Sade

It's been a decade since Sade first burst upon the international popular music scene. Since then, this uniquely multifaceted artist has become an indelible presence in the public eye and ear. As a media figure, her sleekly classy looks have graced many a magazine cover and contributed to a personal mystique as potent as any in modern popular culture. More signifi- cantly, her talents as a singer and songwriter have established her as one of today's most be- loved recording artists.

Her four albums -- all of which have placed in the Top Five on Billboard's Pop and R&B charts -- have sold more than eleven million copies in the U.S. and more than 27 million worldwide, while such singles as the Top Five Pop smashes "Smooth Operator" and "The Sweetest Taboo" and Top Ten R&B hits like "Never As Good As the First Time," "Nothing Can Come Between Us," "No Ordinary Love," "Kiss of Life" and the #1 R&B entry "Paradise" have become modern standards. Her work embodies timeless qualities of elegance, understatement, taste and passion, while remaining completely contemporary in sound and atti- tude.

Those qualities are present in abundance on the new collection entitled The Best Of Sade,which collects sixteen of the singer/songwriter's greatest performances, drawn from her four multi-platinum Epic releases. Also included is Sade's impassioned reading of Percy Mayfield's torchy R&B classic "Please Send Me Someone to Love," originally included on the soundtrack to the film Philadelphia, which makes its first appearance on a Sade album. Simul- taneous with the compilation disc's release is Sade Live, a 90-minute, 17-song home video of a 1993 Sade concert that captures the singer and her band at their live best.

As Stephen Holden observed in The New York Times, "In a pop climate obsessed with changing sounds and the language of the street, Sade has shown herself to be a pop classicist more interested in creating a durable body of work than in keeping up...[Her] best songs find fresh images for expressing time-honored sentiments and placing them in settings that distill particular moods with a special intensity."

Sade was born Helen Folesade Adu in Nigeria, the daughter of a Nigerian teacher and an English nurse. Her parents separated when she was four, and she moved with her mother to London's North End. In her teens, she worked a succession of part-time jobs from waitress to bike messenger, yet devoted all of her free time to music, inspired by the likes of Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Marvin Gaye and Al Green. Subsequently, Sade studied fashion design at St. Martin's College in London, and even saw some of her work shown in New York in conjunction with Spandau Ballet's first U.S. appearance. But her musical passions quickly overtook her budding fashion career, and soon Sade was performing as one of three vocalists in a promising jazz-funk collective known as Pride.

Early in 1984, Sade reemerged as lead singer and principal songwriter of the group bearing her name, accompanied by her former Pride cohorts Stuart Matthewman (sax and guitar), Andrew Hale (keyboards) and Paul Spencer Denman (bass). Their instrumental and compo- sitional talents brought additional form and color to Sade's words and melodies, providing a solid base for her natural vocal charisma. The team would continue to play and write together for the next decade. The public got its first taste of Sade's singular style with the 1984 debut single "Your Love Is King," which quickly went Top 10 in the U.K. and Europe. That song's uncontrived adult soulfulness stood in marked contrast to the trendy ephemera dominating the pop charts at the time, and struck an immediate chord with incurable romantics on both sides of the Atlantic. The single's promise was fulfilled in spades when Sade's first album, Diamond Life -- featuring "Your Love Is King" along with the Top Five smash "Smooth Operator" and the followup hit "Hang On to Your Love" -- was released the following year.

Diamond Life, which The New York Times' Stephen Holden called "the year's most impressive debut album," was honored with the British Phonographic Institute's 1985 Best Album award, while Sade took home a Grammy as Best New Artist. The disc spent an amazing 81 weeks on Billboard's album charts, and remains the all-time best-selling debut by a British female singer. Soon after, Sade made her film debut in Julien Temple's Absolute Beginners, performing the song "Killer Blow," which she co-wrote.

Sade's second longplayer, Promise, further established the artist's sensitively sultry vocal approach and seamless musical depth, maintaining and expanding its predecessor's soulful sound and lyrical considerations of love, life and loss. The album, which boasted such stellar tunes as the U.S. Top 5 hit "The Sweetest Taboo," "Never As Good As the First Time," "Jezebel" and "Is It A Crime," moved quickly to the Number One position on the American pop and R&B charts. Promise's success further established Sade, not particularly willingly, as a much sought- after media figure. After touring for eight months in Europe, the Far East and the U.S. (including a triumphant run at New York's Radio City Music Hall), not to mention benefit shows for Live Aid and the African National Congress, she took a much-needed sabbatical from public life. To escape the glare of publicity, Sade relocated to Madrid, far from the media circus that threatened to overshadow her music. The singer, who rarely does interviews and is seldom spotted in public when she's not actually performing, staunchly resists "the myth that I'm a shy, reclusive diva. I'm a diva, of course. But I'm not shy or reclusive. I just spend my time with people rather than journalists."

The artist emerged from her self-imposed exile with 1988's Stronger Than Pride, the first Sade album to be completely produced and arranged by the vocalist and her band. The album -- featuring songs like "Paradise," "Nothing Can Come Between Us" and "Love Is Stronger Than Pride" -- demonstrated the ongoing vitality of Sade's timeless approach in the face of ever-shifting pop fads, and its commercial success demonstrated that the singer's popularity remained as strong as ever.

Sade spent most of 1988 on the road, playing to packed house in Europe, Australia and Japan. She also embarked upon her first full-scale arena tour of North America. Those shows found the singer and her band performing at new peaks of confidence and intensity. Upon returning from the road, Sade bought and virtually rebuilt an old house in London; there she constructed the basement studio where she and her cohorts would soon map out the themes and directions of her fourth album, Love Deluxe, which continued Sade's unbroken streak of critical and commercial success.

Upon its November 1992 release, Love Deluxewas welcomed as Sade's most adventurous and ambitious effort to date, uncompromising in the emotional honesty and musical integrity of such numbers as "No Ordinary Love," "Kiss of Life," "Like A Tattoo," "Cherish The Day" and "Pearls." In a four-star review, Us magazine praised the album's "spare polyrhythmic flow, and the forthright smarts of Sade's songwriting. She touches raw nerves with silky- smooth vocal finesse, whether her subject is the everyday wear of unemployment, the generalized fear of AIDS or the vagaries of committed romance." Love Deluxe-- which ended up spending a remarkable 90 weeks on the Billboard charts -- was followed by another highly successful touring in the U.S., Europe and Japan; meanwhile, "No Ordinary Love" was featured prominently in the hit movie Indecent Proposal.

Now, the most memorable moments of Sade's first decade of stardom are brought together in one sleek, seamless package. The result is The Best Of Sade: a comprehensive portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist who remains one of popular music's most treasured voices.

"Epic and 550 Music" Reg. U.S. Patent & Trademark Office

11/10/1996 12:00 -by- cab