You’ve got to hand it to the Brits committee. It must be hard to think of new categories – especially when, over in the States, the Grammys extend to awards that may well encompass Best R&B Performance By A Non-Asthmatic or Best Song Recorded In A Studio With On-Site Organic Juice Bar.

In a genius coup, though, 2007 saw the Brits introduce a prize rewarding artists for what they haven’t yet done but might go on to do. In three weeks, when she receives the first Critics’ Award, Adele Adkins’s debut album will have been in the shops for all of two weeks.

If we feel like we already know the musical territory where she resides, it’s probably a post-Winehouse thing. Her nu-Amy status may seem a little too easily conferred. And yet the cap fits in all sorts of unavoidable ways. The street-smart London upbringing and the big ballsy soul timbre are both in evidence. And, like Winehouse, there’s something emphatically unreconstructed about her view of relationships. Like much of the album, Best for Last was written after, to use her words, “I was cheated on”.

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“Though I’m trying my hardest, you go back to her/ And I think that I know things may never change,” she sings, confessing, “The meaner you treat me/The more eager I am.”

In other words, she wants to stand by her man, but finding a man to stand by is proving difficult. What recurs time and time again – especially on Daydreamer and Make You Feel My Love – is its author’s appetite for the search.

A cursory listen may lead you to conclude that Adele has a voice way in excess of her years. In terms of technical ability, that’s true. The instrumentation seems designed to usher you to that conclusion: a dash of jazz bass, the odd string arrangement that seems to take its cue from Massive Attack’s Unfinished Sympathy.

But this is really a series of cries from the bearpit of young love, and none the worse for that. Indeed, no one has put words and music to the long, wet, workaday Tuesday afternoons of unrequited love as well as she does on Crazy for You. When, on Cold Shoulder, she sings “Whenever you look at me, I wish I was her”, you feel like bringing her a mug of warm sweet milk and a saucer of HobNobs, before trying to convince her that no man is worth this sort of heartache. She may well agree. But would she believe it if you told her that no album is worth this sort of heartache? Probably not. And, when you hear 19, neither will you.

(XL)

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