On February 12, 2023, pop icon Adele knows exactly where she’ll be: sitting in the stands and witnessing her colleague Rihanna’s comeback to the stage during the Super Bowl Halftime Show in Arizona. She announced her plans on Friday to the audience during her Las Vegas residency show at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace.
“I’m going just for Rihanna. I don’t give a flying f–k,” she joked. Except it is probably not a joke, and there will undoubtedly be a number of other people there to see Rihanna perform live for the first time in years.
The pair have been friends for many years and Adele is also just an avid fan. In 2018, Adele wrote of the Anti singer for the Time 100, saying, “The progression of her superstardom feels steady, well deserved and extremely natural.”
She added, “Even more, she has designed and conquered an entire lane of her own. The innovative and groundbreaking world of Rihanna that no one else will ever be safe in and get away with copying. She makes her own rules and bends ours.”
As a friend, Adele called Rihanna a “gracious, loyal and funny goofball of an icon,” finishing, “She’s fearless and full of all the right kind of attitude to be everything that she is and will be forever.”
Adele has never performed at the Halftime show, and said she turned down the opportunity when it was offered to her.
“First of all, I’m not doing the Super Bowl,” she said at a concert in Los Angeles in 2017. “I mean, come on, that show is not about music. And I don’t really — I can’t dance or anything like that. They were very kind, they did ask me, but I did say no.”
She added, “I’m sorry, but maybe next time.”
Aimée Lutkin is the weekend editor at ELLE.com. Her writing has appeared in Jezebel, Glamour, Marie Claire and more. Her first book, The Lonely Hunter, will be released by Dial Press in February 2022.
