Sade is back with The Ultimate Collection. The must-have, 29-track, two-disc album contains 29 tracks in this two-disc album that includes four new, never-before-heard songs including a remix of “The Moon And The Sky” (featuring Jay-Z). The Ultimate Collection also features 15 tracks that were not included on Sade’s 1994 “Best Of” album. Here for the first time, fans can find all of their favorite Sade classics including songs “Lovers Rock” and “Soldier Of Love.” Sade makes her highly anticipated return to the world stage on June 16, after 10 years.
Helen Folasade Adu aka as Sade, was born in Ibadan, Nigeria. Her father was Nigerian, a university teacher of economics; her mother Anne was an English nurse. She listened to American soul music, particularly the wave led in the 1970’s by artists such as Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, and Bill Withers. Music was not her first choice as a career. She studied fashion at St Martin’s School Of Art and began singing with Pride.
For three years, from 1981, she and the other seven members of the band toured the UK. Pride’s shows featured a segment in which Sade fronted a quartet that played quieter, jazzier numbers. One of these, a song called
Smooth Operator, which Sade had co-written herself, attracted the attention of record company talent scouts. Soon, everybody wanted to sign her, but not the rest of Pride. Obstinately loyal to her friends in the group, Sade refused to depart. 18 months later she relented and signed to Epic records – on condition that she took with her the three band mates who still comprise the entity known as Sade: saxophonist Stuart Matthewman, keyboard player Andrew Hale, and bassist Paul Denman.
Sade’s first single, Your Love Is King, became a top 10 British hit in February 1984, and with that her life, and that of the band, changed forever. The unstressed, understated elegance of the music in conjunction with her look – unspecifically exotic and effortlessly sophisticated – launched Sade as the female face of the style decade. Magazines queued to put her on the cover. “It wasn’t marketing,” she says, wearily. “It was just me. And I wasn’t trying to promote an image.”
At the time of her first album, Diamond Life, her actual life was anything but diamond-like. Sade was living in a converted fire station in Finsbury Park with her then boyfriend, the style journalist Robert Elms. There was no heating, which meant that she had to get dressed in bed. The loo, which used to ice over in winter, was on the fire escape. The bath was in the kitchen. “We were freezing, basically.” For the remainder of the 1980’s, as the first three albums sold by the million around the world, Sade toured more or less constantly.
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