On the first night of her ten-show run in Munich, Adele is feeling nervous. Throughout the evening, she conveys this anxiety to the audience in several typically Adele-esque ways.
From somewhere backstage before curtain-up, she posts a message onto the auditorium screen under a contemporaneous photograph of herself with her hair in curlers. ‘See you soon, I’m bloody sh****** myself,’ she writes, adding a smiley face. ‘F***it. I am f****** s******* it,’ she repeats during the show.
‘I can’t believe we do this for pleasure,’ she wails at one point. As the evening progresses, the potty-mouthed diva keeps us regularly updated on her personal mood music. ‘I’m still very nervous. I can’t breathe properly. I’m very f****** frightened,’ she says, after her fifth song, Easy On Me.
What about being easy on us? Not quite yet. ‘I am so relieved I am near the end. I have been s******* myself the whole f****** show,’ she says after two hours, then starts crying. Crying! I am nearly in tears myself.
My VIP ticket for this 135-minute performance cost just over £1,000. For that kind of money, I didn’t expect to have to listen to Adele moaning on about how awful it is being a star, what an ordeal it is for her and how she suffers so to entertain us.
One supposes it is all part of her infamous emotional vulnerability and north London geezer charm – certainly her superfans seem to enjoy the drama of her every trembling lip and panicky whimper. For the rest of us, oh god, it does wear thin after a while.
However, Adele’s brilliance and eternal saving grace is that when she stops fretting and starts singing, everything changes. Once she unfurls that amazing voice – so rich and expressive, all endless power and plangent beauty – she is in total control. Up there under the Munich night sky, sparkling in her beautiful Dior gown and diamond earrings, Adele is magnificent.
From Someone Like You to When We Were Young, many of her songs are vocally complex, emotionally intricate, technically challenging. She is more than up to the task of performing them, night after night. And somewhere in her complicated psyche, she must know that. Still, we are where we are, bearing witness again and again to the unburdening of her burdens.
‘I’m always terrified of everything. It’s not that I feel I don’t deserve it, it’s not that I think I’m not good enough, it is just that I care too much,’ she blubs to the audience at one point. And yet she still finds the inner strength to continue giving so much to her public.
Really, she is an example to us all. Adele is performing in a £100 million stadium custom-built just for her, situated on the drab eastern fringes of the Bavarian capital. She will play ten concerts here to an 80,000-capacity audience each night, ending on August 31: her only European dates this year.
The cheapest tickets are £157, and concertgoers also gain entrance to Adele World, a festival-type area with entertainment, karaoke, live music, fairground rides, a bier garden and ice cream kiosks alongside nicely appointed bars and food outlets. Punters are encouraged to come along at 3pm to make a day of it and drink in Adele-themed bars such as I Drink Wine (Deutz champagne £10.50 a glass) and Adele Spritz bars selling assorted Aperol cocktails.
Many do, including legions of women dressed in long, black gowns and with elegant updos or bouncy, brushed out waves, in homage to the Hollywood glam of our queen. ‘The drunker you are, the better I am, so drink your hearts out,’ Adele had exhorted from the stage, and I noted it wasn’t her only mention of drinking on Friday evening.
‘I can really drink. I’m British. I can’t wait to have a drink on Sunday,’ she said, before also expressing regret that she had never been to an Oktoberfest.
‘It would get messy if I did,’ she said. My extortionately priced ticket included dinner and drinks in a VIP area adjacent to the auditorium, which was really a giant function room draped in black with a black carpet, black tablecloths, golden palm trees, diamante accents and a glittering gold bar – the perfect setting for the wedding reception of a vampire and some sequinned ex-WAG.
Michelin chef Christian Jurgens was in charge, and he told me that Adele had come to check the venue out (‘she approved’) but that she had not chosen the menu.
So catering for 900 to 1,300 people every night, he has gone for quality ingredients and kept it simple: prawn and lobster cocktail, beef fillet with mashed potato and ‘wild’ broccoli, the inevitable fillets of seabass and some sort of mango and chocolate pudding. The main course was self-service, and the wines were desultory.
No lovely Deutz champagne here, only a thin prosecco (a brand which retails for £9 a bottle) and similarly priced red and white wines. Anyone expecting five-star luxury for their four-figure sum would have been sorely disappointed.
‘This was the price of a holiday,’ said Adele fan Oliver Kurt, who had brought his wife and two daughters – and didn’t have much change from £5,000 after their family outing.
Still, we all loved the view from our moulded plastic seats in the second row of the auditorium, even if we did get drenched in a biblical downpour around 8pm.
When Adele appeared in a swirl of dry ice 15 minutes later, she complained that the train on her Dior dress became so ‘f****** wet and heavy’ on the damp stage that she had to take it off. But there were no words of commiseration for her army of All Blacks, the female fans like me soaked right through to our bras in the open-air stadium.
‘I feel like a right fanny,’ she said. She wasn’t the only one.
Still, what a terrific, emotionally charged show. There was a full orchestra, confetti cannons, special effects as well as an incredible fireworks finale.
‘I don’t like encores. When I’m gone, I’m gone,’ she said, and she was true to her word, vanishing like a cipher at the end of the night.
Adele is never going to tour, like Taylor Swift has. She is never going to do choreography. She even complained about how long it took to traverse her giant stage, stomping around in her slipper socks.
‘I’m out of breath just walking,’ she said, her curls falling out because of the humidity, her giant diamond glittering on her ring finger like a white flame. She is fabulous, she is preposterous and I’m always conflicted with Adele. I love her songs, adore her singing but would happily pay £1,000 not to have her chunter on endlessly onstage in her filter-free way.
‘Oops. I’ve gotta burp because that song makes me use my diaphragm, sorry,’ she belched at one point.
In Adele World, that’s what passes for wit and charm.