It's Adele the unstoppable
In a perfect world everyone with a talent for songwriting and performing would get an equal bite of the cherry, and live happily ever after. Life doesn't play fair, of course, so for every one Adele there are tens of thousands of also-rans.
What must really rub salt in their wounds is that even when keeping a very low profile, Adele is still outperforming every other artist on the planet...and racking up more and more sales.
There's no doubt about it, the 23-year-old Londoner is a genuine, diamond-encrusted phenomenon.
As she considers putting together a third album, and kicks up her feet nursing her most valuable asset following throat surgery, Adele is back on top of the charts this week in many countries, including the U. S., Britain and Ireland.
Her album '21', far and away the biggest selling album of 2011, has now joined an elite club in the States by topping the Billboard charts for a 16th week. Only 20 albums have achieved that feat since the charts kicked off in March 1956 and Adele's '21' is the first to do it since the ' Titanic' soundtrack in 1998.
In Adele's homeland '21' is even more popular. Earlier this month it became the longest chart-topping album release in nearly 42 years in the UK.
This week, ' 21' jumped back into the top spot in Britain for a twentieth time and, combined with the one week that Adele's debut ' 19' spent at number one, that gives her a career total of 21 weeks at the top of the UK charts, equalling the achievements of both Queen and Oasis.
Meanwhile, '21' remains the longest running No 1 album for a solo artist in UK chart history, and the sixth longest-running Number 1 album overall, a record beaten only by Simon & Garfunkel's 'Bridge Over Troubled Water', and The Beatles' 'Please Please Me', 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', ' With The Beatles' and 'A Hard Day's Night'.
Here in Ireland, we just can't get enough of Adele either. '21' has been a permanent resident of the Irish album charts for all of its 52 weeks since release, and it was the best selling album here by some distance in 2011.
Not only that, Adele's ' 19' was the fourth best selling album in Ireland in 2011, with 'Someone Like You' the top-selling single.
All of which proves that you don't necessarily have to (a) look like Rihanna, and (b) move like Beyonce, to rule the world. Are you listening, Mr Cowell?
- WITH JIM HAYES
