Sade Fan Site

Her first single, 'Your Love Is King,' became a top ten hit. And quite abruptly Sade herself became an icon. If during the Eighties, she seemed to embody newly discovered values of aspiration and elegance, there was, and remains, something more fundamental to account for Sade's popularity. Her music has a resilience that belies its apparent softness. It stays in the heart and in the head long after the last notes have fallen silent, in the same way that the embers of a love affair never truly go cold.  That's why, just a year after the first single, she became one of the few recording artists ever to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Because from the very beginning her music transcended the pop moment.

Indeed, with the release in 1984 of her debut 'Diamond Life', Sade was speaking to a global audience. Featuring hit singles 'Your Love Is King', 'Smooth Operator' and 'Hang On To Your Love' , the album spent 98 weeks on the UK charts and 81 weeks on the Billboard charts. Sade received a BPI award for Best Album and a Grammy for Best New Artist. After 'Diamond Life' came 1985's 'Promise', the rich, evocative second album that yielded hits such as 'Is It A Crime' and 'The Sweetest Taboo',  which has become one of the most played songs in radio history. Like it's predecessor, this too was an international multi-platinum success.

Three years later, she recorded 'Stronger Than Pride', which produced memorable singles like 'Paradise', 'Love Is Stronger Than Pride' and 'Nothing Can Come Between Us'. Her group has always attracted a diverse, multi-racial audience who are drawn by the band's open-minded approach to music. Sade have created dance floor classics, songs for film soundtracks, radio favourites and late night love anthems, at the same time refusing to be classified simply as a pop group, an r&b act, a soul band or anything else as one-dimensional. Instead, like the multi-cultural London streets the group hails from, their music has thrived by embracing diversity as a guiding principle.

She didn't fit into the established scheme of things where female artists were eye candy in a male driven record industry. She has dismantled many of the old music business ways, taking the power of creative control away from the men in suits and entrusting it to the musicians themselves. Sade and the band quite promptly became a fully functioning autonomous unit with a firm grip on every aspect of the recording process. Sade always determined to maintain a private life. She seldom gave interviews. For those who cared to listen she felt there is enough of her, and her life, in her songs. This aspect of Sade's character so annoyed the british media and the rumour machine frequently swung into action.

In 1980 Sade met Lee Barrett, the manager of a Latin-soul group Ariva, who was to subsequently become her manager. He famously asked Sade if she could sing and she found that she could. She joined Ariva despite failing the audition and began to write her own songs. She very much enjoyed the process of songwriting, and in many ways, living hand to mouth out the back of tour bus, this sustained her.

In 1981 Sade moved into the top floor of a disused fire station in north London, with a large record collection. This was where many of the songs on the forthcoming debut album were written.

Sade seldom records new albums and it could appear that each new album is in some way her comeback from retirement. Of course, the sheer length of time between last Sade albums could provide grounds for such a misconception. But the real reason is that Sade albums aren't products that come around with punctuality of trains, they are individual pieces of work that require both a purpose and a reason. From album to album her songwriting matured, progressed and shifted away from the jazzy soul, and her production skills also grew from strength to strength. Her fashion stylist of minimum fuss for maximum effect applies that same principal to her music. "If you have nothing to say, don't say it!"

More for us Sade, MORE ! Alas, it's not to be. In her last album "Lovers Rock" Sade is much less interested in throwing matches on the gasoline-soaked landscape of new love than she is in rummaging through the ashes of early love and offering a more mature analysis of what can happen and what it may all mean.

It's a natural progression, at least. And although she still looks like the young Sade on the outside, it's an older, apparently wiser, somewhat sadder, certainly smarter Sade in this introspective jazz-funk outing.

And that sound. Her whispery, flatline voice against a killer group of latin jazz funksters and the hired gun percussionists. Her songs were fixated on the starts of relationships, those heady, uncontrollable hormone hits of attraction, exploration, discovery, joy, transfixion. And the band pumps it out like a waterbed on steroids, waves of cool heat flowing out and around in hypnotic, head-bopping syncopation.
"Second time is not quite what it seems. It's never as good as the first time. Second time will never do the dream."

"Your love is king."

Now Sade lives in her house in London. She cherishes her private life more anything else and prefers the company of old friends to the glitterati lifestyle. She likes to drive fast her old mercedes and is trying to quit smoking for a long. And she still stays up very late most nights, a habit that is proving to be quite tiring with a beautiful young daughter to attend to.

No homage to Sade can be totally complete. The impact of her soulful songs and lyrics have truly impacted the whole world in many marvelous ways.

We hope she sees this tribute and we wish her all the best of luck. January 16th is her birthday.