Adele hasn’t spoken to a journalist for five years, says Giles Hattersley in British Vogue. In that time, the 33-year-old singer has married, divorced, won five Grammys, lost 100lb and moved to a swanky compound in Beverly Hills. Brits might worry that the born-and-bred Londoner has turned terribly LA. They needn’t. “’Ello, I’m Adele,” she booms, in her thick, unchanged accent. “’Ow are you?” Within minutes she has called an old boyfriend an “effing c***” and Matt Hancock a “dirty sod”.
Still, some things are different. “I’ve got some right ’Ollywood friends,” she admits. Her new boyfriend is a basketball agent worth $100m. And “I’ve got fit and ’ealthy. That’s quite LA.” She started exercising to help with anxiety after her divorce. Now she works out three times a day. “I needed to get addicted to something to get my mind right. It could have been knitting, but it wasn’t.” Her fitness obsession absolutely wasn’t for brand deals on Instagram (“I couldn’t give a flying f***”) or to make her ex-husband jealous (“Bullshit”).
The ex is Simon Konecki, a 47-year-old charity boss from London. They met in 2011, had a son in 2012, married in 2016 and split up in 2019. Their son struggled, always asking questions like: “Why can’t you still live together?” Her new album, 30, might give him some answers. He can listen to it as an adult, she says, and learn “who I am and why I voluntarily chose to dismantle his entire life in the pursuit of my own happiness”.
🍾 🎵 🤢 Adele’s divorce also meant she was back in nightclubs for the first time since becoming a mother. It wasn’t the way she remembered – she’s much too famous now. “I have security guards coming out my ass, so nothing ever got out. I was falling out the back door of the bar rather than falling out of the front.” She’d wake up with a horrible hangover and the sensation that she had done something terrible: “Hangxiety, I call it.”