Adele has said that she was a “shell of a person” after the “brutal” reaction to postponing her Las Vegas residency.
The British singer was due to perform weekend shows from January to April at Caesar’s Palace.
However, less than 24 hours before the first shows were due to begin, Adele shared a video to social media tearfully explaining that the show was not going to be ready on time.
No further updates have been given since then, much to the chagrin of Adele’s fans. In May, they bombarded the comments section of her Instagram to ask for “updates on Vegas”.
Appearing on Desert Island Discs on Sunday (3 July), Adele said that she was “devastated” the news, adding that she had “definitely felt everyone’s disappointment”.
“I was frightened about letting them down and I thought I could pull it together and make it work, and I couldn’t,” she told Lauren Laverne.
“I stand by that decision. I don’t think any other artist would have done what I did, and I think that is why it was such a massive, massive story.
“It was like, ‘I don’t care’ and things like that. You can’t buy me. You can’t buy me for nothing. I’m not going to just do a show because I have to or because people are going to be let down or because we are going to lose loads of money. I’m like, ‘The show is not good enough.’”
Adele said that plenty of work was happening behind the scenes to bring the show to the stage, but that she felt like constantly updating fans would only lead to further disappointment.
“Maybe my silence has been deadly. I don’t know,” she said. “But it was horrible and the reaction was brutal. I was a shell of a person for a couple of months.”
On Friday (1 July), Adele played her first public show in five years as part of BST Hyde Park’s summer series.
You can read The Independent’s four-star review of the gig here.
Desert Island Discs airs Sunday 3 July at 11.15am on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds.
