Sade - Queen of Cool

The world's most famous African pop artist is probably Helen Folasade Adu, aka Sade. Born in Ibadan, Nigeria, to an English mother and a Nigerian father, she moved to Essex, Britain, with her mother at age four after their separation. Despite her strictly English formal education, her African roots were never entirely erased. For this reason, she grew up listening exclusively to black-soul music, especially those artists for whom religious faith and a tragic dimension were central, from Curtis Mayfield to Marvin Gaye, and above all Nina Simone, who became a kind of hypothetical link to that archaic yet evocative homeland whose hieratic slowness marked the life of all its inhabitants.

Despite her great passion for soul, becoming a singer wasn't actually part of Sade's plans, and indeed she never took singing or music lessons during her teenage years. It was during her college days, while studying fashion design at St. Martin's School of Art in London (and briefly working as a model), that she began to consider a career in the music business, after breaking the ice by performing for the usual group of friends. It may seem like an irrelevant detail, but fashion, her African origins and her interest in black-soul music would go on to become the basic ingredients of her style and of the imagery evoked by her music.

In the early Eighties Sade began her career by forming a latin-funk group, Ariva, later renamed Pride, proving herself a refined r'n'b performer and songwriter. It was during this period that she first recorded "Smooth Operator", which within a couple of years would become one of her most famous singles. Pride, however, were still far from the kind of sound she had in mind, so she left them, taking with her the best musicians, the ones most attuned to r'n'b: bassist Paul S. Denman, guitarist and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman, and keyboardist Andrew Hale.

She thus formed the Sade project, and in 1984 released her debut album Diamond Life. Her r'n'b stood out sharply from that of other black artists of the time, whose rhythms tended to be more synthetic, largely the product of drum machines, with a very strong sensual and erotic component; even the "devout" Marvin Gaye, in the final stretch of his career, became the quintessential soul artist whose music conjured languid erotic atmospheres. Sade, by contrast, enchants with more sophisticated melodies, songs steeped in Motown soul but also in more traditional, white pop, where jazz and a calm, seductive groove became the foundation for alluring samba rhythms, as in "Smooth Operator" and "When Am I Going To Make A Living", or delicate love songs such as "Your Love Is King", chosen as the lead single and destined to become one of the biggest pop hits of the Eighties.

Dominating everything is Sade Adu's deep, mesmerizing voice, which, bolstered by other hit songs like the more danceable "Hang On To Your Love" and a cover of Timmy Thomas's "Why Can't We Live Together", would see her debut reap excellent sales figures and overwhelmingly positive reviews.

After winning the Grammy for "Best New Artist" in 1985, Time put her on its cover with the title "Queen of Cool" — a term also used musically to describe everything "calm" and "relaxing" — and her fame grew so immense that the public came to perceive Sade not as a band (which in fact remained unchanged and utterly loyal over the years) but as a solo project. Although she wasn't a pop artist in the strictest sense, a genre in which iconography is essential, Sade became a trend-setter for a broader musical and stylistic revival built around "old-style" Forties atmospheres; she was even cast in a role in Julian Temple's 1986 film "Absolute Beginners" (alongside David Bowie and Patsy Kensit), but above all she became the leading artist — and the only one to make lasting inroads into the American market as well — of that distinctly English soul movement that also included Everything But The Girl, Matt Bianco and Style Council (aptly dubbed cool-jazz-pop), and which, passing through Simply Red and Lisa Stansfield, would flow into acid jazz at the dawn of the following decade.

At the end of 1985 came her second work, Promise: the mood grows even more elegant and refined (with the possible exception of "Fear", a rather kitsch melodrama in a Spanish-tinged sauce), the jazz quotient rises, but while the softness of the new songs showcases Sade's interpretive gifts more than ever ("Is It A Crime" and "Jezebel" rank among the finest performances of her entire career), it also blankets much of the album in a faint soporific haze that makes for a less effortless listen than the debut; the three musicians' playing remains top-notch, but some songs have become so soft that they feel elusive, almost intangible.

Nonetheless, the public would go on granting the band worldwide success, and tracks like "Never As Good As The First Time" (practically a duet with Leroy Osbourne, from then on the band's official backing vocalist) and "The Sweetest Taboo" — both among the album's most rhythmically driven moments — boosted sales of the whole LP, which, although it didn't match the total sales of its predecessor, cemented Sade's fame and took her to the top of the American album top ten. And it was precisely the album's first single, the Caribbean-flavored "The Sweetest Taboo", that would rival "Smooth Operator" for the title of her biggest U.S. hit, holding the record for years for pop radio airplay and even being paid tribute by Prince two decades later, when he referenced it in his (far less memorable) charity single for Hurricane Katrina victims, "S.S.T." (an acronym for "Sade's Sweetest Taboo").

Live, too, Sade's band racked up one success after another; their performances proved just as evocative and meticulously crafted, and both on the mini-tour following Diamond Life and on the world tour that followed Promise, Sade enchanted her audiences. The first criticisms, however, began to surface too: quite a few argued that live, the weak link in the chain was actually her, the vocalist — too cold and not fully in command of the stage, less engaging than the music played by her three bandmates and than her studio recordings.

The world tour was followed in 1988 by the release of Stronger Than Pride, which once again confirmed the band's class and commercial success. Some critics, however, began to show signs of impatience with a musical formula that was increasingly described as mannered and predictable by now. In truth, the album does contain new elements and a different attitude compared to the previous work: the jazz component present since the debut is almost entirely absent, everything sounds leaner and more appealing, less pretentious. The rhythms occasionally become more modern and aggressive (listen to "Turn My Back On You" or "Give It Up"), decidedly in step with contemporary r'n'b, and above all, for the first time, the overall mood turns warmer and more sensual, as shown by the singles "Nothing Can Come Between Us", the enveloping, exotic "Love Is Stronger Than Pride", or her new big hit, the even sunnier "Paradise".

By the end of the Eighties, Sade and her band deserve great credit for having made popular around the world, crossing cultural and racial boundaries, an "adult" r'n'b built from vintage jazz and other sounds of bygone eras — ones that many of their peers seemed never to have even heard — while still managing to sound current and credible, never like pastiche.

Four years would pass before Sade's lineup reappeared on the record market, and when Love Deluxe was released at the end of '92, many were surprised by how much they had evolved. Rather than ride the acid-jazz wave, as might have been expected, or simply recycle the old formula, Sade returned with an album that doesn't renounce the calm of her Eighties work but heightens its dramatic tones, pares the arrangements down to the bone (the touching "Pearls", almost a cappella over a bed of reverb and strings), and bets everything on rarefied atmospheres, as in the instrumental "Mermaid", underscoring the songs with sinuous, more rhythmic electronic inlays that, rather than clashing with the delicacy of her singing, make it more hypnotic and evocative than ever (the singles "No Ordinary Love" and "Cherish The Day" are the most representative moments of this new sound).

An elegiac work, in both its construction and presentation, the best since the debut and certainly the most mature and sensual, listening to which one gets the impression that, for the first time, her music looked forward rather than to the past, now fully aware of its own means. Many argue that, beyond its beauty and the enormous success it achieved (thanks to other memorable singles like "Feel No Pain" and the more classic "Kiss Of Life"), the album's greatest point of interest is that it sowed, a couple of years ahead of time, the seeds of what would become one of the most important phenomena of the Nineties: trip-hop.

After the triumphant tour in support of Love Deluxe, also captured on video, Sade took one of the longest breaks in the history of multi-million-selling pop, second in length only to those of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, who curiously both went on stand-by in that very same period. A full eight years would pass before a new album of theirs was released — years during which Sade withdrew completely from the scene to raise a family, while Matthewman, Denman and Hale kept making music under the name Sweetbox, pushing their funk blend to extremes by fusing it with dub and collaborating with the likes of Talvin Singh and the then-rising star of nu-soul, Maxwell.

The wait for Sade was only partly interrupted at the end of '94 with the release of The Best Of Sade, a compilation featuring nearly all her singles ("Feel No Pain" is inexplicably left out in favor of a lesser track, again taken from Love Deluxe, the acoustic ballad "Like A Tattoo") but no new material. The compilation is nonetheless worth noting for including the single versions of "Smooth Operator" and "Never As Good As The First Time", both punchier than their album counterparts, as well as "Please Send Me Someone To Love", a Percy Mayfield cover recorded the previous year for the Philadelphia soundtrack.

When Lovers Rock finally saw the light of day in November 2000, few would have bet on Sade's ability to revive past glories — in the world of pop, eight years is more than enough to be forgotten by the mainstream audience. Instead, singles like the lulling "By Your Side" and the bittersweet "King Of Sorrow" were captivating from the very start, winning over an audience that (especially in the United States) would embrace the album so warmly that its sales would even surpass those of Love Deluxe.

The new effort stylistically departs from the previous work, picking up the more acoustic sounds and warm colors of Stronger Than Pride but rendering them less polished and mannered, more full-blooded; the beats, modern and deep, indeed nod toward the r'n'b sounds then in vogue (Erikah Badu and, indeed, Maxwell) but without ever sounding pandering. Once again Sade seems perfectly at ease in this new guise, able to range, with her usual elegance, from thoroughly nu-soul numbers like the title track or "Somebody Already Broke My Heart" to harsher pieces like "Slave" and "Immigrant", which for the first time introduce African roots and tribal flavors into her music. And while tracks that are, in any case, more personal in their themes than in the past — like "All About Our Love" (about pregnancy) — sound like instant classics, overall the record is less immediate than usual, yet equally captivating.

The following "Lovers Tour" would prove to be yet another success; for the first time, critics were unanimous in recognizing Sade's unexpected growth as a live performer, and as a seal on this second youth, their first official live album, Lovers Live, was released in 2002.

But Sade was by now an increasingly unusual popstar, more devoted to her family than to the cult of fame, so, even though her success showed no sign of waning, she once again withdrew into private life, and for another eight years there was practically no news of her.

Soldier Of Love would be the title chosen by Sade for their umpteenth comeback, and, ten years on from their previous studio record, they would pick up more or less where they had left off, even simplifying and softening what had already been offered on Lovers Rock, as if only two years had passed rather than ten. Soldier Of Love indeed features similar moods, the same warm, full-bodied sounds, the same ethnic nuances, though further enhanced by Sade's voice, which had become decidedly more expressive and deep, at times almost dark; even melodically, several songs could pass for contemporaries of the earlier ones. The element of surprise is entrusted solely to the first single released to promote the album, the martial title track, which, though beguiling, is their least catchy and immediate single ever: its blend of beats in line with the current urban-pop scene and electronic echoes of their early-90s sound, seasoned with an unusual, vaguely western atmosphere, in fact represents very little of the rest of the record, which instead rests almost entirely on heartfelt ballads, dominated by acoustic guitar, as if the intention were to rewrite not one but many new versions of "By Your Side".

This is probably Sade's most romantic, singer-songwriter-like record, the one where, more than ever, it truly feels like listening to a solo album rather than a band's (this time kept on a tight leash), but when one's ear catches the unchanged class with which Sade caresses impeccable, textbook slow numbers like "The Moon And The Stars" and "Long Hard Road" (accompanied by a lovely string crescendo) or an extremely elegant torch song, "In Another Time", the likes of which hadn't been heard in a long while, there's little room left for disappointment.

The album proved to be yet another commercial success for the band and its reclusive leader, who then decided to embark on a new world tour just over a year after its release. At the same time, a new compilation was also put together, The Ultimate Collection, this time a double album also featuring a couple of remixes (courtesy of Neptunes and Jay-Z) and as many as three unreleased tracks, none of which is truly memorable: an acoustic cover of Thin Lizzy's "Still In Love With You", a "Love Is Found" that wouldn't have sounded out of place next to the title track of the previous record, and the piano ballad "I Would Never Have Guessed".

Once the successful run of concerts had come to an end, a new live album/video, Bring Me Home Live 2011, was also released in the spring of 2012, as the ideal conclusion to yet another acclaimed return to the scene.

Even though some of her works have been polished and mannered to excess, the Anglo-Nigerian singer and her group deserve credit for having left their mark on English soul of the Eighties, and for having introduced into English pop music rhythms on which groups like Incognito and Brand New Heavies would build their careers, as well as démodé musical ideas later "exhumed", in a subdued and dark key, by the Bristol trip-hop of Portishead, Tricky and Massive Attack.

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