For many music critics in the early Eighties, Sade was something of a conundrum. She and her band – and Sade was always a band, never just a singer – conjured up images of suburban supper club jazz. To compound the problem, Sade – the singer – was drop-dead gorgeous, which obviously meant she had made some kind of image-related deal with the devil.
At first, way back when, as the Eighties puttered into gear, many people thought that Sade was simply Miss Congeniality, the faux cabaret crooner that could later be found in Julien Temple’s Absolute Beginners (released in 1986, this musical still looks like one long pop promo, and not in a good way). The fixed intimacy of her delivery was mistaken for pastiche, and if she and the other members of Sade – keyboard player Andrew Hale, bass guitarist Paul Spencer Denman, and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman – had followed their massively successful debut album Diamond Life (1984) with another similar record, this might have been understandable.
But they didn’t. What they did instead was marshal their talents to create a truly original type of modern British soul, a sound that has continued to mutate over the 36 years since that first record. Their journey is analogous to the one imagined by Bryan Ferry back in the Seventies – turning sophistication into abstraction without losing the beat or destroying the melody. Maximalist is something Sade have certainly never been.
They arrived in the early Eighties, when soft jazz, or “café soul”, was almost considered radical, and when the likes of Everything But the Girl and The Style Council were confounding critics because of their wholesale adoption of classic bossa nova styles and old-school jazz tropes. At first this anti-punk volte face was considered almost shocking, although it soon calcified to such an extent that we found ourselves embracing Simply Red and Lisa Stansfield (help!).
But by then, Sade had moved on, keen to explore the sonic opportunities afforded them by success.
Sade herself was born Helen Folasade Adu in Nigeria, to a Nigerian academic and an English nurse, in 1959. Four years later, after her parents split up, she moved to England with her mother, settling in Clacton-on-Sea, in Essex, and where she would eventually start listening to Marvin Gaye, Donny Hathaway, Nina Simone, Curtis Mayfield and Bill Withers.
As a teenager she saw The Jackson 5 at the Rainbow Theatre in London’s Finsbury Park, where she was working as a barmaid. “I was more fascinated by the audience,” she said. “They’d attracted kids, mothers with children, old people, white, black. I was really moved. That’s the audience I’ve always aimed for.”
And she got it. Diamond Life would go on to sell over ten million copies. They remain one of the most successful British acts of the last four decades, having sold over 50 million records worldwide, with five of their six studio albums certified 3 X Platinum in the US.
“I was born in somewhere called Ibadan, and my true Nigerian name is Folasade, which means Crowning Glory,” she said. “It was abbreviated, so I could actually have been called Fola, which is quite a common prefix. When we moved back from Nigeria, we didn’t have anywhere to go, so first we lived with my grandparents. From the first day we moved into the house, I was making friends; no one ever brought up my colour. I think that children aren’t naturally racist at all. It’s more about society and culture and their parents. And the history as well. There was one kid who jumped out of the bushes once and insulted me, but I told my big brother, and the next day my brother jumped out at him. I used to read a lot back then as well, at least up until the age of fifteen. Whatever book I was reading, that would become my entire life. I was so engrossed in the process of reading.”
For years, the press would focus on Sade’s beauty – her “pellucid, pale-cocoa skin, a large, gently curved forehead, and wide-set eyes” was one atypical description – reasoning that her global citizen good looks were a principal reason for the group’s success. But as her reluctance to embrace any kind of celebrity would suggest – she is so reclusive that her friends nicknamed her Howie, after Howard Hughes – it’s never really been about optics.
It’s been about the music.
To glide through Sade’s back catalogue is to travel through a landscape of ambience – muted saxophones here, treated acoustic guitars there – almost as though you can’t feel yourself, or the music, moving. Any simplicity belies its complexity, something the band share with Steve Winwood, Marvin Gaye, Michael Franks and all gold star soul music.
“Musically, we all had common ground, because we all loved classic soul records,” says Andrew Hale, who, like Denman and Matthewman, has been with Sade since 1983. “We were all obsessed by soul, but we also loved imperfections. All the singers that Sade liked, they weren’t necessarily technically perfect, but you hear their life in their music. Equally, we were driven by punk because it was a sort of fuck-you DIY attitude.
“With hindsight you realise there was so much music that was an influence,” he adds. “We were listening to early hip hop and electro coming out of New York like Schoolly D and Mantronix which had a rawness that had a similar energy to punk. But alongside that I was obsessed by Talking Heads and YMO and Steely Dan so it was coming from all over. It was a combination of feeling that you could try anything but you had a respect for musicianship and dogged perseverance at the same time.”
Having released so few albums in their lifetime – six in nearly 40 years – it would perhaps be natural to assume that their fortunes can wax and wane, but Sade’s songs have been covered by everyone from Frank Ocean and Lauryn Hill to Herbie Hancock and the 1975, while they are frequently espoused by acts such as Beyoncé, FKA Twigs, Mabel, Kanye West and Taylor Swift (never forget that Drake has at least two Sade tattoos). One of the reasons they are so revered is because they obviously care passionately about what they do: hence a relatively small amount of output.
“If any kind of music was missing from the industry at the time it was soul,” says Denman. “Everything got a bit electronic and we weren’t into that at all. On our first Top of the Pops we looked like we’d landed from Mars, all dressed in black and we didn’t smile! We were of our time but not in time with what was going on around us. Our producer Robin Millar recognised that we had something that was a bit different if not special and we needed someone to guide us as opposed to moulding us. The title of our first album, Diamond Life, wasn’t meant to be about money and flash cars and upward mobility. It was a comment on living a hard life but a life that shone bright like a diamond.”
Even so, it sounded flash. Millar also produced the first two albums by Everything But the Girl: Tracey Thorn, the EBTG singer, said, “In love with simplicity and acoustic instruments, his skill was in arrangement – ‘congas in on the second verse’ as we used to joke with him. With Sade this was enormously successful.”
In the Eighties, the prefix of choice tended to be “designer”. This was everyone’s favourite retail tag, used in conjunction with everything from cars, double-barrelled suits and supermodels to personal organisers, kitchen fittings and vegetables, and was one we were all encouraged to embrace with gusto. “Designer” was originally used adjectivally to describe the notionally elitist designer jeans produced by Murjani, Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans, in the Seventies. It is often said that the company had actually wanted Jackie Onassis to lend the brand her name (and thus enormous added value), but when it could not get the former first lady, it called in the New York socialite. These garments were advertised on the sides of buses with the slogan, “The end justifies the jeans,” alongside photos of a line-up of Vanderbilt-clad (signed) bottoms.
The idea caught on, though, and soon the word “designer” was being stuck in front of everything, even pop groups.
Which is how Sade became the first designer pop group, a band who dared to whisper about the good life, the thread of the exotic. In various obvious ways Sade were the quintessential Eighties act, adored and vilified in equal measure because of it.
The thing about Sade was the fact that she, and the band, were obsessed with less as opposed to more, a distaste for wildness and flash that was reflected in Sade’s public persona. “It’s now so acceptable to be wacky and have hair that goes in 101 directions and has several colours, and trendy, wacky clothes have become so acceptable that they’re... conventional,” she said at the time. “From being at art college, I’ve always hated people that have the gall to think they’re being incredibly different when they’re doing something in a very acceptable way, something safe that they’ve seen someone else doing. I don’t look particularly wacky. I don’t like looking outrageous. I don’t want to look like everybody else.”
One of the reasons they were so successful was because they slotted nicely into “Quiet Storm” programming, the sexy, late-night radio format featuring soulful slow jams, smooth R&B and misty-eyed soul, pioneered in the mid-Seventies by DJ Melvin Lindsey at WHUR-FM, in Washington, D.C. The “Quite Storm” radio format reflected an emerging genre of smooth, romantic contemporary jazz-flavoured R&B. Named after the title track on Smokey Robinson’s 1975 Quiet Storm, it was a niche that turned into a substantial programming sector in the early Eighties, as artists like Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, Al Jarreau, Loose Ends and Sade became popular.
Political commentary was downplayed, while sex and lifestyle were pushed to the fore. Essentially a gentrification of soul, some critics found it emasculating, while others – many others – saw it as simply a reflection of the growing affluence of a black middle-class.
It wasn’t that Sade’s records were apolitical, it’s just that the social realism and the comment wasn’t shoved down your throat.
Looking back, it’s easy to think the Eighties were reduced to a neologism: cool. Everything was cool, or not. There was a complete anorexia of language. And Sade was accused of being complicit in this time and time again.
“I do care about clothes and glamour, but not because I’m a singer,” she said, in her defence. “When you have a photograph taken of you it’s a permanent thing so you make an effort. If someone comes up to you at a party with a camera you don’t then start scratching your ear unless it’s for a joke. If I have a picture taken of me for the cover of a magazine I don’t want to look gruesome because I have to look at it. The same way I don’t want to look gruesome walking about the streets. I pay attention to detail because it’s a frozen image that reports you. I have to project myself. But I only do that because that’s the way I want to be.
“I didn’t want to be signed up because I was glamorous, because I might make glamorous records.”
For Sade, it was always about the music. “When it comes to writing songs, I think I could be anywhere. Inspiration doesn’t come from sitting on a beach somewhere, and trying to write a song, it comes from moments that can arrive out of just about any situation you could ever find yourself in, from the most mundane to the most magical. If our music has to be labelled as anything, I would say it was soul, but we have our own feeling and our own sound, that have come from many things that have subconsciously influenced us. But soul is the common denominator.”
If you read old pieces about Sade, you’ll continually come across references to the band’s “signature” sound (which derives from a vague visual mosaic of big hoop earrings, polo neck jumpers, furrowed brows and studied cool), whereas in fact their longevity has been driven by the variety of their records, not the similarity. Just play the tunes in your head – “Smooth Operator”, “Soldier of Love”, “Your Love Is King”, “By Your Side”, “Hang On To Your Love”, “No Ordinary Love”, “The Sweetest Taboo”, “Paradise”, “Is It A Crime”, “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” etc. There is a consistency here, but only in quality, never in construction. One of the many extraordinary things about the noise Sade make is its diversity, a diversity that displays a subtlety that reveals itself the more time you spend with it. And the music is a reflection of character, most notably Sade’s.
There is only one instance when I can remember Sade deliberately putting herself front and centre, and I think I was partly responsible. In 1992, I was coming to the end of my time as the editor of Arena magazine – the first modern men’s title, which preceded GQ by two years. One of my last jobs was to commission a photographer to shoot Sade for our cover, to publicise the release of the band’s new album.
We chose Albert Watson for the job, and suggested that he shoot Sade naked, something she had never done before, at a time when magazines didn’t really do this kind of thing. The pictures were remarkable, although I didn’t actually see the results until one of the shots appeared on the cover of the resulting album, Love Deluxe, a few months later. At the magazine we were given a selection of rather anodyne headshots to choose from instead, and while I was momentarily irritated, the photograph that was chosen for the album cover has become one of the most iconic pictures ever taken of her – it’s also one of the few where Sade had used her beauty to shuffle outside her traditional comfort zone (the last time she was photographed for a fashion magazine, she wore Wellington boots).
On October 9th, all six Sade albums are set for reissue in a box set called This Far. As well as Diamond Life (1984), it includes Promise (1985), Stronger Than Pride (1988), Love Deluxe (1992), Lovers Rock (2000) and Soldier of Love (2010). All four members of the band remastered the albums at Abbey Road Studios.
“Remastering all the albums together was quite an emotional experience,” says Hale. “Listening to 60 songs that were written over a 30-year period you find yourself not only concentrating at the job at hand which is the sonics, the dynamics and so on, but of course you are transported back to the time of their conception and a flood of memories and feelings about that. Joy, pride, tears, wishing you had played something differently! It was a surprisingly powerful process.
“It’s strange, because most bands are forgotten about when there is a long hiatus between albums, but with us it seems the opposite, particularly in the last few years. I think a whole new generation have responded not only to the music but also Sade’s reserve and the wish to only say something when the time is right. In the silence the influence has only grown. Together with our audience, time has passed, lives have been lived, but essentially when it comes to making music nothing has changed – still wanting to write a better song, still easy in other’s company, still laughing at the same jokes. To be relevant not only to the audience that has grown with us but also a younger generation is hugely rewarding and not something we take for granted.”
Was there a reason why 2020 was chosen as the perfect time to look back?
“There wasn’t a specific date in mind when we embarked on the project – just the wish to collect a body of work together on vinyl, some of which wasn’t widely available at the time of release. Box sets sometimes can have a finality attached to them but for us the title This Far alludes to a point on the road, not the end of it.”
Sade haven’t toured for nine years, and in that time, demand has only grown.
“There’s no question that scarcity increases demand for an artist’s live performances, in this case Sade,” says John Reid, the EMEA President of Live Nation, one of the world’s most significant concert promoters. “She hasn’t toured for nine years now, and demand will be very high indeed when she does again. The lack of concerts in this year has led to substantial pent-up demand for concerts and festivals generally, which we are seeing in the extremely high retention rates (85% overall) of tickets bought for this year’s postponed shows and festivals that will play next year.”
What are Sade up to know? Recording, actually, in Gloucestershire, at Sade’s house, trying to finish an album and contemplating another tour. Hey, why not?! It’s only been ten years since the last one.
The record, when it finally drops, will no doubt be as quietly confounding as all the others, and I, for one, can’t wait.
Sade's six album vinyl box set is available via Amazon now. amazon.co.uk
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