Posted by | Cyrena Rose
A week ago I heard The Sweetest Taboo and shared with a friend how “we need more SADE!” Ironically she is featured in Style.com as a beauty icon…a monthly look at the faces that have made history.
The mag states if Sade’s sultry vocals didn’t hook you, her lacquered red lips, tight, braided ponytail, and oversized gold hoops likely did. RC fans, enjoy a brief history of the British-bred crooner
Sade…
Born in 1959 to a Nigerian father and an English mother, Sade spent the first four years of her life in Ibadan, Nigeria, before her mother, a nurse, moved her and her brother to England. Her full name, Helen Folasade Adu (meaning “honor earns a crown”), was likely more exotic than any other in Clacton-on-Sea, the small town on the English coast where she grew up.
After high school, Sade moved to London to study fashion at Central Saint Martins. Upon graduation, she squatted in a flat in Tottenham with her then boyfriend, the journalist Robert Elms, a contributor to The Face and NME. Feeling at home in the city’s thriving nightlife culture, she joined the funk group Pride.
While launching a menswear label and working as a model for friends, it became increasingly obvious that life in the spotlight suited Sade. She developed a fan base while singing with Pride, and after working on her own songs during set breaks, she went solo.
By the end of 1983, Sade the band, which she now fronted with a few of the original members of Pride, was signed to Epic Records. Their first single, “Your Love Is King,” was released in early 1984 and charted at number 6 in the U.K. The song’s video cemented Sade’s status as a style star; ditto this cover of The Face, which came out the same year.
After quickly releasing another album, Promise, which includes what is probably her best known hit, “The Sweetest Taboo,” Sade toured the world for eight months. In 1985, she played Live Aid, gracing the stage as the only female artist at London’s Wembley Stadium.
Sade enjoyed international fame and a camaraderie with some of the industry’s biggest stars, but the singer kept her private life very much under wraps, this despite rumors of drug addiction, a nervous breakdown, and a bad breakup.
Sade’s third album, Stronger Than Pride, went platinum in under two weeks. Following a worldwide tour in 1988, the star married Spanish film director Carlos Pliego. She installed a studio in her London home and in 1992 started working on the band’s next album, Love Deluxe, the first single of which was used in the movie Indecent Proposal, earning the artist a fourth Grammy nod.
In 1996, Sade gave birth to her only daughter, Ila, with the Jamaican music producer Bob Morgan. The family moved to Montego Bay so she could concentrate on motherhood—and a Best Of album. After returning to the United Kingdom at the end of the nineties, Sade started booking live shows again in support of Lovers Rock in 2001 and was awarded the prestigious Order of the British Empire for services to popular music a year later.
In 2010, she released Soldier of Love. While touring on it last year, she grossed $16.4 million from combined album and ticket sales, just behind totals amassed by Lil Wayne, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, and U2. “I do want to get on the stage and sing the songs,” she told The New York Times. “But then I just want to disappear again.”
Well, we want you back in the studio AND on the stage again Sade!
Thanks again FashionBombDaily
