Even the album's title feels coded: It would be beautiful to shine bright, but I want to feel indestructible.īecause things are falling apart. Haven't I told you before, she sings: We're hungry for a life we can't afford. This is 1986, and though Sade's second album, Promise, is everywhere, I crave the multiple entendres of Diamond's 'Cherry Pie.' There's grit - 'Sally,' 'Frankie's First Affair' - in the way Sade names names. The twirling cassette, from a girl named Sade, is called Diamond Life. I am abandoned and loudness is a weighted blanket. My head is between a landline and my booming system. I am jealous of his freedom yet refuse to leave my neatly made secondhand mattress. The boy who had just as much sex with me as I with him has no decision in his belly, and he hasn't called. There is no clue as to what next Tuesday will bring, let alone the rest of this one, when the Challenger explodes every minute on the mute TV. When I am near 21, and poor, and pregnant. I've tried to say how it was, in those boombox times. The artist released her fifth album, Lovers Rock, in November 2000. Sade were a product of the pre-acid house London club scene dominated by the Wag, so it’s probably just a coincidence that 1988’s Stronger Than Pride felt distinctly Balearic: Love Is Stronger Than Pride sounds like a song glimpsed through a heat haze, slivers of cooing synth and Spanish guitar topped with an exquisitely airy vocal.Sade performs live at New Jersey's PNC Bank Arts Center in 2001. No one does small-hours heartbreak quite like Sade and Bullet Proof Soul might be the supreme example: a vocal that’s yearning and controlled a lyric that suggests bad karma will get the errant object of her desires a perfectly understated arrangement of meandering sax, melancholy piano and drum machine. Both could be misread as a paean to 80s greed and Thatcherite self-improvement, rather than a damning critique: their protagonists are at the bottom of the heap, scuffling to survive in an increasingly uncaring society. When am I Going to Make Living? is Sade’s equivalent of the Pet Shop Boys’ Opportunities. The band Sade most obviously resembled weren’t their quiet storm contemporaries, but early 80s Roxy Music: you can hear it on Smooth Operator, where a glossy luxe-feeling sound coats a lyric that offers an ambiguous depiction of its jet-setting subject, its jaded tone clearer in the full-length album version: “Heaven help him when he falls.” 7. There was a time when the idea of Sade writing and recording a dubby roots reggae track would have seemed nuts, but it turned out to be a genre to which they were remarkably well suited: Slave Song is terrific, the live version with roots legends the Abyssinians on backing vocals possibly even better. The original is gorgeous – Sade’s voice floating over a beatless, barely-there backing of synths and pulsing bass – but the killer version of the track may be the Musk Men’s bootleg 1995 remix I Never Thought, which transforms the song into introverted, small-hours deep house.

Both great, but the latter is the pick: drum-free, acoustic guitar, flecks of harp and wordless backing vocals that make it that rarest of things, an eerie Sade track. Sade’s only new releases in the past decade have been songs for films: stark ballad The Big Unknown from Widows and Flower of the Universe from Disney’s A Wrinkle in Time. Immigrant may be its most powerful expression, simmering with anger, filled with small, but sharply observed detail: “They gave him his change, but didn’t want to touch his hand.” 15. Sade’s music always had a bleak social realist strain that belied the popular misconception of them as a tasteful yuppie soundtrack. ‘No one does small-hours heartbreak quite like Sade.’ Photograph: David Graves/Rex/Shutterstock 16. Babyfather (2010)įar closer to lovers rock than anything on the Sade album named after the genre, Babyfather is melodically beautiful, bedecked with Jamaican-accented backing vocals and given a slight shimmer of darkness by the sense that the song’s narrator may be reassuring her daughter of her father’s undying fealty in the absence of any hard evidence.

Lovers Rock’s closer is hushed and intimate – just an organ and occasional piano – but incredibly potent: weirdly, the rich, multitracked vocals and the atmosphere of sadness tinged with flickers of hope seem to prefigure the work of James Blake a decade later. It’s Only Love That Gets You Through (2000) The cool-but-impassioned vocal and minimalist slo-mo funk of Cherish the Day was sampled on the late Nipsey Hussle’s If U Were Mine, a tribute to how the singer, in Rakim’s words, “took out even the hardest hood at the knees”. Sade’s hip-hop fandom is legendary – Drake, Rick Ross, Missy Elliott and Jay-Z are stans.

Sade ill be there