Adele. Sean Smith

      1

       A Surprise Announcement

      The live video for Adele’s 2016 single ‘When We Were Young’ is a relaxed and informal affair. She is dressed in a chic black outfit and sings the nostalgic power ballad perfectly in front of her band at The Church Studios, a state-of-the-art complex in an old Victorian church in fashionable Crouch End, North London. One hundred yards away stands The King’s Head pub, a popular local boozer where, coincidentally, the Adele Adkins story begins.

      These days the studios are owned by the acclaimed producer and long-time Adele collaborator Paul Epworth, with whom she co-wrote two of her best-loved songs, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ and ‘Skyfall’. Back in the 1980s, however, the studios were put on the music map of London by Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart. As Eurythmics, they recorded their debut album, Sweet Dreams, on the top floor. They went on to become one of the most successful acts of the decade, eventually buying the building and playing host to many top names, including Bob Dylan, Depeche Mode and Elvis Costello.

      Down the street, on the corner of Crouch Hill, The King’s Head, which was also founded in Victorian times, became a popular and trendy bar for a young crowd keen to rub shoulders with musicians or perhaps catch a glimpse of someone famous nursing a drink in the corner. Downstairs was one of those tight, atmospheric rooms for comedy nights or for up-and-coming bands. If you were lucky, back in the day, you might have caught Dave and Annie jamming. You can imagine that Adele might have played there if she had been starting out then.

      It was just the sort of place to attract an eighteen-year-old art student called Penny Adkins. She had travelled there on the bus from her parents’ house in Tottenham for a night out with friends one summer night in 1987.

      Penny was tall, slender, raven-haired and stood out from the crowd. She caught the eye of most of the young men in the upstairs bar, including a broad-shouldered, handsome blond window-cleaner called Marc Evans, who had moved to London from South Wales and was carving out a good living with his round in the upwardly mobile neighbourhood.

      It wasn’t love at first sight, but there was definitely some lust in the air as Marc sauntered over confidently for some light conversation and Penny’s phone number. Marc, who was twenty-five, had all the chat as a young man and enjoyed a very high success rate charming young ladies during the year he had been in London.

      He and his younger brother Richard had been brought up in the popular Welsh resort of Penarth, nowadays more a Cardiff suburb than the popular seaside town it was then. Their father, John, had spotted the need for a self-employed plumber and soon was so successful he was able to buy his family a five-bedroom Victorian townhouse. ‘My parents always owned their own house through good old-fashioned graft,’ observes Marc proudly.

      Marc’s mother, Rose, was a devout Christian and for many years has been a respected member of the Tabernacle Baptist Church choir. Marc was a choirboy as a youngster – ‘an Aled Jones-type until the old schmoogers dropped’. He sang at All Saints, Penarth, in Victoria Square, a ten-minute walk away. As a teenager, he harboured ambitions to sing and act and even wrote off to drama schools, but, in the end, went to a technical college in Llandaff for formal training as a plumber before joining his father’s business. Richard, meanwhile, chose a career in the police force.

      Marc was enjoying the life of a Penarth playboy with a sky-blue MG roadster and a gorgeous girlfriend. When that romance went sour, his best friend, Nigel, who was studying for a degree in London, invited him to stay. Nigel’s parents were quite well off, so he wasn’t living in halls of residence but had his own place.

      The two-bedroom flat in Turnpike Lane was conveniently situated a couple of miles from Crouch End in one direction and Tottenham in the other. Marc soon found work as a shop-floor manager in the Edmonton branch of Wickes, the home-improvement chain.

      One day an elderly man came in and asked him for some ‘scrim’, the durable cloth used to polish windows. They got talking and the man told Marc he was earning a ‘fucking fortune’ cleaning the windows of yuppie house owners. The conversation gave Marc the germ of an idea and a few days later, on a pleasant summer evening, dressed smartly in a shirt and tie, ladder on his shoulder, he was knocking on the doors of suitable houses in Crouch End and nearby Highgate. ‘Good evening, sir. Good evening, madam, would you like your windows cleaned?’

      It was £10 or £15 for twenty-minutes’ work cleaning the windows of a two-up, two-down property. By the time he met Penny later that summer, he was well on his way to earning £20,000 a year, which was a tidy sum for a young man in the 1980s.

      Penny was a North London girl, not originally from Tottenham at all, but from Islington, and lived in Chalfont Road, a mile from the old Highbury football ground that closed in 2006. Her large family were, unsurprisingly, big Arsenal supporters, even though her mother and father, Doreen and John, eventually moved into a council house on the Tower Gardens Estate, off the busy Lordship Lane in Tottenham.

      John Adkins was earning his living as a lorry driver when Penny, the youngest of five children, was born, but by the time their daughter was at senior school, he and his wife were working on a fruit and vegetable stall at the New Covent Garden Market in Nine Elms.

      Penny was an artistic girl who showed an early talent for drawing and painting. She was never happier than when sketching in her bedroom or playing her trusty acoustic guitar. She was determined to use her gifts by studying art at university and, as many students do, she enrolled in a one-year foundation diploma in art and design at a college in Barnet.

      While Penny’s family were very much working-class North Londoners, she didn’t have the rough edges. Marc explained, ‘Penny doesn’t have that sort of cockney twang. She could walk into a pub anywhere and you wouldn’t know she was from London. It’s not so much that she is posher – she is more reserved.’

      Even though he had a girlfriend at the time, Marc sensed there was real chemistry between himself and the teenager. ‘She was a very, very attractive girl. She had lovely long dark hair, legs up to her neck and, what can I say, Bob’s your uncle.’

      He wasted no time in ringing her to arrange a date a few days later at his favourite pub, the Punch and Judy in Covent Garden. Although it was a chance to get to know one another properly, Marc quickly realised that she wasn’t the sort of girl to jump into bed on the first date. ‘She wasn’t like that,’ he recalled.

      ‘It was not a big love story,’ he added. However, they continued to meet at the pub, which became ‘their’ place. Over the next few weeks, things between them got more serious and Penny agreed to stay the night at the flat in Turnpike Lane.

      About two months after they met, they were passing the time at the Punch and Judy, when Penny suddenly blurted out, ‘Marc, I’m pregnant.’ He was shell-shocked at the news, but put on a brave face for his eighteen-year-old girlfriend: ‘All right, babe. No worries. We’ll sort it out.’

      Despite her young age, Penny was to prove hugely resilient. There was never any question, or even discussion, about the possibility of her not keeping the child. The most pressing concern was telling Penny’s parents, who, at this point, hadn’t even met their daughter’s new boyfriend.

      Despite his bravado, Marc had been brought up traditionally and insisted that he would be there when she broke the news. Penny arranged for him to join them for a Sunday lunch. ‘I told myself to “man up”, and so I went along and explained to them that I was the father. They were