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Music

Behind The Music - Adele

As hard as it is to believe now, there was a time when TV producers didn’t have The xx to cut their montages to.

Well, well, well, why you giving me the third degree…. Oh. Sorry. That’s not me, is it? That’s Duffy. Honestly – I get so confused between us sometimes. Now, let’s see: Duffy’s the one who’s comeback single grazed the lower-reaches of the top-forty and then sank like a particularly thick blonde stone.

And I’m the one who got to number one this week by outselling the rest of the top ten put together. Yup. I’m the one who’s being feted as ‘mature’, ‘considered’, ‘a powerful, rich redolent blast of British soul that will outlast the chasing pack’ and ‘yes, this will probably do’. Duffy’s the other mum-soul belter: who’s now ‘thinly-stretched’, ‘emotionally empty’, ‘reliant on a narrowing template of ideas and a deep inherent conservativism’. Serves you right for glugging all that Diet Coke, you cow.

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Alright, so my boyfriend’s dumped me in the past two years. And alright: So I’ve spent this entire record mourning the death of that relationship while still transmitting little psychic antennae of magical-thinking about making him love me again. But that can’t take away the fact that I’ve been more successful than her because of it. Now hand me that box of Kleenex. No, I’m not upset. It’s just that my dog’s shat on the carpet. “So stunning you almost hope she never stops being heartbroken.” That was the word in the weekend papers, that was. One’s personal pain always feels far more manageable if one reads about it in a Sunday supplement, don’t you think?

So yeah, like I said: it’s just more belting, but with more blues in the mix (gotta think of the American market, right?). And a bossa nova cover of The Cure’s “Lovesong” that seemed like a good idea at the time. Headline collaborators: Paul Epworth (Didn’t see him, I think XL just have him as an FX patch that they plug into Pro-Tools). The guy who wrote “Bleeding Love” who seems to turn up on all these albums where a diva needs to write a top-line unit-shifter. And Rick Rubin – aka the godfather of tasteful MOR Americana.

He’s a genius of course. Rick would often stop by during the recording to give me guidance. Well, I say guidance: he’d post another load of pictures of ideal consumers on the back of the vocal booth – a Surrey housewife in a long relaxing bath, a young upper class girl going down the gym with her iPod, the manager of a regional Cafe Rouge, and so on. He’d encourage me to sing directly to these people. Expectorate the contents of my soul into them, as it were. Which was fun, but not as good as the days when he’d place large-ish amounts of cash on top of stacks of paper. If I could dislodge the stacks by simple vocal power, then I could keep the cash. You laugh, but I made over $2,000 before I’d even done the ballads.

So yeah. Apart from Rick Rubin jizzing the duck butter of good taste all over this mother, the guy who’s been the biggest winner out of this project is Dan Wilson. That’s right – I know you’re as thrilled as I was – only the bloody bloke from bloody Semisonic! What? You remember “Closing Time”, right? You need to brush up on your Shine Volume 8, mate.

Dan wrote this song of mine that all the reviewers keep bloody banging on about – “Someone Like You”. As they all point out, it’s going to be soundtracking montages of breakups in low-rent UK TV programs from now until the end of time. So I guess you’d better get used to it. Like, hard as it is to believe now, there was a time when TV producers didn’t have The xx to cut their montages to. And that’s how you should all feel about my song. From Eastenders to Waterloo Road to the latest Gok Wan reel, it’s simply not going to leave planet earth until global warming sucks us all into the superpond. And neither am I. See you all in 2037 for my tasteful pop-soul mum-bait record ‘47′, motherfuckers.

AS RELAYED TO GAVIN HAYNES