Adele review – a lesson in control from the end of the pier
4 / 5 stars
SSE Arena, Belfast
The world’s biggest-selling singer delivers a solid, if unsurprising show on the first night of her tour

Three songs into the first date of her world tour, Adele begins addressing the audience. She was told not to say anything earlier in the performance, she confesses, lest she ruin the high drama of the show’s opening: echoing atmospherics, a moody black and white film of her eyes, the singer slowly rising up on a platform at the centre of the arena, performing her comeback hit, Hello.
You can see why those responsible for the staging might have worried Adele’s brand of between-song banter would puncture the moment. No sooner does she start talking than she acquaints everyone present with the state of her colon. “I’ve been fucking shitting myself all day,” she announces. “Bad bowel movements. I’ve had to have an Imodium.”

On one level, her nerves seem unexpected. After all, she opens her world tour in an entirely imperious position. She can call herself the biggest pop star in the world without much fear of contradiction: her third album, 25, is enjoying its 10th week at the top of the US chart.
Last week it sold 100,000 copies in America to add to the 19m it’s already shifted worldwide. It was comfortably the biggest-selling album of 2015 despite only being released at the end of November. One news story has touts selling tickets for her British tour dates for £25,000 a pop, prompting questions in parliament “Adele is good but she’s not that good,” noted the MP for Winchester, not unreasonably.

And yet a vague sense of uncertainty hangs over the show. Her performance at the Grammys earlier in the month was shaky and marred by sound problems. She subsequently told an interviewer that it had caused her to spend the next day in tears and appeared to suggest she would simply walk offstage if anything similar happened again. One squeak of feedback and the Belfast audience could apparently be witness to the biggest pop star in the world flouncing off.
But there really doesn’t seem much danger of that happening. Her bowels notwithstanding, Adele seems utterly in control from the minute she appears.

Her voice sounds fantastic. For all her tendency to the kind of expressive hand gestures popular with X-Factor contestants, she never over-sings in that melismatic look-at-me style that passes for talent on such TV shows.
She is hugely, earthily charming between songs – charming enough to get away with stuff that shades into end-of-the-pier entertainment, including singing Happy Birthday to one audience member and inviting another on stage to propose to their partner. There isn’t much in the way of surprises as she runs through the hits – Someone Like You, To Make You Feel My Love, Chasing Pavements – but it’s all beautifully done. She’s particularly good during an acoustic section, where the stripped-down arrangement adds a bit of grit to Send My Love to Your New Lover, 25’s most toothsome pop moment.

And besides, no one comes to see Adele to be shocked. There’s a compelling argument that one of the reasons 25 has done so well is that buyers – judging by tonight’s audience, mostly middle-aged – knew what they were going to get, Adele having understandably declined to mess with the formula that made its predecessor, 21, the biggest-selling album of the century thus far.
And there are certainly moments when even the most-dedicated naysayer might be forced to concede that they see what the fuss is about, not least her performance of Skyfall. As Sam Smith subsequently proved, writing a decent Bond theme is no easy task and her performance of it tonight is an object lesson in selling a dramatic song without going over the top.
“I know some of you have been dragged along here tonight but I’m going to win you over,” she said at one point. Judging by the reaction as she finally disappears – on the same platform on which she appeared – she has managed it.

巡演也有
打分
啊，哈哈

演唱会还能打分

其实我呆为人还是很低调谦虚的不过还是要拿出舍我其谁的气势来

巡演打分来干嘛