Tales From The Video Stash: Adele - Live At The Royal Albert Hall

[with special emphasis on "Set Fire To The Rain"]

Tales From The Video Stash: Adele - Live At The Royal Albert Hall

[with special emphasis on "Set Fire To The Rain"]

While I do still have a pretty solid mid-range collection of pop music DVDs on hand (nothing to boast about, but fairly representative and not at all limited to a small bunch of 1960s’ heroes), I do have to confess that only a tiny handful of it concerns post-2000 artists — and this is not just because of my continuing mistrust of modern music, but, as it happens, also has to do with the fact that modern artists, even in the early stages of the 21st century when DVDs were still a thing, kind of downplayed this particular medium. I would have loved, for instance, to own a big sprawling video package of a great big Arcade Fire show from their glory days (which, as of 2025, are long past them), but the only video stuff they produced in the early days were boring arthouse experiments, and essentially, if you want to see what it was that made the band so great in those days, you’ll want to go view some YouTube-only footage.

Even so, back in 2011, when Adele, still riding high on the success of her 21 LP, decided to secure her newfound diva status by releasing a video of her entire concert at no less than the Royal Albert Hall, I vividly remember thinking "I have to get this a.s.a.p.!", which might, perhaps, have been the last time in my life ever to receive this kind of brain signal over a relatively fresh young artist. With Adele, it was a rare situation for me that I’d been monitoring her ascension to the throne from the very start — her first album came out in 2008 and I already reviewed it in 2009 — and while few of my regular readers shared my enthusiasm, I just knew I was dealing with the real thing here: an intelligent, powerful, brave singer-songwriter bent on breathing some life back into what used to be known as «blue-eyed soul». She sang, she played, she composed, she was not a glamor doll, and she could actually make sense of a piano ballad à la Elton John or Carole King, rather than, uh, Vanessa Carlton (anybody remember Vanessa Carlton? "I’d walk a thousand miles if I could just see you tonight..." oh God).

Not only that, but she grew: there was an astonishing leap in... let’s not say quality, but rather confidence and maturity from the still rather teen-themed 19 to the mix of deep soul and sassiness reflected in 21. The numbers she marked those LPs with weren’t there just for show, as the songs delivered exactly what they meant. I could certainly do with a bit less emphasis on the «permanent break-up» trope, but she kept handling it better than most of her contemporaries and, most importantly, in a manner that did not suggest the stereotype of the «shallow vapid teen girl» as her primary, best-calculated audience. So, a big bombastic show at the Albert Hall, with a big band and backup singers and orchestral support? She’d earned that.

The entire concert, during which she sings most of the songs from 21 mixed with a few from 19, is pretty much Adele at her absolute peak — in the «earliest stage» of her diva status, when self-assurance and star power have not yet managed to completely erase traces of the shy, nervous, adorable little big girl who first sang ‘Daydreamer’ with an acoustic guitar on the Jools Holland show in 2007. Recorded on September 22, 2011, about eight months into the smash success of 21, the concert shows how desperately she wants not to be passed around as posh royalty, contrasting the (admittedly still quite tasteful) elements of show glitz and the bombast of the music with exaggeratedly cockney-style banter and crude jokes, sometimes making it seem like she’s really trying too hard in that respect — not by way of her singing, though, which is as consistently soulful and touching as it comes.

With the setlist constructed entirely of material from her melodically and spiritually finest two albums, there are literally no weak performances — the entire 90-minute show is well worth an uninterrupted watch — but in these video overviews, I like to focus on one particular moment, and to me, that moment, the culmination of the entire show, arrives with ‘Set Fire To The Rain’, really one of the best songs the lady ever wrote and one of the most justifiedly dramatic compact depictions of the rise and fall of a relation­ship in pop history. In the early days, the song occasionally got a bad rap from those critics who believed Adele always worked best in an intimate chamber setting — but it’s hard to imagine how a song that goes "I set fire to the rain and I threw us into the flames" might work better with just an acoustic guitar, or even a pianoforte.

As it is, the song formally satisfies the criteria for a «power ballad» — going from quiet romantic start to all-out emotional bombastic climax — but as hard as it may be to believe, not all power ballads suck; a few of them are blessed with fresh chord sequences, or unpredictable blends of melodic solutions from verse to bridge to chorus, or intriguing atmospheres that go beyond the generic Bryan Adams message of LOVE CONQUERS ALL!!, especially if it’s a dark power ballad like the one I am concentrating on at the moment.

And this one really has a brilliant construction, as the verse-bridge-chorus build-up is such a fine case of the dialectical triad, or, rather, the embodiment of the three natural stages in any bad relationship: love — abuse — break-up. Of these three, melodically the love stage is (of course) the least interesting; ironically, I believe it could actually have been more interesting if Adele played it straight on the stage, all big smiles and fluttering eyelashes while singing "I was over until you kissed my lips and you saved me", instead of a worried look which already says "it’s too good to last". But that’s fine, some people do jump head first into relationships they know to be doomed from the start, because, you know — the thrill, the pull, and all that.

The magic proper is in the chorus, and while I do not have a particularly vast experience of watching «divas» in live performance, the difference between good and bad here is not really all that different from any other kind of live performance — the more you focus on what is right for the song and for yourself, rather than on what the audience expects you to deliver, the bigger the payoff for posterity. She is not over-emoting, not over-mugging, not over-cooking with flash and glitz; lighting effects and string ensembles aside, the camera largely follows her face and her hands, and the body language is impeccable, be it the fluttery fingers mimicking the proverbial "flames", or the semi-clenched fists during one of the final "let it burn"’s, or the funny upward-pointing finger as she hits her highest note on the next one — as in, "that’s how high these flames shall go". It’s just such a delight watching this modest, true-to-life theatricality, not to mention the actual singing which, in my and many other people’s opinions, beats the studio original in terms of intensity and dramatism, without sacrificing a single note.

Although she was technically 23 rather than 21 during the performance, it’s still almost phenomenally grown-up for her then-current age; unlike Taylor Swift, Adele never exploited the image of the eternal (spoiled) teenager, and unlike Celine Dion, Adele’s emotional maturity and complexity is something that demands (well, demanded at the time) to be taken seriously. If you think I’m exaggerating here, try concentrating on the contrast between the desperate-but-tender falsetto of "I threw us into the flames" and the determined angry snarl of one of the let it bur-r-r-roar-r-r-n’s in the coda: how many generic power ballads make symbolic use of such emotional contrasts? (correct answer: none, because these contrasts are precisely the thing that can make power ballads non-generic). These days, it might almost seem strange that such a decidedly old-fashioned songwriting effort could be a big hit in 2011, but apparently, millennials could still recognize the value of a natural human voice.

It’s too bad, of course, that this beautiful story of a talented young girl maturing into an equally talented young woman lasted no more than five years, pretty much reaching its highest point with this Albert Hall performance and then careering all the way down from there. Fast forward ten years, to this alternate live rendition of the song from the TV Special An Audience With Adele, and get a vivid, instructive, free lesson in what separates genius from tackiness. Ten years later, there are no more signs of a living person: this is a Stepford-wife-level projection of the real thing, all glamor and glitz and make-up and singing that, technically, is impeccable — like a Yujia Wang piano performance — but has lost any kind of true emotional meaning. (Even when the camera pans away from Adele, the feeling of tackiness refuses to go away — at least the Albert Hall in 2011 was packed with real people, while the London Palladium in 2021 was mostly stuffed with glamor-doll celebrity mannequins). All the little human overtones that added dynamics and storyline to the song have been flattened out — and the formerly brilliant "let it buuuuurn!" dissipating sky-high in a psychedelic falsetto meteor has been replaced here with a trademark Diva Power Blast where you’re supposed to measure the singer by how ripped, rather than nuanced, her lungs really are. Of course, ‘Set Fire To The Rain’ is still a great song, but then again, so are all those rock and pop classics that Miley Cyrus covered when she was working for that elusive «artistic credibility», and it didn’t really help her or the songs in question. (There’s an even more horrendous rendition, from a 2023 Vegas performance, making the YouTube rounds, where they actually add the special effect of literally setting fire to the rain — eat your puny little hearts out, Alice Cooper and Peter Gabriel!)

Not that this hollowness took me by surprise or anything: as a true artist, Adele had steadily been going down ever since the dreadful ‘Hello’ and her third album — the quality of the songs deteriorated in direct proportion to the amount of sold copies, and although traces of the fresh old glory could still be found, by the time of 25 «Adele» was really no longer Adele Adkins, the little independent girl from Brockwell Park, but a full-time corporate enterprise, with an army of songwriters and producers and imagemakers and supporting celebrities calculating her trajectories. In my mind’s eye, it is really one of the most tragic, and the most telling, artistic downfalls of the 21st century — though I do realize that few will want to share this perspective, because most people who know anything about Adele at all fall in two categories: (a) those who were never interested in her in the first place, (unjustly) putting her in the Vanessa Carlton shoebox from the very start and not seeing any major difference between the boring singer-songwriter crap of 19, 21, 25, or 30; (b) those who eagerly eat up whatever the media market throws their way anyway, and since the promotion campaign for 25 was far more aggressive than it was the earlier records, well, that’s probably because the later records are even greater, right? besides, as long as she’s got that set of pipes oiled up so damn good, who cares about the actual songs, right?

In any case, no matter how many crappy, overproduced, artificially puffed-up albums the Adele Factory turns out in the future (fortunately, she at least has the good sense of taking long breaks between recording sessions), I’m not throwing away my copy of Live At The Royal Albert Hall anytime soon, no more than I’d be willing to deprive myself of the delight of classic Fifties-era Elvis Presley just because the next two decades of his career were so disappointing in comparison. Incidentally, there just might be something in common between Elvis and Adele, and I’m not simply talking about both sharing a Las Vegas residence — it’s more to do with both projecting a down-to-earth, tough-as-nails, take-no-shit-from-anybody image while simultaneously and inconspicuously (unnoticed even by themselves) transforming into predictable posters for the pop music industry.

Admittedly, Adele has a better excuse for this than Elvis, who was burning away his talent smack in the middle of the most fertile and abundant decade for pop music ever — Adele dispensed with hers in the middle of a general musical drought, with no end in sight and pretty much no means whatsoever to hope to combine popularity with true artistic independence and timeless quality. For the past ten years, she’d simply been doing whatever it takes to survive, and I cannot blame her for that. But neither do I feel obliged to respect the path she’d taken after 21, which, funny enough, seems to have been accurately predicted and vividly described in this verse of the very song at the center of this particular write-up: "I set fire to the rain / And I threw us into the flames / When we fell, something died / ’Cause I knew that that was the last time". Cheesy, I know. But apt, goddammit!