Adele got quite emotional while performing to a huge audience in London’s Hyde Park during the opening lines of “Hello”.
This was her first public concert in five years. She surely missed her fans as she tried to get her composure while singing the hit song. She quickly got herself together and went on to play a crowd-pleasing two-hour set for 65,000 fans in her home city.
Adele also performed a number of other classics during her two-hour set, including “Someone Like You”, “Send My Love (To Your New Lover)” and “Rumour Has It”, as well as “Easy On Me” and “Oh My God” from her latest album 30. The shows — which took place on Friday July 1 and Saturday July 2 as part of BST Hyde Park — were the singer’s first ticketed performances since her 2017 shows at Wembley Stadium.
https://youtu.be/zZ9DU8Py1AE
This also comes after she decided to postpone her Las Vegas residency at Caesars Palace. The British artist put an abrupt pause on ‘Weekends With Adele’ just one day before it was set to launch in Sin City. In an interview with Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4, Adele elaborated on the last-minute postponement. “I definitely felt everyone’s disappointment and I was devastated and I was frightened about letting them down,” she said during the interview.
The “Weekends With Adele” residency was scheduled to launch Jan. 21, 2022, and the singer was to perform two shows each weekend through April 16, 2022. In a tearful Instagram post, the star said planning for the event had been “absolutely destroyed by delivery delays and Covid,” and dates would be rescheduled.
“Half my crew, half my team are down with Covid, they still are, and it’s been impossible to finish the show and I can’t give you what I have right now. And I’m gutted, I’m gutted. And I’m sorry it’s so last minute. We’ve been awake for over 30 hours now trying to figure it out and we’ve run out of time.”
Before the postponed residency, Adele released her long-awaited fourth album, 30, which shot to number one in 2021, overtaking Abba to become the fastest-selling album of the year. Its 261,000 first-week chart sales meant it sped past the Swedish pop group’s comeback album Voyage, which opened with 204,000 sales. However, Adele’s sales figures are significantly lower than those of her previous album 25, released in 2015. That album, her third, opened with 800,000 first-week sales, which means 30 has sold 32% of its predecessor.
Reviews for the album were quite positive, with critics praising the “immediacy” to her lyrics, along with her vocal prowess. Rolling Stone music journalist Rob Sheffield called 30 Adele’s “toughest, most powerful album yet” with the best vocal performances of her career, and praised its “deft” production by her collaborators.
Adele’s lead single “Easy on Me” from the new album, broke the Spotify and Amazon Music records for the most streams for a song in both a day and a week. It became the longest running number-one song on the US Billboard Hot 100 by a female artist in the 2020s decade, with ten weeks atop the chart. “Easy on Me” also broke several records at radio — including becoming the most played song in U.S. radio history during a song’s first week on the air.