Most A-list artists who return with a new album after nearly a decade away from the celebrity glare are apt to show signs of nerves, or at least offer some excuses. Not Sade. The imminent release of Soldier of Love only her sixth studio collection in a career stretching back 27 years seems to be a cause of raucous hilarity. On the afternoon we meet in her spacious house in leafy north London, Sade is chuckling at a photograph of a graffitied poster photographed in New York by her guitarist Stuart Matthewman. Above an image of her glamorous self somebody has sprayed the caustic legend "This b**** sings when she wants to". Never one to miss a chance to laugh at herself, Sade thinks this is hilarious.
As a broad summary of her last two decades, it's hard to fault. She is very much her own person, unswayed by managers or her record company. Since the start of the 1990s, Sade has released just three albums of new material. There's been a 10 year gap between Soldier of Love and her 2000 offering, Lovers Rock. The third, Love Deluxe, dates back to 1992.
For much of that time she has been, as is her habit nowadays, virtually invisible. Her friends have taken to calling her "Howie" after the millionaire recluse Howard Hughes. She sees her fellow bandmembers infrequently two of them are based in America — and she hangs out mainly with long-term friends. Sade meanwhile has been living recently in seclusion in a tiny village in the English west country, where, after spending 30 years in London she de-camped with her now 13 year old daughter, Ila, in 2005. Nobody in the area pays much attention to the half-Nigerian superstar, something she appreciates.
Exotic allure
"Most of my social life is imported from London, but I'm not the most sociable person. I'm usually doing something like building, writing or gardening. I love to dig. Its so tangible and real. I'm always amazed; it's like alchemy to me. You can plant a tiny seed and something incredible grows. Making music is like that. I wonder sometimes where it comes from. I am a country girl at heart."
The change clearly suits her. Sade doesn't look to have aged at all during her long absence. On the eve of her 51st birthday, her face is unlined and she still possesses a striking physical presence. She is taller in person than she appears on stage; and her height (about 1.7 metres) in combination with her large, domed head, the coil of jet black hair which frames it and those wide set almond-shaped eyes, still lend her an exotic allure which she professes not to care a fig about.
"People always used to say, what's it like to see your face on the cover of a magazine? I don't really see it. I don't connect with it."
She has years of privacy to prove it. And given that she has only done a handful of interviews and one tour in the past 15 years, you can't help wondering what has now lured Sade back to the pop marketplace. Having sold 50 million albums the biggest tally by a British female artist ever she has earned all the money she will ever need. And her needs are, as she points out, modest.
Sade is a creature of obstinately loyal habits, and when her band the same trio she's worked with since 1983 began to agitate to make a new record as the Noughties wore on, she responded to the pressure.
"The band were keen to do it, I'd been writing in London but initially I didn't want the pressure of everybody flying in. I wanted to work at my own convenience. Then, after I moved, and the band were still antsy, I said okay, let's do it.
"I did think maybe it had been zapped out of me. I always think that after every album, but then I just went headlong into it."
Soldier of Love was mainly written and recorded in 2008-09 over series of fortnightly sessions at Peter Gabriel's Real World studio, near where she lives. Although her personal circumstances were much happier by now, thanks partly to a new relationship begun in 2005 with her present partner, a former Royal Marine, the songs still bore the unmistakably melancholic imprint of classic Sade. Why?
"It's what I do, I can't help it. Sadness dealt with well brings happiness, I think. It purges you and enables you to leave it behind. Happy songs can actually make you feel worse. I'm not a moper, but I do have a tendency towards melancholia. Somebody told me once that I'm a Capricorn born under the saddest star. Who knows?"
Her parents split when she was 4 years old, which meant her English mother, a district nurse, returning to England with Sade and her older brother while her Nigerian academic father stayed on in Ibadan. The broken family initially went to stay with her English grandparents.
Sade grew up a tomboy who loved watching cowboy movies and has retained many guy-ish characteristics — a deep, mannish voice, loud ready laugh, and legs-apart stance. She remarks on how her friends have often commented on the way she writes from a male point of view, as she does on the single Soldier of Love. "I guess I see struggle as basically masculine," she says.
Having shown a talent for art at school she won a place at St Martins School of Art and Design in Holborn, and pitched into the burgeoning club culture of London in the early 1980's, slogging around in a battered transit van, usually driven by herself, singing back up in a soul band called Pride.
Music wasn't exactly her choice. After graduating, Sade set up as a clothes maker. But being a black singer in a largely white ersatz soul outfit lent important credibility to the proceedings and, as a fan of the American soul giants Donny Hathaway and Bill Withers, she got talked into it. "I didn't have any confidence as a singer, but I found that I liked writing songs."
One of these that she contributed to, Smooth Operator, which she sang solo, soon attracted record company talent scouts. After a protracted negotiation, in 1983 she agreed to leave Pride and sign to the Epic label — on condition that she took three of her bandmates with her, guitarist and saxophonist Matthewman, keyboard player Andrew Hale and bassist Paul Denman.
She learned about the downside of fame as swiftly as she became very, very famous. With her albums selling by the million all over the world, paparazzi photographers would climb the trees surrounding her London house to get an intimate shot of the face that launched a thousand magazine covers. False rumours about her personal life irked her enormously, and encouraged an aversion to interviews of any kind that persists to this day. It was a relief to her as the 1990's rolled around when Britain tired of its obsession with Sade, and pretty much left her alone.
Mother and child
With the British media off her back, and plenty of money in the bank — the Sunday Times Rich List recently valued her as worth £30 million (Dh172.93 million) — Sade has moved into a lower gear career-wise and devoted more time to her personal life.
She loves the fact that on Soldier of Love she's finally been able to involve her daughter in her music. "As soon as she arrived she became the centre of my life. I took her on my last tour in 2001, but I didn't let her see any of the concerts because I didn't want her to hear people shouting for her mum. She wasn't ready for that."
Now that she's a teenager, Ila knows all about her famous parent, comments on the songs and even sings on one of the tracks, Babyfather. "Ila told me she thinks my music is very emotional, which means a lot to me."
So does Sade think the world is still waiting for her, eight years after she wound up her Lovers Live tour? Long pause.
"Mmmm, yeah, I do. I'm not a materialistic person, but artistically I have very high aspirations. I never want to do anything less than the best I can do, late as I may be in delivering it. And I think the people who bother to listen to us realise that, whether they like what we do or not."
In her own words
Sade talks about selected tracks from Soldier of Love. “Writing and recording for me is a layering process, with a lot of subtraction, a lot of chipping away,” she says. “To me a song is like a sculpture. What’s finally left is what it is. I never do covers because I’m not a good enough interpretive singer. I don’t have the technical spectrum to render a great song, if it was done well in the first place. The point for me is to deliver a story or a feeling that doesn’t already exist.”
The Moon and the Sky
“Stuart [Matthewman, guitarist and saxophonist], brought the basic backing track in with the intro and chorus already established. Though we worked on the verses and bridge together, I found it really hard establishing the chorus line over a part already written as it was a bit like karaoke without the words. I found it harder than starting from scratch. Most of our songs are built in the studio. This is about not being appreciated, about somebody pretending to let somebody go but not really letting them go. It’s about realising you can never go back.”
Soldier of Love
“I don’t see this as a love song. It’s about looking for life and faith, I think. Someone said to me recently, ‘You often sing from a man’s point of view,’ which is what I do here. When I visualise struggle, I often see it as like a wild west scene or battleground. It is a very masculine thing, connected to all the westerns I watched as a child! It took a long time to get this song right, with all the layers and spaces.”
BabyFather
“This is about how great it is to be a parent and what a great honour and privilege that is, and what a terrible thing that is to waste. As long as you feel good about yourself, you can be a good parent and then it becomes an endless fruitful cycle. I wanted this to sound quite rough and scrappy, not too honed. The beginning feels like the ice cream van coming down the street.”
The safest place
“This is about the idea that you won’t be let down, but everybody finds their own way through my songs. They have their own reason for being, but you can listen to them the way you want. That is so important.”
