Adele has 600,000 reasons to be happy
Ed Sheeran recently had the top three songs on the Australian charts, only the second act to manage that since the Beatles in 1964. Bruce Springsteen recently played wineries and arenas over multiple nights in each city to audiences in raptures, and [sometimes] hail. And Guns n' Roses somehow convinced a few hundred thousand Australians they were relevant, or at least viable, more than 20 years after their heyday.
But they're all small beer. Yes, even Justin Bieber, who is on his first, quite inexplicable stadium tour of Australia right now.
By the time Adele, who plays the first of two shows at Sydney's ANZ Stadium on Friday, leaves Australia later this month she will have played to more than 600,000 people. They will have paid from $100 up to $800 for tickets to see the singer who recently beat the seemingly unstoppable Beyonce at the Grammy Awards and whose albums have spent most of the past seven years on the charts around the world.
This Australian tour, her first, is already rumoured to be the most lucrative staged here, as promoters local and international bid extravagantly for the right to stage the shows.
Adele has the biggest tour seen here in a very long time.Credit:Glenn Hunt
The English singer's guarantee is said to be a minimum $1 million per concert and returns from merchandise would be a very rich cream on top of that.
All this for someone who won't have a troupe of dancers, is unlikely to stage dive or play four-hour shows and is not known for wearing top hats, white bicycle shorts or a mop of red hair.
What is pulling in the fans is a suite of songs that have become modern standards – as defined by their appearance in karaoke bars in any city and singing competitions on any TV network.
As some critics have ungraciously pointed out, it may be that many of those who have bought an Adele album or a ticket to an Adele show don't buy many albums or go to many shows a year. Somehow they're not "real" music fans.
But if that's a criticism it ignores the fact that they're buying Adele for a simple reason: it speaks to them more than any other music released this century. And "real" or not, they've got money to spend and Adele had them at Hello.
To paraphrase an old Elvis Presley album title, 600,000 Adele fans can't be wrong.
Since joining Fairfax in 1992, Bernard has been an editor and written on education, roads and local politics. These days, he specialises in music and is the senior music writer and reviewer.