Adele has said that she was almost forced to cancel the opening night of her new Las Vegas residency after feeling “sick as a dog”.
The 32-date ‘Weekends With Adele’ series at Las Vegas’ The Colosseum at Caesars Palace was originally scheduled for January before being postponed with a day’s notice “due to delivery delays and COVID”. Adele later claimed that the postponed shows had “no soul” and “lacked intimacy”.
New dates were announced back in July and the run of gigs finally kicked off on Friday night (November 18).
Speaking to the crowd during that first show, Adele admitted that she almost had to postpone the shows once more.
“You’re not gonna believe me, you’re gonna think I want a tiny violin to come out and start playing behind my tears, so last week I was sick as a fucking dog, right?” she told the 4,000-strong crowd (via The Telegraph). “I was like, ‘Shit, if it’s solely my fault for not being able to perform this Friday, I’m done, I’m gonna fall off the face of the earth.’”
Earlier in the show, Adele had thanked her fans for “coming back to me” after they greeted her with a standing ovation. Before the concert, she took to Instagram to reveal that she had “never been more nervous before a show in my career”.
During the first night of her Weekends With Adele run, the singer performed a 20-song setlist including many of her greatest hits as well as newer cuts from her most recent album ‘30‘.
Elsewhere in the show, she walked into the audience and asked them to share their favourite childhood memories before ‘When We Were Young’ [via The Guardian] and fired a T-shirt cannon in the audience that contained “a signed T-shirt, a handwritten note and 50 bucks”.
Adele has said that she will be taking a break from music to study for a degree in English Literature online once the residency wraps up, revealing that she thinks she might have become an English teacher if her music career hadn’t been so successful. “I wish I’d gone to university and had that experience,” she said.