Marc didn’t go far. He moved into a house share near The Flask pub in Highgate. He would still see plenty of Penny and Adele and would frequently stay over in Shelbourne Road. He never had a formal agreement with Penny about supporting her. If he had a good week, he would hand over a wad of cash or come bearing gifts of clothes and toys. And his father, who was quite well off by this time, gave Penny a monthly allowance to help out.
When Adele was a bit older, Marc would take her to the London Zoo in Regent’s Park, which she loved. He recalled, ‘She loved the monkeys most of all. To a child, they are naughty, aren’t they?’ Marc used to tease his daughter: ‘I shall never forget one day at the zoo when she went to the loo, came out and saw that I had a scratch on my hand.’
‘What happened to you, Dad?’ asked Adele.
He replied, ‘Well, the lion jumped over the fence and had me.’
‘She looked at me, eyes wide, and said, “Oh did he, Dad?”’
There was never any question of Penny and Marc getting back together. He started going out with a school teacher and their relationship quickly became serious. When Adele was two, Marc’s father asked him to go back to South Wales for the summer and help him run a takeaway outlet that he had taken for the season on Barry Island, a few miles along the coast from Penarth. Where Marc and his father were based later became famous as the setting for the popular comedy series Gavin and Stacey. Holidaymakers would queue up at one of three counters for burgers, hot dogs, ice cream, candy floss or sticks of rock and then eat them strolling along the front.
The first year was not a success, perhaps because of the decline in visitors to the resort, so at the end of the summer season Marc went back to London to be close to Adele and his friends. He also kept in close touch with his brother Richard, who was happily settled in the capital. They used to meet most weeks for a pint and a catch-up at the Punch and Judy. The following summer, Marc’s father decided they should have another go with the Barry venture. The lease cost £18,000 for the season, so it wasn’t something to be undertaken lightly. He asked Marc to take charge while he continued to run the plumbing business.
Penny brought her daughter down to see everyone and they stayed at the house in Penarth. Adele, who was now three, loved playing along the promenade or going to Rabaiotti’s for one of their renowned knickerbocker glories. It was a huge treat for a little girl living in Tottenham. If he had the time, Marc would take her swimming. He had already taught her to swim at the local leisure centre, within walking distance of Shelbourne Road, and it’s the one sport she enjoyed.
At the end of the summer, Marc decided not to return to London this time. He wanted to see how things would work out in South Wales. Life had moved on for both him and Penny. She now had a steady boyfriend, so the days of casually dropping in to see his ex and his daughter were at end. Penny was still only twenty-one and had her whole life in front of her. She was determined that having Adele to care for wasn’t going to stop her living her life. They were a team.
2
Just a week before her fourth birthday, in the spring of 1992, Adele was hidden inside Penny’s trench coat and smuggled into the Brixton Academy in South London. They were there to watch The Beautiful South in concert. Looking back, Adele observed, ‘It was amazing – my clearest memory of when I was little.’
The Beautiful South were a wry and quirky, yet very popular band formed in 1988 by two former members of The Housemartins, Paul Heaton and David Hemingway, who were both from Hull in Yorkshire. Two years later, their best-known single, ‘A Little Time’, was their only number one, but it established them as one of the leading chart acts of the decade. It’s a feisty break-up song and easy to understand why it was a favourite of Penny’s, as it expresses the need for a little time to ‘find my freedom’.
Penny loved them and wanted her daughter to share the experience. The Academy is a standing venue, so Adele couldn’t see anything. That problem was solved when Penny asked a well-muscled, bodybuilder type if he wouldn’t mind putting her daughter on his shoulders. Adele now had the best view in the hall. The man also came to her rescue when a host of balloons were released and the little girl failed to grab one: ‘He walked through the crowd and knocked someone out who wouldn’t give me a balloon.’
When Paul Heaton finally met Adele in the autumn of 2015, he was flattered that she remembered the concert so well all those years later. ‘She owes me the price of a ticket,’ he joked. ‘Unfortunately, it was only about £2 then.’
Although there was no great musical heritage in the Adkins family, Adele’s home was always filled with music. Her mum would play guitar along with her favourite chart tracks and encourage Adele to get up on the sofa and sing.
It’s easy to forget how young Penny was and these were the years she might have been enjoying college if fate had dealt a different hand. Adele has always appreciated that: ‘She just thought I was amazing. She could have been at university but she chose to have me.’ She once described her as being a ‘hippy mum’.
Penny never treated Adele as an inconvenience but always as someone to be included in whatever was going on. She always had plenty of friends round to socialise into the night with music and good conversation, and she liked her daughter to be part of these happy times. Fortunately, Adele wasn’t shy and enjoyed staying up.
On Friday nights, that also meant letting her watch Later … with Jools Holland, which was broadcast at 11.15 p.m. The relaxed and informal mix of big names performing next to virtual unknowns would prove to be an enduring success. The Kinks, for instance, rubbed shoulders with cutting-edge rapper Neneh Cherry and La Polla Records, a Spanish Basque punk-rock band.
Mother and daughter forged a lifelong bond through sharing so many experiences, especially musical ones. Penny had no hesitation in loading up the Citroën and taking her daughter, then eight, to the Glastonbury Festival were they sat in the mud and watched Radiohead and The Prodigy on the main Pyramid Stage.
That was by no means Adele’s first experience of a festival. She was an old hand by then. Closer to home, just after her fifth birthday, in June 1993, Penny took her to a one-day pop festival, Great Xpectations, in Finsbury Park. The event was a benefit to support the campaign to grant a permanent radio licence to the XFM station.
Damon Albarn and Graham Coxon from Britpop darlings Blur sang an acoustic version of the band’s latest single ‘For Tomorrow’. Damon is one of those people who drift in and out of the Adele story, not necessarily in a good way, but this was the first time she came across him. He wasn’t top of the bill, however.
That honour fell to The Cure, led by the charismatic singer and songwriter Robert Smith. The band are one of the great survivors of British music, still hugely popular thirty-seven years after they began in the post-punk era of 1979. During Penny’s teenage years, they were renowned for their dark and gothic sound that culminated in their most successful recording, Disintegration. Penny went through a Goth stage and was a huge fan of the group. Adele was a little unsure: ‘I used to be really scared of Robert Smith because he looked like Edward Scissorhands.’
The album provided the soundtrack for Adele’s Tottenham years. In particular, her mother’s favourite track, ‘Lovesong’, stayed with her and reminded her of those days. Ironically, on that unseasonably cool June afternoon, The Cure didn’t perform it, although they did play probably their best-known hit, ‘Friday I’m in Love’, as an encore.
The number one record that month was ‘Dreams’, the breakthrough hit for Gabrielle, a young black singer from Hackney with a silky smooth voice. Louise Gabrielle Bobb was refreshingly different. She wrote her own songs, had one of the most distinctive