“REGRETS and mistakes, they’re memories made. Who would have known how
bittersweet this would taste?”
When the words of Adele’s No1 single about lost love, Someone Like You, waft
from the radio they make Mark Evans break down in tears.
He is the 22-year-old’s dad and has had years to regret losing the affection
of his little girl thanks to a fog of alcohol and self-pity.
Last night, he exclusively told The Sun: “I was a rotten father at a time when
she really needed me.
“I was putting away two litres of vodka and seven or eight pints of Stella
every day.
“I drank like that for three years. God only knows how I survived it. I was
deeply ashamed of what I’d become and I knew the kindest thing I could do
for Adele was to make sure she never saw me in that state.”
The Sun tracked down the 47-year-old — who split with Adele’s mum Penny Adkins
when the singer was three — to south Wales, where he runs a plumbing firm.
And now, three years after Adele’s debut album, 19, transformed her into a
star, Mark has opened up for the first time about the guilt he feels towards
his famous daughter.
He says: “It’s time I got it off my chest. I’ve never talked to anyone about
it before, not even my closest friends.”
Adele was raised in London by her lone mum after the couple split.
Mark reveals that he shut out his daughter after becoming an alcoholic
following the death of his beloved dad John in 1999.
He says: “I hit the bottle so hard that I am pretty much oblivious to anything
that happened to me for three years.
“I was way, way below rock bottom by then. I reckon I made Oliver Reed look
like a teetotaller.
“I was in the darkest place you can imagine.
“I saw no way out. I didn’t really care whether I lived or died.
“And all the time I thought, ‘How can I do this to Adele?’ I knew she’d be
missing her grandad just as much as I was because they had such a close
bond. She adored him. Yet all I could do was drink and I’m so, so ashamed of
myself for that. I was in so much grief that I couldn’t see past myself and
how I was feeling.
“I was not there for my daughter when I should have been and I have regretted
that every second of every day to this moment now. It tears me up inside.”
Mark says that his shame at being a poor father means he can’t even face
seeing his daughter perform.
He says: “I’ve never been to one of her shows or even listened to her music
very much.
“I know that all those memories would come flooding back because I’d be
thinking how proud Dad would be of his granddaughter and it would tear me
apart all over again. I can’t deal with loss.
“I don’t just mean that it unsettles me, it absolutely crucifies me. I don’t
want to go through that again.
“I’ve heard her songs when they’ve come on the radio and I watched some of her
performance at the Brits.
“But even then I had to walk out of the room halfway through. I couldn’t bear
the memories it brought up.”
Mark met Penny in a pub in north London in 1987 and Adele was born a year
later. He believes his musical tastes helped influence his child to become a
blues-type artist.
He says: “I’d lie on the sofa all night cradling Adele in my arms and
listening to my favourite music — Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Bob
Dylan and Nina Simone.
“Night after night I’d play those records. I’m certain that is what shaped
Adele’s music.
“The music I loved — and still love today — is what gave me the idea for one
of her middle names, Blue. I always think of Adele as Blue.”
After Penny and Mark split Adele would often visit Mark in his native Wales.
He met Penny while working in London He says: “I remember she came to stay
in the summer after her fourth birthday and she was carrying this little
acoustic guitar she’d picked up in a charity shop. She said she was teaching
herself how to play it by listening to the blues songs we used to listen to
on my record player and then trying to make the same noise.
“Within a couple of years, she’d started singing along and I remember
thinking, when she was seven, ‘My God, Adele’s really got it. She’s going to
be a huge star one day’.”
But the closeness between father and daughter ended 12 years ago when Mark’s
dad John died, aged just 57, from bowel cancer.
Shortly afterwards Mark split from his long-term girlfriend and his best
friend died from a heart attack. Mark found solace in the bottle.
After three years of drinking, an ex helped Mark to quit the booze and he got
in touch with Adele again. Nursing an orange juice at a small wooden table
in the corner of a pub in Cowbridge, in the Vale of Glamorgan, he says: “We
met up at Camden Market and we were sitting at a stall drinking tea when I
brought up the subject of my drinking. I started to tell her what had
happened to me and she gave me this huge, kind smile and put her arms round
me.
“‘It’s OK, Dad. I understand. I forgive you’, she said. Just like that, she
forgave me. I was so grateful.”
Adele claimed in an interview last month that she hasn’t seen her dad for
years. She said: “I last saw him at my grandma’s funeral. I think I was
about 15. But I’d cut off contact with him when I was ten or 11.”
But Mark says his daughter’s claims are “lies” she invented so he could be
spared talking publicly about his painful past.
Mark has a new girlfriend now, who he lives with, and also a 15-year-old son,
Cameron, from a previous relationship, who is close to Adele.
He adds: “They see a lot of each other. Adele still comes back to Wales to see
us and I pop down to London every couple of months to meet her. The last
time I saw her was about six weeks ago.
“We get on fantastically now so who knows, one of these days I might even find
the courage to see one of her shows.
“I am the proudest dad in the world. I think she is amazing as a person, not
just as a performer.
“I love her voice and I think she is going to be around as a singer for
many, many years to come.”