Three songs into her second night at Hyde Park’s British Summer Time festival, Adele asks the 65,000-strong crowd whether anyone has been to any of her previous gigs. It’s a rhetorical question. The audience blare in the affirmative. “Everyone’s always telling me I don’t do enough shows,” the star concludes mock-huffily. “But if you’ve all been before, I can fuck off.”
If Adele’s quip has a kernel of truth to it – you suspect there’s part of her that would much rather be miles from central London, curled in a foetal ball – her ad hoc charm contradicts it. We all know that the Tottenham singer, long since relocated to LA, suffers from stage fright and a serious disinclination to tour. Five very long years, almost to the day, have passed since she abruptly wrapped up a residency at Wembley Stadium in 2017 after her vocal cords failed. A mooted stint in Las Vegas earlier this year was cancelled at the 11th hour as a wave of Covid hit the production. For an artist so synonymous with the past decade, Adele shows have been rare things indeed.
