Happy birthday Sade! Look back at our 1985 feature on the sophisticated singer
and other British chart toppers, Sade shuns such excesses as synthesizers, glittery clothes and lavish videos. Instead, she represents cool understatement, an elegance based on absolute simplicity. Sade’s smooth, husky voice and her penchant for backless black cocktail dresses recall nothing so much as the great New York jazz clubs of the Thirties and Forties, while her band’s stripped-down arrangements have more to do with jazz than with rock & roll.
“We don’t sit around and say, ‘Right, we’re going to create this sound.’ It happens too naturally for us to even intellectualize about. When we create a song, it’s just . . . the way it goes. Our music is clearly pop, because it’s easy to understand. All the songs I’ve ever loved – even jazz stuff – are things that tell a story, like [Roland Kirk’s] “The Inflated Tear.’ And [, who always tells a simple story. It’s all simple and unpretentious, and that’s what music is to me.
After Sade’s mother completed her nursing-school studies, she moved the family to its own house. That, too, proved to be a temporary dwelling. When Sade was ten, her mother married “a mad butcher,” and the family moved to Holland-on-Sea, “a rent-a-go-cart seaside town, full of poodles and old ladies.”
The turning point for Sade came in 1983, when the band was engaged for a concert at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The show was cosponsored byBritain’s high-gloss music and fashion magazine. Gussied-up technopop was at its zenith – but when a coolly elegant Sade, backed only by Matthewman and a rhythm section, breathed her confident, authoritative rendition of the torchy “Cry Me a River,” the place erupted with the joy of trendies who’d found their next wave.
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