The Beauty of British Song: Sade

The one and only.

I can't believe it's been, as of this writing, twenty-five years since Sade's first album, Diamond Life, was released in the United States. She should be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but there's likely only room for one single-named pop singer from the eighties (the talentless American), so the idea of Sade getting in is probably just a pipedream.

Anyway. . . . Sade was born Helen Folasade Adu to a Nigerian father and a British mother in pre-independence Nigeria and raised in Britain, where she went to college and joined a soul band while in school. She had been studying design, but fate intervened and she turned to music instead. She drew favorable comparisons to Roberta Flack (agreement there) with her first big hit single, "Smooth Operator."


Subsequent albums included Promise, Stronger Than Pride, and Love Deluxe, which respectively spawned the hits "The Sweetest Taboo,""Paradise," and "No Ordinary Love."

No ordinary singer, she, Sade has been very reclusive over the years. Her 2010 release Soldier of Love was her first album in ten years and only her second since 1992.