September 11, 2024
ISLAMABAD – Sometimes in life, you can recall exactly when you first dream of something. I think I first dreamt of attending Adele’s concert somewhere in 2015 when someone I knew got one of the front-row seats at her concert in Toronto.
Having heard her music throughout my college years, knowing someone I personally know, listen to her live, made me feel like this was something that could actually happen! Fast forward almost a decade, and I found myself at Munich Messe to attend the eighth show of Adele’s 10-show residency in Munich this summer.
How life surprises us and makes our dreams come true as time passes is something I’ll always marvel at.
Adele’s Munich residency
Earlier in the year, Adele announced that she would be performing a few shows in Munich in the summer. What began with four shows, gradually turned into a 10-day residency spread over August, with two shows every Friday and Saturday. For an artist who doesn’t tour anymore and performs very selectively, the location seemed surprising.
Why Munich? Why not London, her hometown?
Two concert promoters had been trying to convince her for two years, The Times reported. They proposed a custom-made arena for Adele to be built for her concerts at the Messe München Exhibition Centre in Munich, Germany.
Even Adele asked about the selection of Munich and was told that the city functions effectively even during large events, such as the Oktoberfest. Interestingly, Adele found these arguments “madly convincing”, and accepted the offer after seeing the designs for a temporary stadium.
Only when I saw the venue did I realise what they meant by a custom-made arena and why it mattered. The screens were huge, the largest I’ve ever seen, and I’ve attended quite a few global festivals and concerts.
Adele once admitted in an interview that she knows people come to the concert to see her and she wanted every single person at the concert to feel like it was just them and her and therefore the gigantic screens were used!
A custom-built arena aka the Adele World
The arena covered 400,000 square meters, loosely equivalent to 60 football pitches, making the site was a lot more than a concert venue!
It had the capacity to accommodate between 75,000 – 80,000 people for each show, with dedicated and unique hospitality areas including bars and food stalls, a Ferris wheel, a swing carousel, and a merchandise section, which was nothing less than a museum of Adele’s costumes from the past and memorabilia from her music videos like the telephone booth featured in the ‘Hello’.
Open before and after the concerts, Adele World aimed to offer audiences an immersive experience, which can’t be possible when artists tour around the world.
An additional stage was set up in Adele World, where covers of Adele songs were performed. There was also a Spice Girls tribute act that could also be seen performing and after each concert, a karaoke party began, where people were encouraged to perform covers of classic pop songs.
The Performance
The summer of 2024 was the season of concerts in Europe. With Coldplay and Taylor Swift, both touring Europe and Adele performing her residency in Munich, the music scene in the continent had much to offer.
With these artists, you can be sure that the musical performance is going to be par excellence. Each of them has their own style and in the case of Adele particularly, its quality over quantity. She has limited albums and therefore her live performances include limited numbers.
The set list for her Munich residency consisted of 22 songs including all the hits; ‘Hello’, ‘Rumor Has It’, ‘Water Under the Bridge’, ‘Easy on Me’, ‘Love in the Dark’, ‘All I Ask’, ‘Make You Feel My Love’, ‘When We Were Young’, ‘Someone Like You’ and of course, ‘Rolling in the Deep’ along with many others.
Just when Adele appears (and I say appear, not come, because she emerges from the middle of the stage instead of walking onto it), and sings ‘Strangers By Nature’, you know you’re in for a treat. A treat that is emotional and fun, in equal parts and will make you laugh and literally cry at the same time. She then moves on to sing ‘Hello’, which makes every penny (and trust me, there were many) spent on the ticket worth it!
Each performance was a reminder of her strength as a vocalist but what was surprising to me was how invested she is in her live performances, even if they’re happening frequently.
There were quite a few songs that made her eyes well up, particularly, ’Love in the Dark, ‘All I Ask’ and ‘Make You Feel My Love’ (which is originally a Bob Dylan song, I found out that day).
Adele was crying, I was crying, everyone was crying! That’s how emotionally charged her song delivery is. But at the same time, Adele insisted throughout the show that even though she knows that her songs are emotional, she wanted everyone to have fun — and fun it was!
While every performance deserves a special mention, I believe it was ‘Love in the Dark’ that completely blew my mind. What a song and what a performer, Adele is! I have not seen a single artist of today’s time so invested in their craft as Adele was when she performed that song. Her emotions, song delivery, eye movements — everything was in sync with the powerful lyrics.
The large screens not only displayed Adele’s live act for those in the back seats but also had custom visuals for each song. While ‘Hometown Glory’ showed London in all its British glory, ‘When We Were Young’ had Adele’s childhood pictures showcased on the screens with a special confetti shower that had polaroids with those photos and lyrics of the songs, for the audience to take as keepsakes from the concert. ‘Set Fire to the Rain’ perhaps had one of the strongest visuals with real fire blazing out of various spots near the stage to make a mesmerising experience for the crowd as it showed Adele singing in the rain.
The ending of the 2.5-hour concert, ended with (no surprises), ‘Rolling in the Deep’ and a stunning firework show that will be a core memory for the 75,000 people who showed up for a very long time!
The connection with the audience
Adele is known for her ability to connect with her audience on an emotional level through her raw and vulnerable music and while I knew she’s very quirky in the interviews and shows she has appeared on; I didn’t expect to see her candid self at the concert too. That was a pleasant surprise.
She conversed so much with the audience, often telling the background context of a song, the transition of her emotions when she wrote that song and now when she performs it, and very often just showing her humorous self.
In the 4th show, before she sang ‘Send My Love to Your New Lover’ she narrated that in her 20s she kept finding the silver lining of why some people come into our lives until she realised in her mid-30s that some people are absolutely useless.
“Sometimes, there is no reason at all. I’ve stopped finding the silver lining and I’ve never been happier”, she added.
This little quirk became popular and so she made this a part of her remaining residency, talking a little about the useless additions to life and leaving the crowd in splits every time she sang ‘Send My Love to Your New Lover’ in Munich.
She would invite one fan onto the stage on every show, speak to them and take selfies with them, and had a letter and 50 euros hidden under one of the seats for a lucky member of the audience on every show, adding a personal touch to the whole affair.
Was it worth it?
Many a times, while planning this trip, I wondered if its going to be worth it to fly to another country to attend her concert, but having done so, I am so glad!
There were rumours that she might be taking a break and prior to the shows, she told a German media house that she would take a break from performing. On the last night of her residency, Adele formally announced that she would be taking a break from performing to live the life she has been working so hard to build — a befitting reminder to me, to work hard and play harder!
“I will not see you for an incredibly long time and I will hold you dear in my heart for the whole length of my break and I will fantasize about these shows and any shows that I have done. It has been amazing; I just need a rest. I have spent the last seven years working on building my new life and I want to live my new life now. I will remember these shows for an eternity, they have been spectacular; people have come rain or shine, thunder, monsoon, lightening… risking their lives,” she said while welling up on her last performance to the crowd at her Munich residency.
As far as whether it was worth it or not, oh most definitely, one of the best nights of my life and I would do it all over again, any day!