Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born on May 5, 1988, in London’s Tottenham neighborhood, to an English mother, Penny Adkins, and a Welsh father, Marc Evans. Evans abandoned Adele when she was two years old, and she was raised by her mother.
She began singing at the age of four and claims to have become enamored with voices. Adele, then nine years old, and her mother, who had found work as a furniture maker and an adult-learning events organizer by then, moved to Brighton on England’s south coast in 1997.
In 1999, she and her mother relocated back to London; first to Brixton, then to the adjoining borough of West Norwood in south London, which is the subject of her first song “Hometown Glory”.
She spent most of her adolescence at Brockwell Park where she would play the guitar and sing to friends, which she recalled in her 2015 song “Million Years Ago”.
She said, “It has held some of the most significant moments in my life, and as I drove past it [in 2015], I literally fell into tears. It was something I genuinely missed.”
How old was Adele when she was discovered?
She began singing at the age of 4 and acquired a passion for music, which her mother supported by purchasing a toy guitar from a charity shop. She and her mother moved to Brighton when she was nine years old.
Adele grew up listening to mainstream music on the radio, but that all changed when she was 15 and found a collection of Etta James and Ella Fitzgerald albums at a neighborhood shop.
“Our family had no musical tradition,” she told The Telegraph in 2008. “I grew up listening to only chart music. So listening to Etta and Ellas may sound clichéd, but it felt like an awakening.
“I was like, okay, right, some people live a long time and are legends. I was so motivated that as a 15-year-old, I was listening to music from the 1940s. The thought that people would look back on my music in 50 years motivated me to achieve this.”
