Do we like Adele?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Pride flag on stage, a charity push after Grenfell and no campaigning against anyone, with one 2022 speech that got spun harder than the facts support.
Adele Adkins was born on 5 May 1988 and raised in London by her mum, first in Tottenham and then Brixton. She went to the Brit School, signed to XL Recordings off a demo, and took the Brits Critics' Choice award in 2008 with her debut, 19. Her second album, 21, went on to become the biggest seller of the century so far.
The Pride credentials are real. At her 2022 Hyde Park show she draped a Progress Pride flag over her shoulders and sang When We Were Young in it, telling the crowd “Happy Pride.” A fan holding a sign saying she was the reason they were alive got a reply that she was glad they'd found comfort in her music.
Then there's Vegas, 2024. On the first day of Pride, she heard a heckler and asked if he'd just said Pride sucks, called him stupid and told him to be quiet, and the room cheered. PinkNews later reported that another video suggested he'd actually yelled “Work sucks”, so she may have gone off at a misheard man. Her instinct was still to defend Pride.
The harm check turns on one speech. Accepting the gender-neutral artist of the year Brit in 2022, she said she loved being a woman and a female artist, and right-wing outlets ran with claims she'd been slammed. Media Matters found those claims rested on five tweets, one since deleted, and Fox cited no sources for widespread criticism. A few days later she was filmed at a G-A-Y event in London telling the room she loved being female. That's a contested moment, not a campaign, and I found nothing from her on trans rights, climate denial or conspiracies.
The good stuff is better than the trophies. After the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire she asked fans at her Wembley shows to chip in £5 each, said the money would go to the residents, and visited the site. She also took tea and cake to the firefighters at Chelsea Fire Station to say thanks.
The recent news is film. Tom Ford's Cry to Heaven, set in 18th-century Italy, has her making her acting debut alongside Colin Firth, Nicholas Hoult and Aaron Taylor-Johnson. Ford directs from his own script and produces through his Fade to Black company. Nothing in the reported cast or production lines up with the culture-war crowd, and the article had no quotes from her or Ford.