world (depending on how you measure that, Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa all come out ahead), but she's the only current artist big enough to maintain this kind of reserved attitude to promotion and celebrity.

That's crucial, because while Adele seems accessible, she's also extraordinarily private. She separated from Konecki in 2018, but didn't announce the news publicly until 2019 – a level of discretion that's impossible to imagine being maintained by, say, a Kardashian. Other stars turn their weddings into multi-platform marketing opportunities. Adele's was so secret, there aren't even any pictures of it online.

So while Adele's music is confessional (she's described the lead single as an effort to explain to her son, who was in Sunday night's audience, "who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness"), she's also careful to keep the public at arm's length. The interviews for 30 are her first since 2016.

The only way to maintain the space to have a normal life when you're as famous as Adele is, ironically, to lose yourself in the Hollywood bubble. That's good for her – whose love life has ever been improved by the attentions of the paparazzi? But it also means that she can't carry on being the gobby London girl the world fell in love with. Adele belongs to Los Angeles now.

• Adele One Night Only will screen on TVNZ on Monday, November 22.