Would you like to have your breath taken away?

Last night, the re-invented Brit Awards were held for the first time at the O2, a venue with a capacity somewhere in the region of twenty three thousand people. The video above depicts a piano player accompanying a voice with the sheer magnetism, power and magic to send each of those twenty three thousand hearts soaring through the air before being brought swiftly back down to the ground with a crushing crunch.

Opinion on Adele amongst the writers of Shiny & New seems to be divided. While 21 hasn't quite impacted one writer, this here author holds it as his favourite album to be released so far in 2011. Admittedly, that isn't the greatest honour one could bestow considering it is only mid-February, but we're struggling to imagine something which can blow us away any further. Her skills as a lyricist are unparalleled within artists of a similar age, while her voice is something which cannot be described faithfully within the confines of a blog post. Magnificent is one word we will try to use. We could never have dreamed that under any imaginable circumstance we would quote the monstrous buffoon that is James Corden, but annoyingly we would struggle to improve on his introduction to "Somebody Like You".

There's nothing quite like the feeling when you're listening to a song written by someone you don't know, who you've never met, who somehow manages to describe exactly how you felt at a particular moment in your life. This artist is able to do that time after time, and it's for that reason that she is currently number one in seventeen countries.

Adele is very much a commercial success. She perhaps sums up more than anyone else currently the concept of mums picking up the latest album on their weekly shop at Sainsbury's, something we have mocked with vigour in the past and will probably continue to do so. However, again more than anyone else she serves as an example of why popularity does not always mean low-brow, or indeed, shite. She oozes beauty and class (well, her singing voice does - we won't discuss her speaking voice), while effortlessly capturing the imaginations and hearts of her audience with laughable ease.

The effect that the above video had on this writer seems to derive in part from the awe and grandeur one can sometimes only receive from enormous crowds of people. The aforementioned twenty three thousand-strong audience sits for three minutes in a daze, absolutely lost in a swirl of magic. A rare sight to behold, and a magical moment even more rarely seen at the Brit Awards.