No Ordinary Love: Sade Adu at 65
Celebrating the career of a soul sensation and her band
Born January 16, 1959 in Nigeria, Helen Folasade Adu’s fame is inextricably intertwined with the band she co-leads, Sade.
Of course, there’s always been a push to make the public aware that Sade is a band, not just a person, but here and now we’re honoring the person as she turns 65.
Sade’s parents are Nigerian economics teacher Adebisi Adu and English nurse Anne Hayes, who met in London and married in 1955, with Adu returning to Nigeria with Hayes. The couple divorced when Sade was four years old, at which point her mother returned to England. Sade studied fashion design in London, worked as a model, and joined the band Pride in 1981 as a backing vocalist despite her stage fright.
VIDEO: Pride “When You Can’t Back Down”
She and the band’s guitarist (and saxophonist), Stuart Matthewman, began writing songs together and soon began performing as a jazzier sub-unit during Pride shows with the band’s bassist and drummer, garnering so much attention with her song “Smooth Operator” that record labels were fighting to sign her. For 18 months she resisted out of loyalty to Pride, and even after relenting and signing with CBS in October 1983, she ensured that Pride members Matthewman, Andrew Hale (keyboards) and Paul Denman (bass) came with her as a unit under contract in 1984. Recruiting five additional musicians, some of whom ended up as nearly auxiliary Sade members, they recorded their debut album, Diamond Life, at the Power Plant that year in six weeks, a rate of speed the band’s fans might wish had kept up with future albums.
Supposedly Sade wrote the lyrics of “When Am I Going to Make a Living” when she had run out of money. (Her fortunes would quickly turn.) The only non-original was a cover (which ever since has brought more attention to that song) of soul artist Timmy Thomas’s quirky 1972 anti-war single “Why Can’t We Live Together” (the first hit to feature a rhythm machine but no drums, and otherwise powered by his Lowery organ—a demo that was deemed so good a full-band version that had been considered was abandoned. An entire article could be written about this amazing song.)
VIDEO: Sade “Smooth Operator”
Single “Your Love Is King” shot onto the charts in England and the United States, and “Smooth Operator,” the third single, was most successful, reaching #5 on the Billboard Hot 100. A video seen frequently on MTV helped that push, flaunting an image of suave elegance. In America, the style fit well in the Quiet Storm radio format (mellow R&B); it was jazzier and arguably more sophisticated, but the band’s influence had been American R&B, so there were plenty of similarities as well. The band quickly returned to the studio in 1985 and recorded the follow-up Promise, which retained the strengths of the debut and hit the charts worldwide with “The Sweetest Taboo,” with a bossa nova beat that reached back to the group Pride’s Latin influences. (In 1985 at Live Aid, the charity concert to benefit famine relief for Ethiopia, Adu was the only African-born artist. In 1986 Adu branched out from her band duties to take on an acting role in the acclaimed Absolute Beginners.)
VIDEO: Sade “The Sweetest Taboo”
In England, there was a mid-’80s wave of a new style of black R&B that Sade was sometimes lumped in with, but unlike many of them, Sade eschewed synthesizers. Rhythmically, bands such as Soul II Soul owed more to modern styles and hit harder; and singers such as Soul II Soul’s Caron Wheeler (who soon had a solo career as well) and Lisa Stansfield sang more aggressively than Sade. Unlike many peers with lighter voices, Sade did not resort to double-tracking her vocals, which was another aspect of her style that made her stand out, adding touches of authenticity and vulnerability to her voice. And Matthewman’s sax was also at the forefront of a trend that saw saxophonists featuring in pop music, but Matthewman’s smokier, classier approach (and tenor sax rather than soprano sax, which some listeners find to have a more nagging tone) again made the band stand apart.
That said, Sade’s third album Stronger Than Pride (1988) found Sade singing with greater oomph, and the band featuring deeper grooves than on their two earlier albums, as on “Paradise” (the band’s only single to hit #1 in the U.S. on Billboard’s Hot R&B chart) and “Turn My Back on You,” the latter suggesting they might have absorbed a bit of rhythm/drum sound influence from their compatriots and featuring a mighty bassline by Paul Denman.
VIDEO: Sade “Paradise”
The band was augmented for tours, and live was a funkier experience. I don’t know whether they deliberately toned down that aspect in the studio for radio play or if it was just a matter of being more exuberant in concert and taking advantage of the additional players. But hearing Sade in theaters (in New York, I heard her at Radio City Music Hall in 1988 and again in 1993, and hooray for the band’s judgment in playing there, where they sounded great, instead of Madison Square Garden), their sound was heftier and more party-ready as opposed to the more intimate sound heard on their albums, especially the classic first three.
It would be four years before Sade released another album in 1992’s Love Deluxe. It also found them mostly returning to the cooler sound of the first two albums (though with a more electronic/modern rhythm sound on “Bullet Proof Soul”), but even more polished. Their fans were not disappointed, as it was yet another multi-platinum seller and featured hit single “No Ordinary Love,” including the grittiest guitar solo in the Sade repertoire. Also worth noting is that Sade’s tendency to have at least one sociopolitical song on each album continued with “Feel No Pain,” released as a single despite the fact that her more serious songs tended not to do as well as her romantic songs. Adu clearly felt strongly about these tracks, and this was the most personal of them. In another vein, smooth jazz had become a radio format to be reckoned with, and the single “Kiss of Life” did well there.
VIDEO: Sade “No Ordinary Love”
Fans had to wait even longer for the next Sade LP, as there was a seven-year hiatus during which Adu became a mother and the other members kept active with the side project Sweetback. Lovers Rock (the title referring to a popular reggae style) was a triumphant return but also a significant stylistic evolution. The drum sound is a little more upfront in the mix, there’s a surprising dearth of sax, arrangements are very stripped down compared to the lushness of their previous work, and world music influences pop up more frequently than in the past. And there are two strongly political tracks: “Slave Song” and “Immigrant.”
Though 2002 brought a live album, it was another decade before the band released another studio project, creativity being slowed down now that the band didn’t even all live on the same continents, much less in the same city as in the beginning, meaning that they convened in the studio with very little written in advance. Nonetheless, the much-anticipated Soldier of Love—which was their first album to debut at #1 on the Billboard Hot 200 chart since 1985’s Promise—was highly successful both commercially and artistically. The title track single had a martial feel apt for the song’s theme, but surprising from this band.
VIDEO: Sade “Soldier of Love”
And that’s been it, aside from two isolated tracks for movie soundtracks. It was announced in 2018 that the band had begun work on its seventh studio album, and here we are six years later and it hasn’t appeared. But even if we have gotten all the Sade there will ever be, the band’s remarkable legacy is secure. Haters will always find the group too smooth, too lightweight, yet several generations have grown up on Sade’s music and adore it, with current acts citing it and sometimes sampling it.
She has been much honored in England, and not only by the music industry: in 2002 she was dubbed and Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) and promoted in 2017 to Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE).
Happy 65th birthday to you, Sade Adu.
His day job since 2013 has been running ESP-Disk, first under founder Bernard Stollman and, since Mr. Stollman's passing, doing his best to perpetuate and publicize the indiest indie label's unique legacy. He has produced albums by Matthew Shipp, Amina Baraka & The Red Microphone, Fay Victor, etc. Previously he worked at Black Saint Records, where he was present at the last studio session of Sun Ra. Other jobs have included editorial positions at Creem, The Big Takeover, and The New York Review of Records; inevitably, he also worked at a record store in Williamsburg (Sound Fix), where one night after closing, while drinking across the street at Mugs Ale House, he preached to some tourists about the greatness of jazz bagpiper Rufus Harley, which led to him reopening the store and selling them a copy of Harley's Re-Creation of the Gods. This is widely considered the most Holtje-esque occurrence ever.
(Photo by Dale Mincey)
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