“I just had to wait it out and just grieve it”

Adele has opened up about being forced to postpone her Weekends With Adele Las Vegas residency earlier this year.

The singer was due to start the residency at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace on January 21, marking her first shows since 2017, and it was scheduled to extend through to April. She announced the postponement a day before the residency’s planned opening night with a video, saying the show was simply not ready.

“We’ve tried absolutely everything we can to put it together in time and for it to be good enough for you, but we’ve been absolutely destroyed by delivery delays and COVID,” she explained at the time.

In February, while appearing on The Graham Norton Show, she discussed how delays relating to COVID and equipment had meant that, if the gigs were to have taken place as scheduled, it “would have been a really half-arsed show, and I can’t do that”.

Now, in a new interview with Lauren Laverne on BBC Radio 4, Adele elaborated on the last-minute postponement. “I definitely felt everyone’s disappointment and I was devastated and I was frightened about letting them down,” she said during the interview.

“I thought I could pull it together and make it work and I couldn’t. I don’t think any other artist would have done what I did, and I think that is why it was such a massive, massive story.”

Elsewhere in the interview, the singer said that she “was a shell of a person for a couple of months” following the postponement. “I just had to wait it out and just grieve it, I guess, just grieve the shows and get over the guilt, but it was brutal.”

However, Adele made it clear she stood by the decision to postpone the residency, maintaining that the show wasn’t good enough. “You can’t buy me for nothing,” she said. “I’m not going to just do a show because I have to or because people are going to be let down or because we’re going to lose loads of money.”

Rescheduled dates for the residency are yet to be announced. In February, Adele said the shows would “absolutely 100 per cent” happen this year, but in the BBC Radio interview said that while she’s still “working on it”, she wasn’t going to provide updates “if I ain’t got nothing to update you with”.

Over the weekend, Adele gave her first public concerts in five years at London’s Hyde Park, performing classics like ‘Hello’, ‘Someone Like You’ and ‘Send my Love (To Your New Lover’, as well as new songs from latest album ’30’ such as ‘Easy On Me’ and ‘Oh My God’.