Last week it sold 100,000 copies in America to add to the 19m it’s already shifted worldwide. It was comfortably the biggest-selling album of 2015 despite only being released at the end of November. One news story has touts selling tickets for her British tour dates for £25,000 a pop, prompting questions in parliament “Adele is good but she’s not that good,” noted the MP for Winchester, not unreasonably.
And yet a vague sense of uncertainty hangs over the show. Her performance at the Grammys earlier in the month was shaky and marred by sound problems. She subsequently told an interviewer that it had caused her to spend the next day in tears and appeared to suggest she would simply walk offstage if anything similar happened again. One squeak of feedback and the Belfast audience could apparently be witness to the biggest pop star in the world flouncing off.
But there really doesn’t seem much danger of that happening. Her bowels notwithstanding, Adele seems utterly in control from the minute she appears. Her voice sounds fantastic. For all her tendency to the kind of expressive hand gestures popular with X-Factor contestants, she never over-sings in that melismatic look-at-me style that passes for talent on such TV shows.
She is hugely, earthily charming between songs – charming enough to get away with stuff that shades into end-of-the-pier entertainment, including singing Happy Birthday to one audience member and inviting another on stage to propose to their partner. There isn’t much in the way of surprises as she runs through the hits – Someone Like You, To Make You Feel My Love, Chasing Pavements – but it’s all beautifully done. She’s particularly good during an acoustic section, where the stripped-down arrangement adds a bit of grit to Send My Love to Your New Lover, 25’s most toothsome pop moment.
And besides, no one comes to see Adele to be shocked. There’s a compelling argument that one of the reasons 25 has done so well is that buyers – judging by tonight’s audience, mostly middle-aged – knew what they were going to get, Adele having understandably declined to mess with the formula that made its predecessor, 21, the biggest-selling album of the century thus far.
And there are certainly moments when even the most-dedicated naysayer might be forced to concede that they see what the fuss is about, not least her performance of Skyfall. As Sam Smith subsequently proved, writing a decent Bond theme is no easy task and her performance of it tonight is an object lesson in selling a dramatic song without going over the top.
“I know some of you have been dragged along here tonight but I’m going to win you over,” she says at one point. Judging by the reaction as she finally disappears – on the same platform on which she appeared – she has managed it.
via: theguardian