British pop stars, from Dusty Springfield to Duran Duran, have of course enjoyed periods of domination in America before, registering both in the charts and also at the Grammy Awards. But what is unprecedented about Adele’s recent US takeover is the sheer magnitude of her triumph.
Her second album, 21, so called because she wrote the songs when she was that age, sold over 5.5 million copies in the US last year. The nearest competitor, Born This Way by Lady Gaga, struggled to sell 1.9 million copies, even with a leg up from a cut-price promotion by Amazon. 21 has again been number one in the American charts every week this year, after a brief interlude in which Michael Bublé’s Christmas CD took the top spot, and the sales total has moved past six million. That means Adele has outsold the far more publicised Gaga three to one. Throw in another million or so sales of her reinvigorated debut album 19 and the scale of the rout becomes astounding.
Put simply, 21 is the hit that won’t quit. The last album to stay ahead for so long was Whitney Houston’s The Bodyguard soundtrack, which 20 years ago topped the US charts for 20 weeks. Barring Earth being struck by an asteroid, 21 should equal that total in two weeks time and, given a Grammy boost, go on to surpass it, since there is no new release on the horizon capable of toppling it.
At a time when selling two million albums is seen as phenomenal, 21’s six million sales are near miraculous. There is, incidentally, no chance 21 could ever overtake the longest-running number one of all time, the 54-week wonder West Side Story from 1962.
21 has already yielded three US number-one hit singles – Rolling in the Deep, Someone Like You and Set Fire to the Rain – becoming the first album by one artist to do so while the album they came from was also number one. She has even managed the bestselling music DVD of the year, Live at the Royal Albert Hall. (It’s interesting to note that in the UK, only Someone Like You hit the top spot).
Adele’s effect on American radio has been similarly dramatic: usually strictly partisan in the styles of music they play, a wider variety of radio stations, including Latin, have played Rolling in the Deep than any previous recording. With six million downloads, it is the bestselling single in America since Elton John’s Candle in the Wind 1997.
The truly astonishing aspect of her success is that Adele has managed it as an American outlier. Partly by design and somewhat by accident, she has not played the promotional games that are considered de rigueur in today’s business. Most money is made from touring, but she had to cancel many 2011 shows due to a haemorrhaged vocal cord, forgoing not only box office revenue but the promotional impact on record sales. In an era when even cute kittens make videos, Adele acted as if she feared that having her image captured on camera would steal her soul. She had one proper video made, Rolling in the Deep, relied on a televised performance of Someone Like You to virally publicise that song, and put out a concert clip of Set Fire to the Rain.
Unlike almost every other major female star of our time, Adele has not launched a fragrance and does not have a fashion line. One might think this is logical, since her appeal is in her extraordinary soulfulness rather than mere physical attractiveness, but the music lover with a long memory cannot help but recall how, at the peak of her historic late-Sixties success, Aretha Franklin, universally recognised as the Queen of Soul, complained that she never got to model designer gowns int he way Diana Ross did. Franklin failed to grasp that she did not need to be a fashion plate to be loved.
Adele seems to know this intuitively. What she sells is well-written music performed with profound emotion. She is perfect for the American market without pandering to it. Even before the r&b giant Etta James passed away this January, Adele made it clear that she had been influenced by the soul titan. She inhabits a song and lives her lyric in the best tradition of jazz and blues singers from Frank Sinatra to Billie Holiday. So did another English singer Americans took to their heart, Adele’s fellow Brit School alumna Amy Winehouse.
This style is far more native to the US than the Nineties Britpop sound, which, in the famous words of music business legend Maurice Oberstein, “was a Britflop”. It is also more natural to American ears than much of Europop, which is constructed on a thumping beat not far from the oompah of German marching songs but very distant from the rhythmic percussion of r & b.
If her recent remarks are to be believed, Adele will become even more palatable to a wide American audience when she incorporates more of a bluegrass feel into her next album. The greatest UK successes in the US have historically returned some American music forms to sender, as the Beatles and Rolling Stones did with early r&b covers and Led Zeppelin did with blues.
Adele is no stranger to the Grammys, having taken the trophies for Best New Artist and Best Female Vocal Performance in 2009. The astonishing element in these wins is that she only got Pavements to number 21 in the Hot 100. Her debut album, 19, peaked at 10.
This year, she has six nominations, Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album for 21, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Short Form Music Video for Rolling in the Deep, and Best Pop Solo Performance for Someone Like You.
If she does take a half dozen walks to the podium, she will overtake all previous British artists who have dominated the American popular charts. The Beatles have more number ones (20) and more albums sold (a certified 207 million) in the US than any other artist ever, but they only won four Grammys when they were together. To follow the Grammys in the Sixties was to suffer a series of self-administered head wounds, caused by repeatedly slapping one’s brow in disbelief. The Grammys just did not get rock ’n’ roll until the Fab Four were history. After they broke up, the Beatles won seven. Jimmy Sturr, the polka king, won 18. As they say in New York, go figure.
Things were even worse for the next British artist to dominate the American charts, Elton John. His Seventies run of seven consecutive number-one albums remains the longest continuous string for a soloist in chart history, but none of them won Grammys. Elton had to wait until 1987 before he could share an award with Dionne Warwick, Gladys Knight and Stevie Wonder.
He has earned a motley collection of six Grammys, including Best Instrumental Composition for Basque, performed by James Galway. So much for Your Song and Rocket Man!
The Grammys got hip during the Seventies, just in time for the historic success of the British disco kings the Bee Gees at the end of the decade. Barry, Robin and Maurice Gibb wrote, performed and/or produced eight American number-one singles during 1978 and were rewarded with five prizes, including Album of the Year for Saturday Night Fever. The next British artist to win that many in one night was Amy Winehouse, who took home five, including Best New Artist, Record of the Year and Song of the Year, in 2008.
Now Adele threatens to equal or surpass these outstanding hauls. In her softly, softly approach to public life she recalls another UK vocalist, Sade, who has released nine albums in America since her 1985 debut. Every one of them has made the top 10. Sade has won four Grammys over her career without too much notice in Britain and enjoyed one of the top-10 earning tours of America in 2011, raking in $48,600,000.
Adele could equal and even exceed that sum this year if her voice holds out. But why bother with a long tour and submit herself to such physical strain? The way she’s pulling in money from recordings, she could actually concentrate on creating music rather than re-creating it.
In the meantime, we await tomorrow evening’s awards ceremony. Adele will probably make a clean sweep because she’s the winner from every perspective. She embodies commercial success, quality, and the underdog factor that made Susan Boyle a global phenomenon. As Elton John quipped at the Ivor Novello Awards in 2011, “Next year a large woman will win everything – and it won’t be me.”
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