Chart entered : 26 February 1984
Chart peak : 6
Number of hits : 13
These lot ( they were a band ) were the most prominent of the "New Jazz" artists. It's hard to recall just how big a deal they were in 1984. Record Mirror treated their singer Helen Sade Adu as a goddess before she'd had a record out. No one else got on the bill at Live Aid with such a slender back catalogue.
Sade were a breakout group from an earlier soul band called Pride that started out in London in 1981 although three members, Stuart Matthewman ( guitar/saxophone ) , Paul Denman ( bass ) and Paul Cooke ( drums ) were originally from Hull. The group also featured Helen as a backing vocalist . Helen was born in Nigeria although her mother was English. Her parents separated when she was 4 and Helen moved with her mother to Essex. She studied fashion design at St Martin's College of Art and did some part-time modelling. Some demos and live recordings have hit YouTube revealing Pride to be a rather lumpy white funk outfit with an indifferent singer. However Helen and Stuart hit it off together and started writing songs . They were allowed a separate slot within Pride shows to perform one or two songs backed by the two Pauls. Pride were backed by Peter Powell and featured on The Oxford Road Show in 1982. They failed to get a record deal and Helen and her collaborators felt they stood a better chance of making it without the others.
Sade became an independent band in 1983 , adding keyboard player Andrew Hale to the line up. With the help of Helen's boyfriend, style journalist Robert Elms and frequent gigging they soon got a record deal with Epic or rather Helen did and the rest of the guys signed as contractors to her except for Cooke who wasn't having it and quit. Dave Early was brought in to complete the album but the band never had a permanent drummer thereafter . I'm not sure whether Cooke or Early played on "Your Love Is King"; neither appear in the video.
"Your Love Is King" was their debut single and was rapturously received by the music press. In an era blighted by bombastic over-production it's not hard to see the appeal of a low-key torch ballad somewhere between jazz and soul delivered with smoky grace by a beautiful but demure singer. Stuart's sax solo does sound all too eighties, the stuff of a thousand dreary power ballads , but it's perhaps unfair to blame him for all that came after.
It's fine for what it is but it's hard to see why people got so excited about it and her music was most enthusiastically adopted by the burgeoning yuppie brigade as a lifestyle accessory leaving her leftie champions to grapple with the irony. Sade's disinclination to move very far from this musical territory would ultimately limit their appeal and this remains their biggest hit but for this short time they were kings of the heap.
Jazz, as I've doubtless said before, does next to nothing for me, but the odd Sade single is fine, though her voice can often drift into slightly beige areas.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure their appeal was too limited, though, as they've been picking up Platinum discs in the States since the very start! Surely not too many other English outfits that have been able to maintain such a high level of success over there over three decades ?
No that's certainly true. It needs the words "as a singles act" adding, although to be honest it was more a case of out of sight, out of mind. It seems like they're up there with Kate Bush in terms of audience loyalty.
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