ALL HER LOVE

Superstar Adele takes Sydney by storm with her songs, her banter, her complete performance, writes Siena Yates

THE HOTEL lift is full of women dressed to the nines, chatting excitedly. “Heading to Adele?” I ask. “Where else?” one woman responds, as if I’ve lost my mind.

She has a point. The excitement has been palpable throughout Sydney for days — there isn’t one place I’ve been where someone hasn’t been talking about Adele.

As thousands of fans flood the train station, I somehow end up tagging along with two women from the hotel lift, cramming on to one of many jam-packed doubledecker train services out to Sydney’s Olympic Stadium.

“Adele brings people together,” one of them says, knowingly.

The train is a piping hot sweatbox full of bodies and noisy, unrelenting chatter. People talk about what Adele means to them, what songs they hope she’ll play, how funny it is when she swears a lot.

When we finally arrive, numerous announcements remind us the show starts at 7.30pm on the dot. No supporting act, no faffing about.

Inside the stadium, Adele’s stage is in the centre of the arena, hidden by a massive circular screen showing a picture of her closed eyes.

When 7.30 rolls around, anticipation of those eyes opening is off the charts, but by 8pm, the damn eyes are still closed.

It turns out Adele decided to wait for the rest of the trains to get in as, because demand was so high, 70 per cent of the audience haven’t even managed to make it to the stadium yet. Otherwise, she assures later, she’s usually super-punctual.

When the eyes finally open and the screen begins to lift, the roar of the crowd is almost deafening as everyone leaps to their feet and the crowd in the Golden Circle surges forward to close the gap between us and the stage.

Adele appears in a glamorous gown, bathed in golden light. She launches effortlessly into her massive hit, Hello, walking around her circular stage to greet the entire crowd, bit by bit. And with that first song, she’s connected so quickly and sung so perfectly, people are already in tears and I have chills.

Adele is record-perfect at all times, delivering everything her fans could’ve asked for, belting out her greatest hits and a few lesserknown tracks with confidence and surety — never straining to hit a note but never phoning it in, either.

And her team is entirely on her level. Her beautiful backup singers, Amanda Brown, Martine Celisca and Katie Holmes-Smith put on a show of their own on the lower level of the stage, which rotates to show Adele’s two guitarists, bass player, pianist and drummer, all playing fiercely and smiling at the crowd.

In a feat no other artist can claim so easily, Adele’s banter is just as highly-anticipated as her songs and, it turns out, just as necessary. She uses those moments to lighten the mood from what she herself describes as her “depressing” music, to keep energy up and connect with the crowd.

She somehow manages to chat with the crowd, despite there being about 90,000 of us. She asks where we’ve all come from, what we’re all doing there, who’s been dragged along by their other halves — and when some hands shoot up from the VIP pit, Adele laughs, saying what we’re all thinking, something which amounts to: “The people in the stands are going to hate you.”

At one point, she explains the heat in Perth is the reason she now has four industrial fans surrounding her on stage.

“I thought I could be like Beyonce with the wind in me hair, but it just ends up more like this,” she says, pulling her hair over her face with a laugh.

Later, she slings a T-shirt canon over her shoulder and fires merchandise into the crowd with a loud “Woo!” and her trademark cackle.

And when she nearly falls down the stairs, she pulls a hilarious face before launching into a tirade of swear words: “Oh f*** me, I nearly fell down the f***ing stairs,” she laughs, regaining her composure while the audience remains in fits. And just as she’s about to begin

Set Fire to the Rain, she stops, telling her team to hold the next song. She rushes forward to the edge of the stage as someone is ill — we later find out someone suffered a cardiac arrest — and she wants to make sure they’re okay before she continues.

She’s so concerned she genuinely starts crying on stage, but when she gets the go-ahead, she launches into song like nothing ever happened.

She is talented but she’s also funny, entertaining, warm and relatable, and between that, the pyrotechnics, the confetti and T-shirt canons, it is an unexpectedly well-rounded show for an artist with a repertoire full of slow ballads.

On the way out, fans are on their hands and knees, picking up confetti from the ground, each piece bearing a handwritten message or song lyric.

The girl next to me holds hers up, reading out loud: “Thank you for coming.”

I glance down at my own: “All my love, Adele.”