Adele has been vocal about her relationship with her father over the years, and when the singer accepted her Grammy for record of the year in 2017, she thanked her manager in her speech, saying, “I love you like you’re my dad. I don’t love my dad, that’s the thing. That doesn’t mean a lot. I love you like I would love my dad.” The singer’s father walked out on her and her mother, Penny Adkins when she was just a child, returning to his home Wales and leaving her to be raised by a single mother.
After Edwards' passing, a source close to the family told The Sun, “Mark’s family are of course very upset by his passing. He always hoped things would work out with Adele, but it remained acrimonious to the end. He made a few attempts to make things right, but clearly it had been too long.” However, sources still say that the singer is sad after her father’s passing, and is mourning her death in private.
Edwards has claimed a number of times over the years that the pair had remedied their relationship, but the singer has denied the claims each time, although sharing in an early interview, “I don’t hate him — he’s my dad.” Her father confessed to The Sun in 2011 the extent to which he failed his duties as a parent, saying, “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.”