As is often the case with open days, Adele was assigned a student in the year above to look after her and chat about life at the school. She was shown around by an aspiring singer called Beverly Tawiah, from Battersea, who filled her with enthusiasm. ‘She really encouraged me and she was a brilliant singer. I thought, “That’s it. I’m coming here.”’
Tawiah may not yet be a star, but she is a much-in-demand singer, working with, among others, Mark Ronson. It is a fact of the music business that it is far harder to be noticed as a black female soul singer, however excellent, than it is as a white one.
The open day was one part of the process; her audition interview was the next. A couple of hundred applicants were chasing twenty-four places. The new deputy head of music, Liz Penney, remembers that Adele, thanks to alphabetical order, was the first prospective student she interviewed when the admission process began in January 2002. She had no idea what general standard to expect.
Adele, who was not yet fourteen, sang ‘Free’ by Stevie Wonder, one of the lesser known, soulful ballads on his 1987 album Characters. It’s not an easy song to perform, requiring vocal dexterity and a strong lower register. She then played ‘Tumbledown Blues’ by James Rae on the clarinet, a classic study piece. She wasn’t in love with the instrument, even though she had progressed to Grade 5. This was a decent achievement, but nothing that made her stand out from the crowd.
‘I didn’t see her play the clarinet after that,’ says Liz, ‘but I remember thinking she can play as well, so she must have had a little tuition. But when she opened her mouth to sing, I thought, “Well, that’s a larger voice than you would expect from a thirteen-year-old.” I immediately said to myself, “Oh yes, she’s in.”’ Liz asked the teenager why she thought she should be given a place at the school. ‘Because I am creative,’ responded Adele.
Penny came along to support her daughter and immediately impressed Liz: ‘I remembered meeting her mum on that first occasion because she is called Penny and my surname is Penney. So we were the two Pennies. And she is, I think, exactly the same age as me, so it was a bit like, “This could be my daughter.” It was clear she was going to be a supportive parent. She knew exactly what Adele was applying for. It wasn’t just an idea of “Oh, I want to go to the BRIT School”. Her daughter was here to learn her craft. Sometimes you sort of build a relationship with some parents and not with others. Penny was one of the former. She came to every show.’
Adele’s stepfather Simon would join them for parents’ evenings and he encouraged her throughout her four years at the BRIT School, even though his relationship with Penny was coming to an end. The teachers always thought he was Adele’s real father.
The BRIT School takes pupils either at fourteen or two years later. For Adele, it would mean two years of mostly ordinary school, with Thursdays devoted to pursuing her specialist strand. The options included theatre, musical theatre, dance, film and media or visual arts and design. For Adele, the choice was always going to be music.
She began the new phase of her life in September 2002. On the home front, there was change as well. Penny and Simon split up and she and Adele moved to West Norwood, no more than one and a half miles away, two minutes round the South Circular Road. Simon was still very much part of their lives, but he and Penny no longer lived together.
West Norwood is one of those districts of London that you need a sat nav to find. Nobody really knows where it is, although it is in the main catchment area for the BRIT School. It’s actually between Streatham and Dulwich in SE27. Soon after Penny and Adele moved to the area, there was some amusing banter in the newspapers about local residents pretending that they lived in Dulwich Village, less than a ten-minute walk away. Nothing could be further from the truth. All over London, million-pound neighbourhoods stand shoulder to shoulder with impoverished streets and bleak estates. Nowhere is this more starkly evident than in this enclave of south-east London.
Tom Utley of the Daily Mail, who has lived there for many years, described West Norwood as reeking of ‘failure and frustrated hopes’. He continued, ‘Everything about the place – its uneven pavements, carved up by the cable-television companies, its net curtains, peeling paintwork, weed-infested gardens and its whiffy kebab shops – is shabby and suburban.’
Penny first found a flat in a building containing four apartments in Chestnut Road, one of the streets of large detached houses off the Norwood Road. These were the streets that appealed to young couples with growing families who had aspirations for something better. One attraction of their new neighbourhood was that they were close to the overground station and it was easy for Adele to commute to school.
They stayed only a few months before Penny found a larger flat above the Co-op on the main road. It wasn’t exactly a step up. The security guard at the store told women in the neighbourhood to take care at night because the area was a ‘war zone’. He wasn’t exaggerating.
The gangs would drift down to the main road from the notorious York Road estate to deal and take drugs outside the Texaco petrol station next to Adele’s building. On any given day, a local shopkeeper might be the subject of ‘steaming’, when one of the gangs would rush into a shop, stripping it of everything they could lay their hands on.
The seedier side of the neighbourhood was represented by a ‘massage parlour’ close to the railway station. Always there was the undercurrent of violence and menace. In one grisly incident that became the subject of local legend, someone was stabbed to death in a fast-food restaurant and his body left in the freezer.
On any given morning, commuters waiting on platform 1 at the overground station in West Norwood would see a young teenager in a Goth studded collar and parachute pants giving her full concentration to heat magazine or the latest edition of i-D, the style bible for modern youth culture. It was Adele on her half-hour commute to school.
You wouldn’t see her every morning. In the aftermath of her unhappy time at her first high school, she still had trouble getting out of bed. Gradually, the BRIT School and, most importantly, the other students won her round. She explained, ‘Whereas before I was going to a school with bums and kids that were rude and wanted to grow up and mug people, it was really inspiring to wake up every day to go to school with kids that actually wanted to be productive at something and wanted to be somebody.’
Her favourite day of the week was Thursday, when five solid hours were dedicated to music. At the BRIT School, it wasn’t simply a case of there being no fees: all the equipment, the musical instruments and the rehearsal rooms were free as well. So when classes were over for the day, it meant personal time to get on with projects and practice.
Liz Penney noticed Adele’s commitment right from the start. Liz was forever passing her in the corridor ‘working by herself, writing lyrics, picking up her guitar and learning to accompany herself’.
Simon had bought her a ‘really nice’ Simon & Patrick acoustic guitar. Hand-crafted at the Godin factory in Quebec, Canada, it was a superior instrument. Pete Townshend, one of the greatest of all pop guitarists, strummed a few chords when she let him try it a few years later. ‘It’s a beautiful guitar,’ he told her.
She wasn’t sorry to give up the clarinet, and for a while took up the saxophone, which she found easy to play. She enjoyed belting out a tune and would take it home to practice. Her next-door neighbour, who happened to be a singer, was impressed when she heard Adele rehearsing.
Shingai Shoniwa, by coincidence, was a former BRIT School pupil. She had studied theatre, but switched to music when she joined forces with another student, guitarist Dan Smith. Together they formed a band called Noisettes. They built up an enthusiastic live following before landing a record deal in 2005 and finally releasing their first album two years later. They had a chart breakthrough in 2009, when the single ‘Don’t Upset