Nine things we learned from Adele's Desert Island Discs

Adele is a singer and songwriter whose songs about heartbreak and emotional upheaval have won her numerous accolades and adulation. She is globally recognised for her four albums which document her life from the age of 19 onwards and has picked up numerous awards including 15 Grammys, nine BRITs and an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for co-writing the James Bond theme, Skyfall. Here's what we learned from Adele's Desert Island Discs, which you can hear first on BBC Sounds...

1. With age comes wisdom

Adele says, “I used to be so knee-jerk with all of my reactions and my decisions when I felt overwhelmed. I think I'm tired now that I'm getting older: I ain't got time for drama, I ain't got time for arguing and I haven't got time for not resolving anything.”

It’s easy to forget when you listen to some of the subjects of Adele’s songs – heartbreak, marriage, becoming a mother, divorce – that she’s still only 34 years old.

2. Her first music choice reminds her of happy times as a child

“I think it's the intro,” explains Adele, “it’s nothing like the rest of the song, and I remember just being really curious about it. And me and my mum used to sing it and dance around the living room in Tottenham. I love them so much and I remember it's so clear. I remember the rug, I remember the couch we had, I remember the wallpaper she painted. I love this song, it makes me so happy.”

The song is Roam by the American band The B-52's and It was the fourth single from their fifth studio album, Cosmic Thing (1989).

3. Adele gets her love of music from her mum

Adele’s mother Penny had planned to go to university when she found herself pregnant at the age of 18. “We're both thick as thieves, and friends. We were always really good friends me and my mum,” says Adele.

“She wanted to go to gigs and she was a young mum and she didn't have any childcare. So yeah, she'd take me with her and she'd sneak me in under her trench coat!” says Adele laughing.

My earliest memory of a show was The Beautiful South at Brixton Academy. “There was this bodybuilder there, this random guy who was really loving it and he became friends with my mum and her friend, and he just picked me up and put me on his shoulders so I got to see the whole show because obviously I was tiny so I couldn’t see anything.”

There was always a piano or a guitar in the house and Penny “... used to twinkle around the guitar and stuff like that. Every day when I got home from school, I would sit down at the piano and would teach myself random - I wouldn't even call them chords, really, 'cause they're not officially chords – they're just random things that sounded nice. And then I started writing [songs] and writing them in a book, so I was probably about 13.”

4. Her breakthrough single was inspired by an anti-war demonstration

“I used to always sit in the kitchen with my guitar late at night,” says Adele. “I couldn't really work my way around the guitar, like I can't really do bar chords as it hurts my fingers too much, so I always just sort of played the guitar like a bass and pick it.”

“I was with my friend Olivia at the time and my mum and we were at the flat in West Norwood and we were going to the march the following day against the Iraq war, down by Parliament.”

“We were making our signs and I felt such a sense of power in that, you know, me and Olivia were like 15 or 16. And we went and I just was mesmerised by everyone. Like I was really soaking it all in. And that night, when we got back, and I got home I wrote it. But it was just... it was very profound and I was very proud to walk those streets with a million other people and that was the first proper song I wrote that I finished and I knew it was good.”

The song Adele is describing is Hometown Glory, her debut single first released in 2007.

5. A reconciliation with her father was a special moment for Adele

Adele’s parents, her mum Penny and her dad Mark, split up when she was three years old and she was raised by her mother. As a child, her relationship with her father was complicated: “I definitely had a yearning for him because he didn’t really deliver for me. I didn't really have his attention, you know. He'd say he would come and then he didn't. And then if he did come, we'd only go out for like half-an-hour and then he’d drop me back home.”

"He had a disease,” says Adele. “He was an alcoholic. He was a really big alcoholic and he had loads of demons. But I didn't really understand that when I was younger.”

She decided to stop seeing him when she was 12.

“I'd gone to Penarth [where he lived] to surprise him for Father's Day and my Nana had said come and stuff and he didn't come, so I stopped seeing him.”

“I saw him very briefly when I was about 15 when my great grandma died, and he did apologise then, but I was 15 and I didn't want to hear it. I was just a teenager.”

"And then when I found out that he was ill a few years ago I went. I got the call and I drove straight there. It was hard, but it was definitely one of the biggest moments of my life in a good way when I went to go and see him.”

“I made the peace of him when I found out he was sick and we really got on, which was amazing, but also sad... He was really bloody funny, and I don't remember that from when I was little, but it was really nice. We laughed and we gossiped and you know, we cried, and it was great for both of us.” Sadly, Mark died in 2021.

6. She loved her time at the BRIT School

At her audition she performed a Stevie Wonder song Free and played the Tumbledown Blues on her clarinet. “My audition was great – I nailed it!” she says, laughing aloud.

“And I had the time of my life there. It's not a stage-stage school, but of course there's kids doing pirouettes and going ‘Aaaaaahhhhh!’ in the hallways”, says Adele performing a high falsetto. “And it's the only non-fee paying, performing arts school in the UK, or at least it was at the time,” she adds.

“It was such a melting pot of every single type of teenager, you know, it's like you got people doing amazing Neo soul, you got people doing rock, you got people writing amazing pop songs. I was like ‘I’m just going to play my guitar and sing about me feelings’,” she says laughing. “It was absolute heaven.”

7. She couldn’t quite believe it when she was spotted by her first record company

A friend of Adele’s uploaded her final year demo online which led to interest from record labels, agents and management companies.

She was nervous about going to her first meeting with an A&R person so she asked her friend and guitarist Ben, who is still her guitarist today, to go with her: “I said ‘You come with me. I'm scared. What if it's a weirdo?’ And so we got on the tube.”

They arrived at the meeting with XL Recordings. Adele describes it like this: "I got inside and it was magical... Prodigy, MIA, Dizzy Rascal, White Stripes. I'm like, ‘Whoa! Hang on a minute!’ and I met Nick and he says, ‘Alright mate’ and we just got on.”

“He was like ‘Who's your manager?’ And I said ‘Pat at The Gap,’ as I was working at The Gap on Ken High Street at the time and he was like ‘I don't know who that is. What's their surname?’ and stuff like that. I couldn't believe it when he said ‘We want to sign you!’”

8. She loves motherhood – and would like more children

Adele’s son Angelo is 10 years old and Adele says she loves being a mum and talking to her son about music. Her ex-husband Simon lives close by and they are raising their son together.

Talking about their split, Adele says: “It was never really tricky because we're such good friends and over my dead body is my kid having a messy divorce in his life. There are no issues and there were no issues, so I guess it was easier to make sure that didn't happen, but I was blessed with them, and him, [Simon] he's just the best, you know. And I definitely approached it all with grace and that really paid off.”

“I definitely would like a couple more kids. It would be wonderful. If not, I've got Angelo.”

9. She’s a champion sleeper

Adele’s luxury item to be cast away with is “a self-inflatable mattress because I love my sleep. Just the other day, Rich [Adele is currently dating sports agent Rich Paul] was like ‘You take sleeping so seriously. He was like ‘You're like the Mike Tyson of sleeping’.”

“When I'm in my sleep I love it,” says Adele. “I never used to get any sleep so I feel like I'm catching up on all the sleep and all the insomnia that I used to have. I could sleep for 12 hours straight.”