Adele: The full story – BBC News

She had her style nailed from the start – sit or stand and sing. No fuss. No bother. But then, she says she doesn’t have rhythm, so dancing is out. Nor is she the athletic type with a Florence-like inclination to prance around the stage. There’s not a band to interact with or Rihanna-style body to flaunt. She’s just an ordinary girl with an extraordinary voice. So, er… flaunt that.

Which is what she has done, to great effect. She is perfectly imperfect. The ordinary girl thing works for her melancholic love songs – a universal theme to which the entire globe can relate. Her whole style seems so relaxed, so nonchalant. She can afford it to be. She has people covering her back.

Adele has built her very own A-Team – a formidable, mostly male, collection of world-class producers and managers, who keep her show on the road; a band of pipers paid to call her tune. Which is what you would expect given her position as the 21st Century’s best-selling recording artist. More surprising, perhaps, is that her core crew has been with her from the very beginning. Which tells you something about Adele’s story – it is largely about judgement not luck. She calls it right so often you’d have her pick your Lottery numbers.

There’s Carl Fysh at Purple PR (who also looks after Beyonce, one of Adele’s celebrity fans) managing her profile and avoiding the multiple elephant traps that are scattered across today’s complex media landscape. And the aforementioned Richard Russell at XL, a creative collaborator who had the contacts and musical sensitivity to draft in the right talent to help her where and when she needed it, hiring producers of the calibre of Mark Ronson, Jim Abbiss, Brian Burton, and perhaps most notably, Rick Rubin, the celebrated, Svengali-like American co-founder of Def Jam Records. These were all good choices made by a savvy teenage Adele. But her best pick has to be Jonathan Dickins, her manager.