[LOCUTOR]

Track thirteen, unit six, this is music to my ears

[MULHER]

Released in the UK, on January the twenty-eighth two thousand and eight, and in the US six months later, Adele's first album, nineteen, was a noticeable début by any standards. As of September twenty eleven, the album had been certified four-times platinum, and had accumulated worldwide sales of over four million copies. Adele's "oak-aged voice and Botticelli face" alone would have been enough to make nineteen worthy of a listen. But add in the full-fat soulful integrity of her songs, laced with generous slugs of jazz, pop, funk and folk to vary the vibe, and nineteen became an album coveted enough to go straight in at number one in the UK album charts, and find its way onto the playlists of thousands.

Remarkable too, was the tender age of the woman who had written and recorded it, a fact to which the album's simple title bore testimony. It felt like a clever bit of minimalist marketing, but Adele hadn't attributed much significance to the title, having decided to call it nineteen because she couldn't come up with anything else. Even so, its straightforwardness chimed with that of some of her own favorite album titles. "The best ones for me are Debut by Bjork, and Lauryn Hills' Miseducation. They're ones that everyone just knows, that don't make you think too much, and are just quite obvious."

And, however hastily conceived, the title instinctively felt right. "To me this album does very much represent my age", she told Blues & Soul in a revealing interview in the summer of two thousand and eight, after she had hit the ripe old age of twenty. "I was only nineteen years old when I was writing it, and I just kind of remember becoming a bit of woman during that time, and I think that is definitely documented in the songs. So, while some people think I was trying to use my age as like a selling point, I really wasn't at all… When I was signed at eighteen, I only had three songs to my name. But yet, literally, within a month of turning nineteen, a load more just suddenly came out of me.".

Those songs came out of her because she split up with her first "proper" boyfriend, or "rotter number one" as a Vogue interview quaintly dubbed him later. The pain of the break-up provided an instant catalyst for the songs she had been trying to write for months.