Adele Emeli Sandé (born 10 March 1987) is a Scottish singer-songwriter-musician, known for her honest lyrics and soulful voice. After penning songs for other artists over a little while, and providing vocals on Top Ten hits for Wiley and Naughty Boy, she released her debut album Our Version of Events in February 2012. It spawned eight singles including six Top Tens — "Heaven" (no.2), "Daddy" (no.21), "Next to Me" (no.2), "Read All About It (Part III)" (no.3), "My Kind of Love" (no.17), "Clown" (no.4), and from the expanded version "Beneath Your Beautiful" (with Labrinth, no.1) and Wonder (with Naughty Boy again, no.10) — across a 15-month period in which she also had a Number One single featuring on Professor Green's original version of "Read All About It".
The album topped the UK charts on no fewer than eight separate occasions over the course of more than a year, spending 10 weeks at the summit in total, became the UK's biggest-seller of 2012 and fell just one week short of ending up the biggest-seller of 2013 as well. Remarkably, it broke a record set by The Beatles' Please Please Me for spending the most consecutive weeks in the UK's official albums chart Top 10 of any debut LP, only dropping out of the upper reaches in May 2013 after 66 straight weeks.
So well-regarded was Sandé at this point, indeed, she was memorably invited to appear at both the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2012 Olympic Games in London. At the former she performed a showstopping rendition of the hymn "Abide With Me", while her song "Heaven" soundtracked the section of the ceremony featuring the world wide web's inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee. At the closing ceremony she sang "Read All About It (Part III)", while The BBC's coverage of the games concluded a video montage soundtracked by her specially-recorded version of John Lennon's "Imagine".
Discography:
- Our Version of Events (2012)
- Long Live the Angels (2016)
- Real Life (2019)
- Let's Say for Instance (2022)
- How Were We To Know (2023)
Emeli Sande provides examples of:
- The Cameo: Laya Lewis of Skins fame appears in her "My Kind of Love" video.
- God-Is-Love Songs: "Next to Me" is about Emeli's relationship with God, and that's easily distinguished once you know the song's backstory.
- My Nayme Is: Emeli isn't a very common spelling of "Emily".
- Stage Name: Emeli is her middle name; her actual first name is Adele, which is already occupied by somebody else…
- Updated Re-release: The deluxe edition of her debut album Our Version of Events, including a Cover Version of John Lennon's "Imagine", was released in October 2012.
- Older Than They Look: Born in 1987, Emeli definitely looks older than her years.
