Sade Is A Group

Sade Is A Group

FEATURES

Sylvie Simmons

Eight million copies the first album sold—Diamond Life, sultry pop, Martini-ad jazz, not really the stuff of eight million copies. Some of those eight million selling in Britain I can understand; stranger things—singing nuns, whistling cowboys, warbling castrato choir boys—have made it here to number one. But America? Harder to figure out. I have my theories (don’t I always?): the epitome of style in depressed Western economies, of love and romanticism where AIDS is on the prowl (hard to fit Madonna into that theory; hell, no one’s perfect), an organic rise against the silicon chip, or more likely still the rise and rise of the upper middle class, the natural-wood-and-interiordesign set, who turn to “taste” and “craft” for self-expression, as opposed to instant mass production gratification, and end up getting conveyer-belt craft and taste exactly the same as everybody else. So, that’s why eight million bought it. Or maybe they just like the music. Which is a sight more pleasant than the Al Stewart impersonators currently topping the charts and makes a nice change from Springsteen. So let’s ask another question. Like why does Sade do it? And continue to do it? Will eight million continue to buy it? And does she care?

The questions lead me to a N.W. London basement where Sade Adu, 25, body wearing plain white man’s shirt and jeans, ears wearing silver hoops big enough for Flipper to somersault through, face wearing a smile, smile puffing on my Dunhills (her Silk Cuts, part of the painful process of giving up the weed, sit untouched) looks amazing and sounds—uh—normal.

“People think that I’m something out of a Milk Tray advert (British candy with a lousy taste but an ultra-sophisticated commercial), and that’s such a cliche. I think it’s basically just because I’m not wacky so they think I must be, you know, all this business of I must go out with some executive and go on skiing holidays. I’m really not like that cocktaily thing. I like more earthy things.” A dirty grin.

Which will surprise, shock and mortify those who see Sade as the antithesis of Madonna.

“Like, I don’t like sex?” She chortles.

To put it bluntly, yes. Madonna’s comerub-your-face-in-my-bellybutton; Sade’s keep-your-distance-l’m-unapproachablycool.

Yes, it s funny, really. I suppose people don’t have the insight, they take far too much what they see and put you in a little box that contains the image they’ve got that doesn’t necessarily exist. I’m not overtly sexy, but then again I’m not like that as a person. I don’t thrust myself about! You couldn’t call me a horny girl because I’m not like that—I flirt, obviously, everybody flirts, but in such a way that it’s not an overt thing. So I suppose it’s quite understandable that people get that impression. I’ve been a naughty girl in my time, though!” More laughter.

“The thing about Madonna is, I don’t think she’s doing it for the camera, she is doing it for herself, and I don’t actually see anything wrong with that. But they’ve got me a little bit wrong. I’m not completely chaste!”

You’d think so, learning that a scene showing Sade getting out of bed was cut from her “Smooth Operator” video.

“That was the record company! And they had to put it back. They actually held the gun at director Julien Temple’s head and said they wouldn’t pay him unless he cut that scene out, and fortunately someone in the office called me up. That made me very angry. I know better than anybody who I am and what my image is, and I felt it should be my choice. So I got screaming mad—as usual!”

Not so much a goddess as a mighty deus ex machina stepping in to put things right. She says she’s got as near total control as anyone in this business can have, and with that kind of selfpossession you believe her. Funnily enough, that self-possession has led to her unpopularity with some ideologically correct Brits, even feminists; she’s not “victim” enough for them. Columnist Julie Birchill puts it better than I can: “Remember how Sade was practically accused of not being black enough? She will never be found blue in a basement with a syringe in her arm. You can hear it in her voice and sense it in her silence.”

“Nobody’s ever compared me with a man, the way I sing” says Sade, who started out impersonating Marvin Gaye as well as Diana Ross in front of her mirror. “It’s always another woman—Billie Holiday.

“Just because I’m the same color as her and she wore her hair back, on a couple of occasions then I must sound like Billie Holiday.” She grunts. “That ignores the uniqueness of Billie Holiday. It’s also a complete misjudgement, and it’s an insuit. I’m quite paranoid about us and what we do not being like anything else, and it’s very important to me to think that we’re doing it our way. If I did once copy Billie Holiday I’d do it a lot better than I’m doing now! I agree with you—women do tend to get summed up more simply than men, maybe because most journalists are males. But then you could argue that the way males are presented in the pop world is quite sexist and cliched, possibly stronger than females. Because females seem to be more individual, less categorizable. Somebody like Alison Moyet, say, is far less categorizable than the lead singer of King, who’s obviously there as fodder for 15-year-old girls.”

But what about this thing of not being “black” enough?

“I grew up in a very white environment and I think when you’re black you like to see black people doing very well, and if you see a black person being a star it makes you feel good, it makes you feel proud. It sounds corny but it was something I could relate to, something I could latch onto—the music— beihg in a mostly white environment.

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“Then again, I can’t really imagine liking any other sort of music. I like things that don’t fall into that category necessarily—like Van Morrison, Tom Waits, there are white artists I like as well, not only blacks—but initially that’s what I found I liked.

“My childhood made me fairly rebelious, but I’m not an avant-garde person. And I’ve never really been chewed up about anything really. I get sort of very resigned and accept the way people are and act and sing. I scream and yell and rant rather than let it hurt you inside too much.”

Except she doesn’t scream and rant in her music. It’s more Smokey Robinson than Tina Turner—intimate, smoky late-night stuff. When I tell her I tend to associate her music with bedsits—lonely people thinking lonely romantic thoughts while a Sade album revolves slowly on the lonely turntable—she looks completely horrified.

“That’s terrible! Oh dear! What I think of as bedsit songs are more dour and insular. I think our songs are more outgoing, more of a positive feeling. You have to think positively in whatever you do and whoever you are, however much adversity there is. You have to think of something good, otherwise you’ll get downtrodden and crushed. There’s no point in always feeling sorry for yourself.”

Take the song on Promise written about her dead friend, Maureen.

“It’s a happy song, an up song. I always wanted to write a song about her, but I didn’t want it to be doleful, sitting-in-a-bedsitcrying. If you lose someone you love, there is no point going around feeling sad about their death forever. You’ve got to feel happy that you ever met them and that you had a good friendship.”

She reckons she’s developed a hell of a lot as a songwriter and singer since her first album—“We all have”—we all being Stuart Matthewman, Paul Denman and Andrew Hale, who make up the core of Sade, the group. And Martin Ditchman and Dave Early, members of the outer circle. “I find it easier to communicate ideas to the band now than I used to. I used to get really paranoid and embarrassed when I wanted to try and explain a tune or riff or something, but now it’s all very easy.”

But what I came to find out was: are eight million people buying the new album? Has she been built up too big too quickly?

“Diamond Life sold a lot, but I think it was a word-of-mouth thing, more to do with one person saying to another, ‘this is a nice album,’ not really such a big buildup. If Promise doesn’t sell as many copies it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been successful. I think you know when you finish an album how successful you were, and that’s a personal thing. I know what we tried to achieve and we achieved it, so if it’s not such a commerical success—and I imagine it should be—it won’t break my heart. We’re happy with it and that's the only thing that matters, and I know that sounds arrogant. If Diamond Life hadn’t been so successful either, I wouldn’t have felt any regret, because I think you’ve got to make up your own mind what your opinion of it is before anybody else does. I want to do something good—I suppose that’s an ego thing really—not how much money you’re trying to make or how much fame you’re trying to get.”

We talk a bit more and she says she’d have loved to have studied English instead of that fashion design course at art college, and then we talk about fashion and then I run out of space. Her current ambitions is to go to South America...“apart from that there is no great desires,” except to carry on making records the way Sade the person and Sade the band wants to make them. If she wasn’t in Sade, she’d be out there buying their records, “because then I’m being true to what I’m doing, true to my taste. I don’t let too much worry me—the finances and the business of it, making money rather than making a good record. Yeah, I think I’d like Sade.” B