Adele has opened up about her relationship with her once-estranged father, Mark Evans, with whom she reconciled shortly before he died from cancer last year.
Evans, who grew up in Penarth, Wales, left Adele and her mother, Penny Adkins, when the singer was three.
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs on Sunday (3 July), the 34-year-old singer said she felt “let down” by her father, who was an alcoholic, as a young child.
Adele told host Laura Laverne that she “definitely had a yearning for him, because he didn’t really deliver for me”.
“I didn’t really have his attention, he’d say he would come and then he didn’t, and if he did come, we’d only go out for like half an hour and then he’d drop me home,” she explained.
“He had a disease, he was a really big alcoholic and he had loads of demons, but I didn’t really understand that when I was younger.”
Adele then said that she decided to cut ties with Evans after he failed to show up for Father’s Day when she was 12 years old.
“I decided to stop seeing him when I was 12,” she recalled. “I’d gone to Penarth to surprise him for Father’s Day and my nanna [told him to come] and he didn’t… I saw him very briefly when I was about 15 when my great-grandma died, and he did apologise then but I was 15, I didn’t want to hear it then.”
Adele said that reconciling with Evans just before he died of bowel cancer in May 2021 was “one of the biggest moments of my life”.
“When I found out that he was ill a few years ago, I got the call and I drove straight there. It was hard but it was definitely one of the biggest moments of my life in a good way, when I went to go and see him,” she said.
“I made the peace with him when I found out he was sick. And we really got on, which was amazing, but also sad because he was really bloody funny. He is really funny, and I don’t remember that when I was little. But it was really nice. We laughed and we gossiped and we cried. It was great for both of us.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone last year, Adele said she had a “physical reaction” to the news of her father’s death.
She compared her reaction to a scene from The Green Mile, where illnesses are sucked out of people, saying: “It was like I let out one wail and something left. I’ve felt so calm ever since then. It really did set little me free.”
During the interview with Laverne, Adele also revealed that she wants more children with her boyfriend Rich Paul and opened up about the public reactions to cancelling her Las Vegas residency and her weight loss.
The megastar’s appearance on Desert Island Discs comes after she performed at British Summer Time (BST) Festival on Friday (1 July) and Saturday (2 July) night. You can read The Independent’s review of the show here.
