Adele taking up residence in Las Vegas? Don’t bet on it

In February 2016, with the world’s media watching, Adele spent the evening making poo jokes.

The opening night of her first (and potentially last) arena tour had come around. The 26-year-old Londoner was visibly crippled with nerves. Amid songs about heartache and early adulthood soul-searching, she revealed she’d spent the day knocking back Imodium in order to bring peace to her jittery bowels. Or, as Adele put it, “I have actually been s_______ myself.”

Her concert at Belfast’s SSE Arena was hugely endearing. Wonderful singing helped. Yet it wasn’t slick nor especially glamorous. Sitting in the stalls of this converted ice hockey venue, it was hard to imagine anywhere on the planet further removed from the pre-packaged glitz and turbo-charted fakery of a night out in Las Vegas.

But could Adele soon be saying “Hello” from the other side of the Sunset Strip? It has been reported modern pop’s great recluse has agreed a £500,000 per night slot at Sin City’s newly-opened Resorts World hotel. If true Adele would set a new record as the highest earner ever for a Vegas residency (she would be coining five times what Lady Gaga earned on the Strip in 2018).

The rumours seem to have originated at Las Vegas blog Vitalvegas.com. The website had previously revealed Celine Dion had signed up to regular shows at Resorts World’s 5,000 capacity theatre (still under construction). In its post breaking the Adele story, the blog noted a blank space on a wall promoting future performers at the venue.

Celine Dion was up there, alongside posters of Katy Perry, Carrie Underwood and Luke Bryan. Might the mysterious headliner be… Adele ?

“Adele has been circling a Las Vegas residency for some time, having been spotted checking out Park MGM at one point,” wrote Vitalvegas. “But we hear Resorts World finally won the prize of working with this award-winning songstress. We understand her residency could start as soon as January 2022.”

The international media has taken up these rumours and run with them. Sources have suggested Adele would be allowed commute by private jet to Vegas from either of her two Beverly Hills mansions. And that, though the gigs would of course be “hugely lucrative”, they would also be a “lot of fun”.

But would they really? Nobody has made global stardom look more of a grind than Adele. She is a notoriously anxious performer – as demonstrated in Belfast five years ago, when she spent half the running time crooning her heart out and the other half banging on about her bowels. The high-rollers at Resorts World Las Vegas are, one suspects, not quite ready for an evening of quips about Adele quaking in terror on the loo.

Belfast was no one-off. In 2011, touring her second album, 21, she didn’t even try to hide her terror of the spotlight. “I get s___ scared,” she told Rolling Stone. “One show in Amsterdam, I was so nervous I escaped out the fire exit. I've thrown up a couple of times. Once in Brussels, I projectile-vomited on someone. I just gotta bear it. But I don't like touring. I have anxiety attacks a lot.”

For Adele time was anything but a healer. Her stage fright had seemingly intensified by 2016 and the Imodium jokes. “It’s actually getting worse,” she revealed to American broadcaster NPR ahead of her world tour. “Or, it’s just not getting better, so I feel like it’s getting worse, because it should’ve gotten better by now.”

Adele, it is true, knuckled down, and after opening night jitters and Imodium monologues in Belfast, got through some 16 months of dates.

Yet even as she reached the finish line there were setbacks. Adele Live was due to conclude with four shows at Wembley in July 2017, with a combined attendance of nearly 400,000. However, she canceled the final two dates citing damaged vocal cords. In the end the slog was too much.

Vegas residencies are a popular new frontier for pop. In 2002, Celine Dion revived the tradition with her A New Day show, which earned $444.69 million dollars across five years and played to some three million people. Following her on the gold-paved road to Sin City were Elton John, Cher, Rod Stewart and Mariah Carey.

And then there was Britney. In December 2013, the …Baby One More Time singer touched down in Las Vegas for her Piece of Me residency at Planet Hollywood. Her price tag was $325,000 per show.

Such was the popularity of her gigs that, within the year, she received a raise to $475,000. In total, across her first 12 months at Planet Hollywood she is estimated to have boosted the resort’s earnings $2 million. And she was back in Nevada in 2018 for a new residency, Britney: Dominion, securing a nightly pay cheque of $500,000.

Would those sort of figures turn Adele’s head? Life on the road is obviously very different to a cushy residency at Vegas. Yet there is still the torture of gigging night after night. And if there is one super-star who seems spectacularly ill-suited to punching the clock repeatedly it is Adele.

Barfing down a stair-well in Brussels is one thing. In Sin City you are expected to be always “on”. At Britney’s Planet Hollywood gigs, super fans would stump up $2,500 for meet-and-greets with the star. Could Adele set to one side her crippling anxiety to pose for selfies night after night?

She certainly doesn’t need the cash. Some three million people are thought to have attended her 2016/2017 tour, which grossed £127 million. Factoring in record sales of 24 million, her net worth is estimated at £137 million.

Nor would a residency make any sense from the perspective of her longevity as a recording artist. Vegas is typically where performers go when they’ve crumpled up creatively.

Britney Spears’s hit-making days were long behind her as she fell into the orbit of Planet Hollywood. The same was true of Celine Dion in 2002. Arguably only Lady Gaga has put roots down in Las Vegas – she earned $100,000 per night for her residence in 2018 and 2019 – and come away with credibility semi-intact.

But Gaga had taken a break from new music when she went out into the desert. Adele, by contrast, is working on her fourth LP. It will reportedly delve into the heartache of her 2019 divorce from Simon Konecki. She made reference to the record hosting Saturday Night Live last October.

“My album's not finished and I'm too scared to do both,” Adele said. “I’d rather just put on some wigs—and this is all mine, by the way—have a glass of wine, or six, and just see what happens.”

With the Adele 4.0 still a work in progress, the recording studio is, for the time being at least, likely to be the focus of her creative energies. And, for a singer with new music to share, Las Vegas is surely the last place she would wish to go.

Thanks to Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack, the city will be forever splashed in showbiz mystique. But for an artist who still has lots to say, and many miles to go before they are on the scrap-heap, it surely represents a resounding dead end. The neon glitz of Sin City would risk becoming the place where Adele’s career went dark.