Adele Adkins

Skyfall, written with Paul Epworth and released on 5 October 2012 for the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. No, was the first James Bond theme to win the Academy Award for best original song; it also took the Golden Globe, a Grammy and a Brit, and was recorded at Abbey Road with a seventy-seven-piece orchestra arranged by J.A.C. Redford. Adele Laurie Blue Adkins was born in Tottenham in 1988 and left the BRIT School in Croydon in 2006; a demo passed to XL Recordings by a friend led to 19, released in 2008 and named for the age at which it was written. 21 followed in 2011, built around Rolling in the Deep and Someone like You and produced in large part by Epworth; it won six Grammy Awards in 2012 and became the best-selling album of the century so far. After surgery on a haemorrhaged vocal cord she returned with 25 in 2015 and 30 in 2021, the latter written around the end of her marriage. She has won sixteen Grammy Awards and twelve Brit Awards, and has sold more than 120 million records.