Sade, the band, could have sneaked a Situationist manifesto into its material while everyone sat still, hypnotized by the mystery of Sade, the person. With nothing to go on but her light English accent, it was difficult to tell where she was from, making her a candidate to represent populations who usually didn’t get their own global pop stars. She has pellucid, pale-cocoa skin, a large, gently curved forehead, and wide-set eyes, which, in 1983, made her look as close to a global citizen as anyone we’d seen. Sade’s beauty, though, is not simply a matter for the gawkers and the sales department there are very few faces like hers. What is the formula for her success?ĭiscussing the looks of a female pop star always feels a bit reactionary even the most evenhanded, politically committed critic probably doesn’t do it as often for male pop stars. In this commercially unstable moment, when a popular album is lucky to spend one week at the top, that’s no minor feat, especially for a fifty-one-year-old woman who is entirely absent from the gossip centrifuge. With her group-the saxophonist Stuart Matthewman, the keyboardist Andrew Hale, and the bassist Paul Denman-Sade has created one of the most profitable catalogues in pop, while appearing in public so rarely that her friends have nicknamed her Howie, after Howard Hughes.Įxactly how much do people want the Sade sound? The new Sade album, “Soldier of Love,” separated from the group’s last studio release by ten years (in pop years, many generations), spent three weeks at No. Signed to Epic Records on the strength of the appropriately titled song “Smooth Operator,” Sade and her band became the benchmark for smoothness. Several musicians in Pride became her backing band, and together they went by the name she used for herself-Sade, pronounced “sha-DAY,” to the consternation of radio d.j.s across the world. Martins School of Art, in London, Adu joined a band called Pride, which played Latin soul and various iterations of a genre that would later be called acid jazz, though it was anything but acerbic. When she was four, her parents split and she moved to England with her mother, spending most of her childhood in the seaside resort of Clacton-on-Sea. Sade was born Helen Folasade Adu in Nigeria, to a Nigerian academic and an English nurse, in 1959. One act in particular understood the potential of going quiet, and eventually made its lead singer the most successful female solo artist in British history, with more than fifty million albums sold.Īs breezy as they sound, Sade’s songs explore the heavier lifting inside love: commitment, consistency, friendship. It was several years before the release of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” and years further from cabaret retro becoming a calcified style. In this overheated context, playing mellifluous, unthreatening versions of soul and jazz could surprise, maybe even shock. Their style was a marked departure from the dominant sounds of the charts: Madonna’s blocky drum machines and the noisy guitar bands of the third or fourth wave after punk. In the early eighties, groups like Everything but the Girl and the Style Council developed a hybrid kind of pop that drew from the more plangent side of soul and jazz-think of an area triangulated by the Delfonics, Dave Brubeck, and Chet Baker. This brief moment should be credited largely to the English. It sounds implausible now, but there was a time when soft jazz was almost radical.
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