Much of Katie’s apparent ‘overnight’ success was due to the enthusiasm of Terry Wogan, who played her enchanting first single on his Radio 2 show. ‘The Closest Thing to Crazy’ was a slushy love song that was unlikely to feature on Adele’s mixtape.
Katie Melua was the biggest-selling female artist in the country in 2004 and 2005. Her teachers were amazed at how quickly it had happened. One minute she was one of the most academic pupils at the school, happily studying for her A Level in music; the next she was sharing a stage with Brian May at a Nelson Mandela benefit in South Africa.
This was a huge deal for the BRIT School. Katie was an ideal role model for students – an accomplished musician writing much of her own material. She also became very wealthy, and was listed as the seventh-richest musician under thirty in The Sunday Times Rich List of 2008. Her fortune then, at the age of twenty-three, was said to be £18 million.
Katie’s boyfriend at school was Luke Pritchard, who formed the successful indie band The Kooks with two other former pupils, Hugh Harris and Paul Garred. She wrote the poignant title song of her second album, Piece by Piece, when she and Luke broke up.
Adele was too young to know Katie, who was nearly four years her senior. She has never cited her as an influence on her singing or her career, but did once say she thought her ‘lovely’. Katie’s melodic combination of jazz and blues owed more to the legacy of Eva Cassidy than to the powerful voiced, soulful or in-your-face singers that Adele preferred.
Amy Winehouse, however, was an altogether different matter. This was a young woman constantly on the edge of pain and regret, with the most emotive voice of her generation. Oddly, Amy and Katie never had much to do with one another, despite being at the BRIT School at the same time, probably because Amy studied musical theatre, whereas Katie stuck to music.
Their debut albums came out at the same time, but while Katie was number one, Amy’s Frank languished in the lower reaches of the charts in January 2004. It was a slow burner, eventually selling a million and becoming hugely influential.
They were almost polar opposites as stars. Nick Williams observes, ‘The one thing Kate and Amy have in common is that there isn’t anyone exactly like them. They’re not factory farmed. What we do is attract people into the school who are creative – that means things will happen.’
Superficially, Adele was treading a similar path to Amy. Both were working-class girls from North London. Amy’s father Mitch was a taxi driver. Both were influenced in their vocal style by black big-band singers: Adele by Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald; Amy by Sarah Vaughan and Dinah Washington. And both wrote songs that honestly conveyed love and loss – as the title declared, they were both frank. Adele was nearly five years younger than Amy, and her personal life had still to develop, but the choices she made were never remotely as bad or shambolic as the ill-fated legend.
If you were in the mood for angst-ridden reflection, you wouldn’t choose the romantic sounds of Katie. For Adele, it would always be Frank, an album she admired hugely, claiming it was this ‘amazing’ record that ‘made her pick up a guitar’. That statement shouldn’t be taken too literally. Adele gushes about so much music, it can be difficult sometimes to find something that she doesn’t like.
She could, of course, already play the guitar, but it would be increasingly important to her when she took writing songs more seriously. That coincided, at sixteen, with becoming a full-time music student. Eighty per cent of her school time would be devoted to music once she waved goodbye to the national curriculum.
Although she had no trouble with her GCSEs and had achieved a distinction in her music GNVQ (General National Vocational Qualification), she still had to go through another audition process at school in order to be allowed to continue at what was its equivalent of a sixth-form college. If accepted, she would study for a BTEC qualification in music. Existing students, like Adele, were competing with a fresh set of applicants from outside. Fifty places were available to 400 hopefuls.
Again, Liz Penney was in charge of the audition, but other teachers were on the panel this time, which made the process more nerve-racking. They listened to Adele sing before she joined rival students to sit a written exam on ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ by The Beatles. Two weeks later, she was relieved to learn that she had been accepted, although in her case it had been a formality.
The very first day of what was, in effect, a new school, clearly demonstrated that Adele had a fresh determination about her and provided a rare insight into the character and dedicated mindset that would sometimes stay hidden behind her larger-than-life image. The music students were now split into two classes of twenty-five. Each of them, in turn, had to get up and perform something – a guitar solo, violin piece, saxophone break, some jazz on the piano. Adele sang, of course. One of her classmates remembers, ‘She did a great performance and then sat down in her chair and was furious because she thought she had done a really bad job. That was our very first day performance.
‘Adele was kind of, you know, an absolute perfectionist. She always had one thing on her mind and that was succeeding over anything else – over social life, over everything like that. That was her main focus.’
Adele has given the impression that she had a carefree attitude at the BRIT School. In reality, that was not the case.
In the canteen, there was a jukebox that had an eclectic mix of 45s for the students – anything from the Beach Boys to Mary J. Blige and Will Young.
One of the favourites during Adele’s first senior year was a forgettable pop song called ‘Leave (Get Out)’ by American singer JoJo. Whenever the track came on the ‘artists’, as Stuart Worden liked to call the students, would break into song.
Everyone seemed to know the words of this particular cheesy break-up song about a cheating dog of a boyfriend, especially the anthemic chorus. One of Adele’s friends and contemporaries observes, ‘It was a bit like Glee but less contrived. It was just a case of jamming together – all of us. It was a very creative place.’
Adele would join in, as would another shining talent, a fantastic dancer and actress called Jessica Cornish, from Romford. At the BRIT School she was known as Jessica, although some of her class in musical theatre called her Jess. Now the whole world knows her as Jessie J.
She wasn’t a bit like the superstar we all know today. One of Adele’s smoking buddies recalls, ‘She was very, very quiet. She would sometimes come and stand in the music room during breaks and stuff. I often thought it was a bit strange, because she was so quiet all the time and didn’t make much of an impact. It’s really weird to see her now; how big and confident and out there she is, because she wasn’t like that at all. Adele, on the other hand, comes across very much as she did at school.’
In fairness, Jessie J was one of those students who lit up like a streetlamp when she was performing. She was already a practised performer in West End musicals, including the role of Brat in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Whistle Down the Wind when she was eleven. But, although she was a very fine singer, she wasn’t as accomplished vocally as a specialist like Adele.
Jessie J literally found her voice at the BRIT School. She had to change from being a stage singer to being natural and relaxed in front of a microphone. She explained in her autobiography that her time as a student was all about ‘gaining confidence, character building and finding out about myself’.
She and Adele did know each other at school, but weren’t part of the same set. Occasionally, they would join forces in the canteen for a little jam and a song. Sometimes Ben Thomas would play guitar. Jessie J recalls those times with affection: ‘We’re so common when we’re together. It’s hilarious.’ Best of all, she remembers the Adele laugh, which already was becoming her trademark: ‘You could hear her laugh from a mile down the corridor. She was very kind of loud and everyone knew her, and she was the girl everyone loved and was up for a laugh.’
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