Will a brand new Adele emerge from the ashes of her divorce?
...with a little help from her A-list pal
GIGGLING, shouting over the music, dancing to Kylie Minogue and playing drinking games with her A-list best friend, the singer Adele was in high spirits at the gay bar Pieces in Greenwich Village, New York, last month.
Ostensibly, she and Hollywood actress Jennifer Lawrence were celebrating Lawrence’s engagement to Cooke Maroney, a New Yorkbased art gallery director.
Adele, 30, took part in an onstage game show hosted by drag queen Brita Filter and told patrons that she was a ‘stay-at-home mom’. Jennifer Lawrence, 28, chastised her for ‘losing’ a drinking game.
Now it transpires that what they were really toasting was the end of Adele’s marriage and her relaunch as an (exceedingly) eligible singleton. According to one report, ‘the girls have the same dark sense of humour that made them think it was funny’.
Just days after enjoying the party, Adele was seen heading into a recording studio in New York City with no wedding ring on. She is now
free from an ill- considered union with Old etonian charity boss Simon Konecki.
Party-loving Simon is 15 years her senior and said to be impressed by fame. They met in 2011, after being introduced by British singer ed Sheeran, and had son Angelo a year later, uprooting from London to LA. They married in 2017.
The first rumours of trouble flew when Simon showed up to the Brit Awards this February without Adele. Their final public appearance was in January, at a concert by her good friend Sir elton John.
Adele, blunt to a fault, was initially dazzled by Simon’s ‘brilliance’ and education. In an interview with Vanity Fair in December 2016, she said: ‘All of my relationships are more important to me than any tour I’ll ever do. If my relationship with Simon or my relationship with Angelo started to flounder a bit now, I would pull out of my tour.’
However, by the time they finally married, having been together for five years, sources say that the romance was already in crisis.
‘It was one of those marriages which went wrong from the start,’ a source said.
They seem to have split over Christmas, after a miserable and mostly separate year. And 12 months before that — their first year of marriage — apparently wasn’t much better, either.
‘They had been trying for years, but eventually you have to accept that something just isn’t going to work out,’ said a source.
By the time of Adele’s Titanic-themed 30th birthday party in May 2018, the marriage was heading for its own iceberg.
Adele invited her friends who are all like her — young, lionised, creatives from her showbiz circle. Actor Aaron Paul, producer Mark Ronson and film director Sam Taylor-Johnson joined others including actress emma Stone to toast her health.
What was the trouble? It seems Simon was ‘the wrong guy’ for Adele, who is famous in showbusiness for her take- noprisoners attitude. Her father, for instance, was criticised brutally from the stage of the Grammy awards in 2016 when she said she simply ‘didn’t love’ him.
She gave the finger to the ‘suits’ at the Brits. She scrapped an expensively recorded album and ditched songs written with Phil Collins because she felt they weren’t right.
One record company source sighed that the album 25 was ‘put back more often than Cher’s hairline’ because of Adele — and anything less than perfect isn’t good enough for her.
And finally that included the husband who she once said was her ‘soulmate and best mate’.
Raised by her single mum Penny in a succession of grotty South London flats, Brit school graduate Adele made it on her own, on her own terms.
THesinger is far from the first pop star to find that, post-tour, the gloss comes off domestic life. After experiencing global adulation, everything is a comedown.
Adele, who can be headstrong, is entirely driven by her need for total creative freedom — and, of course, her love for her son. Simon simply became ‘irrelevant’.
The grandson of a Polish radio operator, Simon also had commitments in the UK, where he has a teenage daughter by his first marriage, who lives in Brighton. He also travels to the South Sudan, Malawi and Mozambique where his clean water charity is at its most active.
Their lives, undoubtedly, diverged. Living in her huge £7 million LA mansion, Adele found it was easier to hang out with young music stars without him — he didn’t come with her to see Taylor Swift or Drake in concert recently. Both stars are also her personal friends.
And as she started to build a happier life as a solo powerhouse, so she was supported by new best friend Jennifer Lawrence, another great believer in speak-your-mind bluntness. By coincidence, Jennifer had her own much older beau — director Darren Aronofsky.
He was 48 and she was 27 when they were together. They split at the end of 2017, with Lawrence blaming the age gap and the fact that they were ‘different people’.
It seems Jennifer supported Adele fully — and could bring her own experiences to bear — in the singer’s desire to be out of a relationship which was clipping her wings.
Some reports in the U.S. suggest Jennifer told Adele that ditching Simon was a way to lead a more ‘positive’ life. She is now encouraging Adele to keep on losing weight, and to open her mind to the possibility of finding new love.
The great negative, of course, will come with a settlement to Simon. There was no pre-nuptial agreement, and Adele is worth more than £ 140 million. If they divorce in California, he could go after 50 per
cent of her fortune. Some reports at the weekend suggested that the money will be sorted out amicably.
Other observers believe this is unlikely as Adele is famously fiercely protective about her earnings (She remarked in 2011: ‘When I got my tax bill in, I was ready to go and buy a gun and randomly open fire.’)
That she signed over a house in LA’s Van Nuys district to Simon in February confirms this state of affairs. The suburban house is worth £488,000. She has two other glorious homes in LA, the mansion and a beach house worth £5 million. He’s been given the third-best property.
They also shared adjoining mews houses in West London, although apparently Adele is now spending a few weeks with her mum in South London. Where she will settle to raise Angelo, five, remains to be seen.
What of Simon? He is the son of Andrew and Rosemary Konecki — who live in Vevey, Switzerland, where income tax is a maximum 11.5 per cent. They also have a £1 million holiday home in Boca Raton, Florida.
The middle of three children, Simon was sent to eton (fees, £30,000 a year). He left when he was around 14. Simon was placed in the boarding house of history teacher David evans, who was at Cambridge with some of the Monty Python team. The house had a reputation for being badly behaved and it seems that Simon fitted right in.
At 17 he had started his first job, as
a trainee foreign exchange broker. He later recalled how he wore a pin-striped suit with red braces to the interview (‘inspired by the film Wall Street’).
He added: ‘They took me to the pub and proceeded to take the mickey out of me for hours. But I got the job.’ When he worked in the City, his nickname was Swampy thanks to his ‘long hair and Leftie views’. (Swampy was an environmental activist briefly famous during the Nineties.)
Stints at Lehman Brothers and investment holding company EBS followed. By 2004, Simon had fallen in love with and married Clary Fisher, a striking fashion stylist from Swindon, Wiltshire.
She had studied costume at the Bristol Old Vic and tailoring at the London College Of Fashion. She then worked as a stylist for TV and fashion shows and music bands.
The young couple first set up home just off The Highway in East London, before moving to Flask Walk, one of Hampstead’s most coveted addresses.
Extrovert Simon made friends with EastEnders actor Sid Owen and playboy heir Lucas White. It was a fast crowd — the late Tara Palmer-Tomkinson was also on the fringes of the scene.
In 2005, disillusioned with banking, Simon left the City behind.
In an interview, he said: ‘I was doing well and earning a lot of money, but I got sick of that greedy and corrupted world.’
After giving up his job, Clary gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Georgie, in 2006 and they left London for Brighton.
There, Simon set up the ‘ethical’ Life Water company, selling bottled English mineral water.
What set his business apart was its partnership with a charity Drop4drop, which would provide clean drinking water in the developing world — at a rate of 1,000 litres of clean water for every one litre of mineral water sold.
SImONsought celebrity endorsements, making friends with Stephen Fry among others. But as he devoted more and more time to business, his marriage foundered.
A former neighbour, speaking on condition of anonymity, recalls the Koneckis’ marriage had fallen apart amid much bitterness.
She said: ‘Even when they first moved into the house in Brighton,
Clary wasn’t happy. She told me they had only moved because Simon wanted to be near his family and he had failed as an investment banker in London.
‘She frequently spoke negatively about Simon’s parents as they would bail him out a lot. She often complained they had no money and that everything extra they had went into his water business.
‘In the summer, when we had the doors open, you could hear them rowing in the kitchen.’
By 2009, according to the neighbour, Clary was on her own in the house with their daughter. In 2011, he met Adele.
So what’s next for the singer? She has turned down offers to do a lucrative residency in Las Vegas as she reasons that she really does not need the money, and doesn’t want to raise Angelo in Nevada.
I’m told she is keen to ‘give back’ more and that her charity work for the Grenfell Tower fire victims will continue. In the longer term, she sees herself doing more philanthropic work in London — like Sir Elton John whom she admires.
One of Adele’s role models is former First Lady michelle Obama, whom she met last week at her UK book launch.
Adele has also been in the recording studio in New York, and her many fans are avid for their next slice of her music.
Whether it will be an album filled with heartbreak — or something altogether more upbeat — remains to be been.