Helen Folasade Adu was natural in Ibadan, Nigeria. Her mother was Nigerian, a university teacher of economics; her mother Anne was an English nurse. The pair met in London while he was studying at the LSE and affected to Nigeria shortly after getting married. When their daughter was born, nobody locally was fain to visit her by her English name, and a truncated translation of Folasade stuck.
Then, when she was four, her parents separated, and her father brought Sade and her older brother Banji back to England, where they initially lived with their grandparents just outside Colchester, Essex.
She listened to American soul music, particularly the wave led in the 1970's by artists such as Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, and Bill Withers. As a teenager, she saw the Jackson 5 at the Rainbow theatre in Finsbury Park, where she worked behind the bar at weekends. "I was more fascinated by the interview than by anything that was passing on on the stage. They'd attracted kids, mothers with children, old people, white, black. I was genuinely moved. That's the audience I've always aimed for."
Music was not her first choice as a career. She studied fashion at St Martin's School Of Art and simply began singing after two old school friends with a fledgling group approached her to help them out with the vocals.
Somewhat to her surprise, she found that patch the singing made her nervous, she enjoyed writing songs. Two days after she had overcome her stage fright and was regularly singing back up with a North London Latin funk band called Pride. "I used to get on stage with Pride, like, shaking. I was terrified. But I was driven to try my best, and I decided that if I was release to sing, I would talk the way I speak, because it's crucial to be yourself."
Sade served a long apprenticeship on the route with Pride. For 3 years, from 1981, she and the other seven members of the band toured the UK, often with her driving. Pride's shows featured a segment in which Sade fronted a quartet that played quieter, jazzier numbers. One of these, a song called Smooth Operator, which Sade had co-written herself, attracted the care of record company talent scouts. Soon, everybody wanted to mark her, but not the lie of Pride. Obstinately loyal to her friends in the group, Sade refused to depart. 18 months after she relented and signed to Epic records - on discipline that she took with her the three band mates who still be the entity known as Sade: saxophonist Stuart Matthewman, keyboard player Andrew Hale, and bassist Paul Denman.
Sade's first single, Your Passion Is King, became a top 10 British hit in February 1984, and with that her life, and that of the band, changed forever. The unstressed, understated elegance of the music in alignment with her look - unspecifically exotic and effortlessly sophisticated - launched Sade as the female side of the style decade. Magazines queued to put her on the cover. "It wasn't marketing," she says, wearily. "It was only me. And I wasn't trying to raise an image."
At the sentence of her first album, Diamond Life, her real life was anything but diamond-like. Sade was life in a converted fire station in Finsbury Park with her then boyfriend, the style journalist Robert Elms. There was no heating, which meant that she had to get dressed in bed. The loo, which used to ice over in winter, was on the fire escape. The bathroom was in the kitchen. "We were freezing, basically." For the end of the 1980's, as the foremost three albums sold by the million around the world, Sade toured more or less constantly. For her this remains a point of principle. "If you but do TV or video then you get a creature of the book industry. All you're doing is selling a product. It's when I get on stage with the set and we meet that I know that people know the music. I can find it. Sometimes I long to be on the road. The feeling overwhelms me."
Intrusive media interest in her secret life has inspired a continuing reluctance on her voice to enter in the promotional game. Having been travestied in print on many occasions, Sade rarely gives interviews. "It's terrible this Fleet Street mentality that if something seems childlike and easy, there must be something fishy going on."
Sade's schedule and tour dates:
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