Watch Adele Perform to A Near-Empty Room at SXSW in 2007

Remember when Adele played SXSW way back in 2007? Probably not. Actually, you weren’t there. Almost no one caught the show. 

Before she was a superstar, the British singer joined hundreds of other hopefuls in Austin, Texas for the annual music feast, where at one point she played to a near-empty hotel room. Fortunately, someone did catch the performance and taped it for posterity.  

In the newly-unearthed clip, the young singer joined her XL labelmate Jack Penate for a performance of “My Yvonne,” lifted from his debut album Matinée. The duet, taped in March 2007 for U.K. radio station Xfm, can be seen below.

Adele wouldn’t release her debut album 19 in the U.K. for another nine months. The rest is in the history books. 

The 2018 SXSW Music Festival will take place March 12-18 at various venues around central Austin, with a predictably massive lineup of international “acts to watch” and plenty of established acts. 
Adele won’t be there.