‍Sade are no ordinary band. American hip hop royalty always knew this, as did the Balearic boys and girls vibing outside Café del Mar. New York’s house mafia understood the soulful  sophistication inherent in their music and for a generation of Black British youth they were the living embodiment of their dreams and aspirations. The band (and they’ve always been a band), fronted by the glamorous Sade Adu, have also been one of the most misunderstood acts of recent times. As they celebrate the 40th anniversary of their debut album (and with new music in the offing), Joe Muggs delves deep into their history, their legacy and discovers how they’ve influenced a raft of modern-day musicians…

‍

Sade began on the dancefloor. “We used to go to Le Beat Route on a Friday night,” remembers house legend and old school soulboy Terry Farley, “and Sade herself was always there as one of the club kids – I didn’t know her, but everyone recognised her, she was the coolest girl, the one that all the girls I knew wanted to be. Then we found out she was in a band, and someone went: ‘Oh, they’re playing at The Wag.’ They did a showcase upstairs at The Wag, in the window where Bowie did his video (the ‘Blue Jean’ clip shot by Julien Temple). There she was, looking amazing, dressed in fringed jacket, halfway between California and what soul girls were wearing in London. I think she represented where London was going in that era. A lot of stars came out of that club, but she was by far the coolest.”

Le Beat Route is significant here. The Soho dive was almost as much of a nexus for the New Romantic generation as The Blitz club – but although pre-fame Wham! and Spandau Ballet were regulars (it’s namechecked in Spandau’s debut ‘Chant No. 1’), the music played by DJs like Steve Lewis and Rusty Egan was heavyweight and underground. A look back at the playlists of 1979-82 shows a smattering of jazz-funk and rockabilly, but the overwhelming majority was cutting-edge dance music: stacks of Ze Records, Arthur Russell, François K, early rap, Trouble Funk – stuff that could still tear up a discerning party now. 

The attitudes and fashion may have been aspirational, the poses arch, but this was a serious dance club for serious dancers, multicultural and musically voracious and open-minded. It’s notable that as well as the pop stars in the making, future underground movers and shakers like Farley, Mark Moore and fabric founder Keith Reilly were also regulars there.

All of this is worth noting because from the moment in 1982, when they formed out of the ashes of Pride, the jazz-funk band Sade Adu was backing singer for, Sade were seen very differently in different quarters. As ‘Diamond Life’ shot them to global success in 1984, to large sections of both the mainstream and alternative culture they became a watchword for background music for the yuppie era: the words ‘wine bar’ and ‘coffee table’ were thrown around as pejoratives, the implication being that the music was somehow facile. 

But plenty of people knew that despite the subtlety, it was anything but shallow. “The first time I saw Sade was the first time she was on ‘Top of the Pops’,” remembers Marc Mac of 4hero. “I watched it with my whole family, huddled around a small portable TV as we did in those days. She made an impact because first off you just didn’t hear that kind of soul-jazz anywhere on TV or commercial radio at that time. It was like lovers rock only without a reggae groove dominating. And secondly, I really noticed how she owned the stage, just so cool and in charge without imposing.”

Not many spotted that lovers rock connection at the time, but the fact that it was undoubtedly there in the sound is crucial to how they would grow and endure – despite none of Sade having grown up around Caribbean sound system culture. Sade herself was born Helen Folasade Adu in Nigeria but raised from the age of four by her white mother and grandparents in Essex. Of the rest of the band, Stuart Matthewman and Paul Denman are both from Hull, with Andrew Hale the only Londoner. But the scene that they had all gravitated to in London’s West End was radically inclusive, innovative and anything but gentrified – Adu had, after all, lived in a squatted fire station at the time they started, their sound forged in hard touring in a Transit van. By 1982, some of the rougher edges of post-punk and electro-pop might have been sanded off, but the experimentalism and a cross-cultural fusion were still there, as was a sense of dub-wise space in the music – they were just geared towards virtuosity and accomplishment with the high tech excitement of hip hop, electro and glossy soul from the US.

Immediate precursors on the same scene like Funkapolitan and Animal Nightlife were also multicultural bands drawing on similar sets of influences, but Sade nailed it in no small part because they brought a very special understatement to proceedings, both emotionally and sonically. 

“Their sound was about perfection,” says Trevor Jackson. “Sonic and compositional perfection. They were leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else of that New Romantic generation, it wasn’t that kind of Trevor Horn grandiose perfection and it wasn’t that slightly zany Compass Point art-rock inventiveness. It was a soulful perfection and that’s stayed with them ever since.” 

Colleen ‘Cosmo’ Murphy says only Roxy Music’s ‘Avalon’ at the time compared to the first two albums’ ability to “get the best out of my crappy little all-in-one Hi-Fi as a kid!” Though a full generation younger, Errol Anderson of the Touching Bass collective echoes this. “They were such a tight band, too,” he says. “The grooves were simple, but a lot of musicians will say the hardest thing is to make something that is simple but will work to keep you locked in. That’s some genius level stuff there.” 

And Adu’s voice and poetic delivery locked in tight with this. As Katy B puts it: “Her voice is a rich, deep alto instrument, so different to the big power ballad singers of the 80s and 90s, with their whistle notes and belting bridges but it’s just as powerful and potent emotionally.”

And of course, this level of accomplishment resonated with American audiences, and particularly Black American audiences. The ‘quiet storm’ radio format dedicated to sultry and sophisticated sounds had been growing from the mid-70s as a niche for slow, sensuous, “grown folks” music, and when ‘Diamond Life’ broke out it was really finding its feet and connecting to a new 80s set of musical production values and sense of social aspiration. Like the late Frankie Beverley of Maze, Sade steadily became a staple of “the cook-out”, the emblematic intergenerational gathering place of Black America. Many didn’t even realise that Sade were not American but injecting a dose of British deadpan melancholy into their cultural fabric. 

“When Culture Club, Yazoo and Depeche Mode broke through on MTV,” says the pop writer and scholar Craig Seymour, “it briefly felt that bunch of kids from The Blitz was going to dominate US pop – but then that seemed to die away to be replaced by heavy metal or whatever. Then Sade came from nowhere, sort of from the same scene, but not erupting into the pop world in the same way. Instead, she was slowly absorbed into the R’n’B landscape via the quiet storm thing, and actually ended up being the biggest-selling and longest-lasting of all of those groups. Because of the nature of the quiet storm format, when the second album came out the hits from the first one were still being played and then both rolled over when the third came and you just had this kind of environment of Sade in R’n’B. The music was just there, it was omnipresent, it was something that your parents, your auntie, whoever would be playing.”

With that mega success, Sade did lose some of their hipness with the jazz-dance and soul club scene they’d emerged from in the UK. “As a dyed-in-the-wool soulboy in the 80s,” says DJ and A&R Ross Allen, “it was more about Loose Ends and stuff like that, Sade we’d think of as a pop act. Not to say we didn’t like them, it would always be ‘oh yeah, nice tune’, but it sort of wasn’t our world.” 

Gilles Peterson concurs: “They’d kind of gone out of our sphere, purely because they’d gone so massive – we just weren’t paying attention.” But they were finding their way into international clubland nonetheless. Trevor Fung, the man who more than anyone can be credited with bringing Brit DJs to Ibiza and the Balearic vibe to Britain, smiles: “I really don’t know much about their influence… other than their music was played daily outside the Café del Mar from 1984. It was huge in helping to create the Balearic vibe.” He’s not wrong – check out tapes of the legendary Alfredo playing in Amnesia that same year and literally every other tune is a track from ‘Diamond Life’.

This continued through the first flush of fame: second album ‘Promise’ followed in very short order, continuing very much where ‘Diamond Life’ left off, and likewise found its way into people’s lives via barbecues and Mediterranean bars. But for its successor, the band started the pattern of leveraging their immense success to allow them to take their own sweet time on their records, as such it took three years to make ‘Stronger Than Pride’. A large section of its recording was in Spain and when it emerged it was clear they had entered into a feedback loop with the dreamy decadence of the beachside milieu where they were appreciated: without adopting any obvious dance production gimmickry they locked their syncopations into steadier rhythm patterns, and the 12-inch mixes of ‘Paradise’ and ‘Turn My Back on You’ in particular were given club rotation and sound archetypally Balearic now. 

Now the Sade dynamic was fully set in motion. In the four, then eight, then ten years it took to make each subsequent album, the band’s existing catalogue was out in the world not just omnipresent as pop but influencing various subcultures via specific routes – and the band in turn was taking all that subculture in. Anyone who’s worked with them without exception will emphasise first that Sade is a band, with a sound that comes from the interface of the four permanent members and second that those band members have all maintained their taste for the current, the funky and the experimental as strongly as when they first began soaking up Brazilian bossa nova, New York electro, post-punk dub and so on. 

As new generation keyboard wizard Joe Armon-Jones states, it all adds up. “You can always hear the sound of a Sade tune, even before the vocals begin it has a sound,” he points out. “Very unique and hard to describe but if you know, you know.”

So it was that 1992’s ‘Love Deluxe’ and 2000’s ‘Lover’s Rock’ were able to smuggle ever more radicalism into the mainstream. Remixes by Mad Professor and Massive Attack made very clear this was UK music (“Sade’s mood and spirit is made for reggae,” says Mad Professor, “and she is one of the first artists that I’ve remixed that actually called me when she heard the remix to say she loved it!”). As Craig Seymour says: “‘Lover’s Rock’ especially had a lot of the kind of strange, trip hop feel that, say, Massive Attack had never quite managed to get through to US audiences. And a lot of listeners just didn’t get it at first – but because it was Sade, because they automatically got played on quiet storm, R’n’B radio, through that repetition people came to accept it.” 

UK soul singer Joel Culpepper remembers putting on his mum’s copy of ‘Love Deluxe’ for the first time, reaching ‘Pearls’, “and just going ‘woah’, like, OK, a British soul singer can do this? Those mad arrangements, the intensity of the subject matter, the way it’s so poetic, it was a total eye-opener”. 

It’s no coincidence that the haunting Debussy-ish strings of ‘Pearls’ was sampled by artists as diverse as madcap Japanese experimentalists Asa-Chang & Junray, grime don Kano and master of soulful tear-out jungle D’Cruze. Indeed, if there was one place Sade’s influence on the UK underground remained constant it was through jungle and drum’n’bass: from D’Cruze and Wax Doctor onward, junglists naturally understood what The 2 Bears’ Raf Rundell calls “that mad combination of comfort, sophistication and dread that’s always present in Sade”, and sampled the living daylights out of them. 

The other route to the heart of clubland was through American house. Again, this was down to the sheer stateside ubiquity of Sade, particularly in the Black community: it would have been weird if Sade wasn’t folded into the fabric of house music. No less than Ron Trent describes Sade as “so important, a force of nature, they definitely brought more colours to the musical spectrum!” The band was also beloved in New York with Junior Vasquez spinning Sade at the Sound Factory. Mid-90s bootlegs like Phillip Damien’s take on ‘Pearls’ and Kenny Larkin’s extraordinary breakbeat-charged remake of ‘Give it Up’ (retitled ‘Surrender Your Love’) became DJ staples, helping map out a particularly soulful, sophisticated territory which would be explored for decades to come. Just look at the roll-call of artists who’ve re-edited ‘Stronger Than Pride’ alone – Karizma, Kaytranada, Alex Nut, Quentin Harris, DJ Duke. It’s an astonishing roll-call of talent and there are dozens more Sade flips by DJ Spinna, Matrixxman, Miguel Migs, Late Nite Tuff Guy, Danny Krivit, on it goes… even now, at the time of writing in autumn 2024, a 2003 bootleg of ‘Somebody Already Broke my Heart’ (apparently by Julius Papp), has caught on again as a festival favourite and is changing hands for upwards of £200.

Despite all that, through the 90s there was a lingering sense, in the UK at least, that Sade weren’t particularly cool. Either, as Gilles Peterson and Ross Allen described, they were perfectly well-regarded but essentially ignored by diggers for obscurity, or they were outright slandered by those for whom a rock press hangover or more-alternative-than-thou attitude drove an inverted snobbery against the smooth, “dinner party” vibe. 

That began to change, though, as millennials came of age. A generation who had few presuppositions but knew Sade from oldies radio, their parents’ records, through a vague understanding that their US faves from Missy to Beyoncé, D’Angelo to Jay-Z loved them, or newly discovering them on YouTube, saw them very differently. By the end of the 00s, the likes of The xx and James Blake were overtly channelling not the smooth soul side, but the fragility, experimentalism and darkness. 

Raf Rundell is a little older than a milliennial but up until this point had been working a “cushy music industry job”. However, when that role was lost and desperation was setting in, salvation came in an unlikely form. “I was on the dole. I’d just come back from the job centre, thinking ‘ahhh what am I going to do?’ I rolled a joint, put on ‘Diamond Life’, and ‘How Am I Going to Make a Living’ came on. ‘Right!’ I thought…” 

His cover version – which with Joe Goddard adding production would become the first ever 2 Bears recording – perfectly captures how Sade was being heard anew. Obviously Rundell’s naive vocal is a million miles from Adu’s velvet croon, but by laying bare the directness, poetry and irresistible hooks of the tune, and by harking back to the digital reggae, electro and post-punk of the early 80s, he made explicit the elements that were latent in Sade’s music. Arriving in 2010 it was perfectly timed to pre-empt what Rundell calls “those cool kids at NTS radio who would play Sade”, as well as coinciding with Sade themselves reminding everyone of their creative relevance with the ‘Soldier of Love’ album.

However, some people didn’t need to be reminded. As in America, for a large proportion of Black Britons, and especially Black women, Sade had been a staple – and Adu a role model – all along and the music and admiration passed down generations. Going back to the early-80s, Marc Mac remembers “being Black and having two sisters, Sade’s classy style had a positive influence on them and all of us, it lifted us up with the elegant look and sound”. SHERELLE, who as well as being a DJ is a scholar of photography and who used her studies to focus on how Black women are presented in the public gaze sums it up thus: “It’s a beautiful thing to see such a talented Black woman capture so many hearts – so much so that my mum and sister would dance around our living room watching VH1 singing ‘Kiss of Life’ and ‘The Sweetest Taboo’. She represents what soul the UK has to offer.” 

And for British singers, that sense of a legacy that’s been consistently passed down seems to go tenfold. Speak to just about any vocalist in the vicinity of soul or R’n’B and the sense of inheritance is palpable. To Kele Le Roc, Sade is: “The voice of a generation – she came across as grown and classy when on adult reflection she was probably very young herself but that just goes to show how sophisticated she was! Young artists can 100% learn from that.” 

For Terri Walker, “Sade is the peace that you understand, know and feel when you’ve arrived at your desired destination as an artist. I’ve always loved her voice and style but since becoming the artist I love and respect myself, I see and hear her more than ever”. To rising star Jaz Karis, she loves the production and everything the band creates: “The freedom to the music... the way she carries herself as she performs, it all inspires me to create music that moves people.” And for Katy B: “She could be your sister or your mother, the warm, soft timbre of her voice soothing you, passing on her wisdom – healing your broken heart with tender stories of how she has been there before.”

We are really feeling that now: in the past decade, that shared inspiration has become ever more obvious as a new UK soul-jazz generation grows in confidence. Jaz Karis, Cleo Sol, Jorja Smith, Yazmin Lacey (who regularly covers ‘The Sweetest Taboo’ live), Ego Ella May, Katy B in her latter grown-folks manifestation, even male voices like Children of Zeus, Joel Culpepper, Maverick Sabre and Michael Kiwanuka carry on the tradition not just of Sade’s style and sophistication, but of a very particular British way of combining influences – Latin, African, Caribbean, American, modernist and traditional – with great subtlety but real power. 

Sade are, of course, still a band, and still recording: Adu has a solo track, ‘Young Lion’, dedicated to her Trans son, on the upcoming ‘TRAA’ compilation, and more music is being hinted at. And they are still very much plugged into new sounds. Tales abound of them showing this hunger for the new – most notably Ross Allen getting recruited by Andrew Hale during a small gig at The Social in 2010 to DJ a Sade aftershow, turning up expecting a polite, corporate major label affair, and finding himself having to play ‘til 7am on a Wednesday morning as Adu and her friends kept the dancefloor going. But even if they were to stop today, their influence is woven deep into modern music, not just via sound but in how to be defiantly themselves. 

4hero’s Marc Mac recounts being inspired by a Sony A&R saying Sade were the only band they were completely hands off with and Joe Armon-Jones says: “The time and care taken around releases is incredibly inspiring to me.” Something that echoes through Ezra Collective, Nubya Garcia and the rest of the scene he’s a keystone in. 

Most of all, though, Sade show musicians how to live in a constantly shifting world of hybridity and be truly themselves. “I like to think,” says Errol Anderson of Touching Bass, “that if young people listen to Sade they’ll be able to respect and understand just how many worlds were colliding in the music that they were making and hopefully then they can appreciate some of the artists that have been influenced by her and them and hopefully follow through and see how that DNA reaches us, because all those chromosomes are still there, man!”

‍

This article first appeared in issue six of Disco Pogo.