Adele has shared that she felt like “a shell of a person for a couple months” after abruptly canceling her “Weekends With Adele” Las Vegas residency in January — just days before it was set to begin.
In an interview with Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4, the singer says that she felt guilty about disappointing fans who had paid thousands of dollars to attend.
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“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,” Adele shared.
Adele first tearfully broke the news of the cancelations in a video posted on her Instagram, in which she told fans that dates would be rescheduled with additional information to come.
She told BBC host Lauren Laverne that she felt she needed to deal with the backlash of the canceled event privately, admitting “the show was not good enough. Maybe my silence has been deadly, I don’t know. But it was horrible.”
Despite feeling bad for the fans, Adele said she does not regret the overall decision to cease the residency although “I definitely felt everyone’s disappointment and I was devastated, and I was frightened about letting them down. I’d thought I could pull it together and make it work and I couldn’t. I stand by that decision… 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.”
Adele told Laverne, “Of course I could be someone on TikTok or Instagram Live every day, being like ‘I’m working on it’. Of course I’m working on it! I’m not gonna update you if I ain’t got nothing to update you with, because that just leads to more disappointment.”
However, Adele did touch on the prospect of rearranging her U.S. schedule during her concert at Hyde Park Friday evening , saying that new dates would be coming “very, very soon.”
“I had my shows that I was supposed to be doing but they didn’t happen,” she said Friday. “I’m just waiting on one piece of equipment.”
The appearance at London’s BST Hyde Park Festival marked Adele’s first public performance in five years. The two-hour set included songs from her latest album “30” as well as hits like “Rumour Has It” and “Rolling In the Deep.”
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