Adele announces Kacey Musgraves, Nilüfer Yanya, Gabrielle and more as openers for London shows

Adele has announced the line-up for her two upcoming shows in London – her first ticketed concerts in more than five years – with Kacey Musgraves, Nilüfer Yanya, Gabrielle and more set to open for the modern pop icon.

  • READ MORE: Adele – ‘30’ album review: dependable pop titan finally mixes things up

Both shows – slated for next Friday (July 1) and Saturday (July 2) – will take place at Hyde Park, with each set to host 65,000 fans. Performances will run all day, Adele said in an Instagram post announcing the line-up, with a total of 11 artists (including the leading lady herself) set to take the stage. Rounding out the bill will be Mahalia, Self Esteem, Tiana Major9, Chrissi, Bonnie Kemplay, Ruti and Tamzene.

“[It’s] an all female bill,” Adele wrote, “from new artists that I’m obsessed with to the heavenly [Kacey Musgraves] to one of my favorite artists of all time [Gabrielle] who I’ve loved since I was 4!! It’s going to be incredible, there’s a whole host of us performing all day, I can’t wait to share the main stage with you ladies.”

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Both of the Hyde Park gigs were announced together last October – nearly eight months ago – prior to the release of Adele’s fourth studio album, ‘30’. She was initially due to pre-empt them with a 12-week residency in Las Vegas (which would have run from January through to April), but that was eventually postponed due to “delivery delays and COVID”. Remaining tickets for the Hyde Park shows can be found here.

The upcoming shows will mark Adele’s first publicly accessible concerts since June 2017, when she performed at London’s Wembley Stadium. In the five years since then, she’s mostly performed for awards shows and TV appearances – such as this year’s BRIT Awards, where she also won Artist of the Year, Song of the Year (for ‘Easy On Me’) and Album of the Year – but has not delivered any performances that fans could buy tickets for.

Last year saw Adele perform her first full concert sets since 2017 – one in Los Angeles and the other at London’s Palladium – both of which were recorded for TV specials. Both of those premiered last November, with the former (billed as Adele: One Night Only) airing on CBS in the US, and the latter (as An Audience With Adele) on ITV in the UK.

In a three-star review of ‘30’, NME’s El Hunt wrote: “Though soul, jazz, and blues are hardly new influences for the Tottenham singer, who has built a record-smashing career on retooling retro sounds for contemporary pop, they feel much rawer here, bolstered by show-tuney strings arrangements, gospel, and a sample from the late jazz pianist Erroll Garner on the glimmering ‘All Night Parking’.”