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Adele cringes: "I can't believe I did a peace sign on TV - like Ringo Starr!"
In a tiny backstage dressing room at the Roundhouse venue in north London, the 19-year-old singer re-enacts her dad-like hippy faux-pas - two fingers raised in a V - and cackles like
a cockney barmaid. Tonight, at the TV-recorded launch party for next month's Brit Awards, she sang her intoxicating, soul-pop, soon-to-be-classic single, Chasing Pavements, responded to the applause with a peace sign and mouthed the words, "That was awful."
She was, in fact, spellbinding, if initially nervous, finally unfurling a billowing voice so vast, pure and deep-soul powerful it could turn the very tides, the kind of voice we used to hear before reality TV invented yodelling like Mariah as the pop kids' definition of singing.
At 19, Adele is a fully formed personality - exuberant, bawdy, disarmingly honest, effortlessly funny, gasping for "a fag", devoted to her beloved music. Dressed in a grey cotton smock, below her jaunty auburn bun she has the smoky green eyes of a cat. She writes her beautiful, deeply melancholic music, too.
"No one really mentions my songs," she says, startled, perched on a plastic seat. "I think they just assume I haven't written them. I've written my whole album. I love love songs. But I love pop music as well: Girls Aloud, Kylie, the Spice Girls, East 17, Mika. I'm not that into credibility ... I mean, of course I wanna be a credible artist but you gotta have a laugh, innit? I used to be obsessed like that, I was a real indie kid, but I'd secretly go home and listen to Celine Dion. She's got proper ballads!"
The past year or so has been a masterclass for Adele (and the rest of us) in the preposterous speed of the public profile of a 21st-century newcomer. In November 2006, aged 18, she was signed to XL Recordings (home of the White Stripes, MIA, Dizzee Rascal, Peaches) on the strength of three songs, played pubs in north London to 10 people in early 2007, quietly toured all over Britain, had her TV debut on Jools Holland's programme with the acoustic stunner Daydreamer in June (despite not yet releasing a single), finally released the piano-led epic of her debut single Hometown Glory in October, was chosen for the inaugural Critics Choice Brit Award for 2008 on 10 December, was unveiled as the BBC's Sound of 2008 poll winner on January 4 and saw the brilliantly bizarre car-crash-themed video for Chasing Pavements uploaded on to Kanye West's personal blog on January 9 with the caption: "This shit is dope!!!!!!!"
"I feel," she muses, "like I'm being shoved down everyone's throat. My worst fear is my music won't connect with the public. Earlier this morning, because Chasing Pavements went up for download last night, just being adventurous I scrolled down to the last 30 of the top 100 on iTunes to see if it was there. [Glumly] And it wasn't there. [Enormous grin] It was No 12! And that was only 9 o'clock!"
In 2008, it's still all about the gobby young girls. After Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen and Kate Nash, the new wave has arrived and this time they're all called Amy. Pretty much. There's Amy Macdonald, 20, the Scottish indie-folk minstrel whose debut album This is the Life knocked Radiohead's In Rainbows off the British Number 1 album slot. There's Amy Studt, 21, sometime fallen teenage upstart returning as a goth-pop torch-singer with the startling My Paper-Made Man. Then there's Amy Duffy, 22 (wisely known as Duffy), the Welsh, blonde, strikingly retro-chic Sienna Miller of pop, who all the indie boys fancy and who is widely perceived to be Adele's greatest rival.
"I think Duffy's wicked and I think there's room for everyone," declares Adele.
Of all the gobby new girls, only Adele's bewitching singing voice has the enigmatic quality which causes tears of involuntary emotion to splash down your face in the way Eva Cassidy's did before her. And only Adele has been endorsed by Beyonce (they share the same independent PR in Britain), who refers to her as "the new British singer". She's been called, elsewhere, "the new Amy Winehouse".
Her debut album, 19, is a break-up collection, melancholic and atmospheric and written about the end of her biggest relationship (he cheated on her, she chucked him). The lovelorn Daydreamer, though, is about a different boy, a bisexual friend she'd fallen in love with and who said the same was happening to him, at her 18th birthday party, only to run off four hours later with one of Adele's gay friends.
"So Daydreamer is about everything I wanted him to be. The daydream of him," she says.
Adele never shuts up. On the rare occasion she does, it's usually in the wake of a terrible fight with a boy and she finally retreats into silence.
This is when she writes a song.
"I will sit in my room on my own for ages," she muses. "Because otherwise I am rude to people. I can't be around anyone, I have to be on my own. And I'll write. That's how that atmosphere [in the songs] gets created."
Adele's mum was 18-and-a-half when Adele was born, on 5 May 1988, in Tottenham, north London. Her biological dad was "never in the picture", but Adele knows who he is: "A really big Welsh guy who works on the ships and stuff. It's fine, I don't feel like I'm missing anything."
Aged 11, she moved with her mum and new stepdad to West Norwood in south London, where new friends introduced her to R&B via Destiny's Child, Faith Evans and P Diddy, while she discovered, independently, Eva Cassidy, Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald, all of whom she could impersonate.
Never musically encouraged at her comprehensive, at 14 Adele was accepted into the increasingly ubiquitous BRIT School in Croydon, the free school for the performing arts which fostered Amy Winehouse, Kate Nash and Leona Lewis. That year, 2003, saw every singer in the school, notes Adele, own Amy Winehouse's just-released Frank and sing it in the canteen. She contemplates her position as 'the new Amy Winehouse'. "Everyone asks me if I think I'm gonna end up like Amy Winehouse," she snorts. "First of all, I don't know how she's ended up because no one does, I'm sorry. I might see her looking really sad on the front page, but I just put my iPod on and listen to Back to Black and remember she's amazingly talented. I'm always like, 'Well, of course, I'm not,' but if Amy got 'You gonna end up like Billie Holiday?', I'm sure she said, 'No.' I don't think anyone asks for it. But you never know."
Unlike Winehouse, Adele doesn't feel the pressure to be tuning-fork thin.
"I'm just not bothered," she announces. "It doesn't bother me. I'm not naive, I don't believe I need to look like that. I'm very confident. Even when I read people saying horrible stuff about my weight. Until I start not liking my own body, until it gets in the way of my health or stops me having a boyfriend then I don't care. I'm fine. Since I was a teenager I've been a size 14 or 16, sometimes 18. And it's never been an issue in any of the relationships I've had. None of my friends, girls, are obsessed with weight. In fact, it's more my boys, who are friends, they're like, 'I'm not gonna eat pasta.' And they're not even gay, they're straight! Trying to be skinny indie boys, yeah, but that's too skinny!"
Adele's thinking about moving to New York. After the natural promotional lifecycle of 19 (around a year), she wants "to live again. Cos it's not real life, this, sitting in a taxi all day, I can't put that in a song.';
She needs "an adventure, for new songs" and has friends there already, including Amy Winehouse's producer Mark Ronson, who has taken her to New York bars where she can not only drink illegally, but smoke illegally.
"Cool!" she cackles. "Mark is so funny, I always think he's about 24, but he's 32. He's old!"
She contemplates where the canyon-sized melancholy in the sound of her music might come from.
"I don't have a hole in my soul," she chirps "I'm not insecure in any way. What I think it is, is, I'm really awful at saying how I feel. When it comes to, like, 'I love you', or 'Mum, you're really pissing me off', or to a friend, 'Look, I don't like us being friends any more', I can never say it. I hate confrontation. So I've always written it down. Even when I was little. If I had an argument with Mum, I'd write down how she made me feel. I prefer people to write it down in a message or text or email. When I broke up with my boyfriend I did it by text. 'Babe, I can't do it no more.' I can't believe I just told you that. And now I write it in songs. That's what it is."
She knows exactly what she'll be doing aged 30.
"Oh I've got everything planned," she grins. "I wanna be settling down by then. And writing pop songs for other people. I've already got 10 songs the Pussycat Dolls could sing. But obviously I'm not gonna get in a bikini!
"So at 30 I'll have my first bah-bee, be married, have a really nice three-storey family house with a little picket fence and be writing songs for pop tarts."
Lowdown
Who: Adele Adkins, aka Adele, aka the new Amy Winehouse
Born: 1988, London
Latest: Her debut album 19 is released this week
- Observer
