We live in an era that I think can best be described
as the content mill. Oh, absolutely. That's the
perfect term for it. If you're an artist, a creator,
or I mean, even just a person with a brand today,
the rule is so simple. You have to feed the beast.
Post every day, story every hour. If you disappear
for a month, the algorithm, you know, it just
punishes you. If you disappear for a year, you
are forgotten. You're irrelevant. The game moves
on without you. But today we are diving into
the anomaly, the glitch in that matrix. We're
looking at an artist who has built a 40 -year
career, sold nearly 75 million records, and achieved
icon status by doing the exact opposite of all
that. She doesn't feed the beast. She starves
it. She starves it. And it just keeps coming
back for more. It's the ultimate paradox of the
modern music industry, isn't it? We're talking
about someone who is, you know, arguably one
of the most successful British female artists
in history. One of the most successful, period.
Right. Yet her fame is almost defined by her
absence. In a world that is just so, so noisy,
she has somehow managed to weaponize silence.
We are talking, of course, about Saad. And I'm
really excited about this one because I think
people have this very specific, almost surface
-level image of her. I know exactly what you
mean. You know, the ponytail, the hoop earrings.
The smooth jazz playlist at a dinner party. Yes,
that's it. But when you actually dig into the
source material, the biography, the discography,
all the industry analysis, it's so much stranger.
And frankly, more calculated than that. Calculated
is the right word, but not in a cynical way.
It feels more calculated in terms of preservation.
Preservation of self or of the art. Both, I think.
And look, before we even get into biography,
we have to dismantle the first and biggest misconception.
When most people say Saad, they're picturing
the woman, Helen Follis -Addu. But Sod is not
a solo act. Right. And this is something I think
even casual fans forget all the time. Sod is
a band. It is a band. Exactly. It's a collective.
It's not just a singer with a revolving door
of session musicians she hires for a tour. You
have Stuart Matthewman on guitar and saxophone,
Andrew Hale on keyboards, and Paul Denman on
bass. And here is the real kicker. They have
been together since 1983. Think about that. I
mean, just try to name another band with that
kind of stability. It's virtually non -existent
in pop music. You have, what, the Rolling Stones,
U2, maybe. The list of bands that keep their
core lineup for four decades is incredibly short.
And that continuity, it has to be the secret
sauce for the sound, right? You just can't replicate
that kind of musical telepathy if you're hiring
new guys for every album. You absolutely cannot.
That specific Sade sound. which we will absolutely
break down later because it's so much more complex
than just smooth jazz, is a direct result of
four people growing up together musically. They
lock in. They lock in. It's a hive mind. So our
mission for this deep dive is to really look
at how a fashion student from Essex and her bandmates
created the sound that just conquered the world.
And also why the hardest rappers in the game,
you know, obsess over them. Which is such a fascinating
part of the story. Ultimately, what this career
teaches us about the economic value of scarcity.
Okay, so let's start at the beginning, the origin
story. Because it's surprisingly geographic,
you can't really understand the aesthetic of
the band without understanding where the lead
singer came from. And it really is a tale of
two very, very different worlds. It's a massive
collision of cultures. Helen Felisata Dew was
born on January 16th, 1959 in Ibadan, Nigeria.
And Ibadan, we should say, it isn't some small
village. It's a major city, a huge cultural and
economic hub. A huge city. Her father, Adebisi
Adu, was a Nigerian lecturer in economics. So
very academic, very driven. Her mother, Anne
Hayes, was an English district nurse. They'd
met in London, married in 1955, and then moved
to Nigeria. So right from birth, you have this
mix of like the African academic elite and the
pragmatic English working class. Precisely. And
her name, Folasad, is Yoruba. It translates to
crowned with wealth. Which, I mean, looking at
her net worth and her legacy now, that feels
a bit like destiny, doesn't it? A little on the
nose, maybe. But she didn't spend her whole childhood
in Nigeria, did she? No, and this is the traumatic
pivot point in her early life. When she was just
four years old, her parents separated. And her
mother, Anne? took side and her older brother,
Banji, and moved back to England. Back to England.
They moved in with the grandparents at first
near Colchester in Essex, and eventually they
settled in a place called Holland -on -Sea. I
want to pause on that for a second because that
contrast is just, it's jarring. You go from the
vibrant, rhythmic, heat -soaked environment of
Ivedon. To Holland -on -Sea, yeah. For listeners
who don't know Essex, especially that coastal
part, I mean, it's gray, it's quiet. It's very
traditional working -class England, the seaside
in winter. It's a massive shock to the system
for a four -year -old, and I think you can almost
hear that tension in her music later on. How
so? Well, there's a warmth to her sound, a rhythmic
complexity that feels distinctly African, but
it's overlaid with this very cool, very detached,
slightly melancholic English delivery. That's
a great way to put it. It's the sound of Ibadan.
Filtering through the gray skies of Essex. Exactly.
And another thing that sets her apart, unlike
a lot of pop stars who were kind of groomed from
age five to be on stage, you know, the whole
Disney kid pipeline. Right, the stage school
kids. She wasn't chasing fame at all. She was
chasing art. The sources highlight her time at
St. Martin's School of Art in London extensively.
And this is arguably the most important non -musical
fact about her. Now, St. Martin's is, I mean,
it's hallowed ground. It's the Ivy League of
art schools. It is. This is where Alexander McQueen,
Stella McCartney, John Galliano went. It's not
just a school. It's an incubator for the avant
-garde. It teaches you a specific way of seeing
the world. So she's being trained from the jump
to think visually, to think about silhouette,
texture, presentation. Exactly. She wasn't just
a singer waiting for a microphone to be handed
to her. She was a designer. actively constructing
an image the sources say she worked as a fashion
designer and even as a model after graduating
and you see that so clearly when you look at
the album covers the stage setups the way she
dresses it's never cluttered never it's minimalist
it's powerful it's curated that is the designer's
eye at work she understands that what you don't
show is just as important as what you do show
which connects perfectly to the music later that
idea of negative space of silence totally but
How does she make the jump? How do we get from
sketching designs in a London flat to fronting
a world -famous band? It was almost by accident.
It started with a band called Pride. This was
an eight -piece Latin funk band in the early
80s, a big, sprawling group. And she was just
a backup singer in it. Just a backup singer.
Yeah. But while in Pride, she struck up a friendship,
a creative partnership, really, with the guitarist
and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman. There he is,
the nucleus of the Future Band. Right. They started
writing together on the side, away from the rest
of Pride. And they came up with this track called
Smooth Operator. Which, ironically, is now one
of the most famous songs in history. It is. And
the problem for Pride was that when Sade and
Stuart would get their little spotlight moment
to perform Smooth Operator during the set. The
audience went crazy for it. Oh, wow. So it was
overshadowing the main act. Completely. It was
sucking all the oxygen out of the rest of the
show. It just became undeniable that this was
the special thing. So in 1983, the split happened.
Amicably. From what the sources say, it seems
like it was just a natural evolution, no huge
drama. Sade and Stewart grabbed the keyboardist,
Andrew Hale, and the bassist, Paul Denman, and
they broke away to form Sade. And the buzz was
immediate, wasn't it? This wasn't a slow burn
playing to empty pubs for years. It was an explosion.
The source mentions their debut gig at a nightclub
called Heaven in London, a legendary venue. And
they hadn't even signed a record deal yet. Not
yet. And a thousand people were turned away at
the door. A thousand people turned away for an
unsigned band. That's almost impossible to conceive
of today without some massive viral TikTok hit.
It really speaks to the power of the London club
scene at that time. Word of mouth was physical.
It was people in clubs, in pubs, on the street,
just talking about this woman with the incredible
voice and this unbelievably striking look. But,
and I love this detail, despite all the glamour
that was starting to form around her on stage,
the reality of her life was very, very different.
Oh, completely different. During this period
of intense hype, she was squatting in a derelict
fire station in Tottenham with her boyfriend
at the time, the writer Robert Elms. I love that
juxtaposition. On stage, she's the absolute epitome
of elegance and sophistication. Off stage, she's
living the gritty, cold, squatting life of 80s
London. It adds this layer of authenticity to
the cool, doesn't it? It wasn't bought. It was
built from the ground up. It grounds the music.
That sophistication wasn't elitist. It was aspirational.
It was something beautiful being created from
a very real, very unglamorous place. Exactly.
So they get signed to Epic Records. They go into
the studio, the power plant in London, to record
the debut, Diamond Life. And this leads us into
what we're calling the golden era. Roughly 1984
to 1992, four albums. world domination it's an
incredible run but let's talk about the production
of diamond life first they did it in six weeks
six weeks from start to finish which for a debut
album that sounds that polished that confident
is remarkably fast they worked with a producer
named robin millar And this is where the Sade
sound was truly codified. If you listen to Diamond
Life, it just doesn't sound like other records
from 1984. Not at all. Let's set the scene. 1984
was the year of loud, synthesized pop. You had
Van Halen's Jump. Prince's Purple Rain. Cyndi
Lauper's Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. Everything
was neon. Big hair, big shoulder pads, and big
gated reverb on the drums. High energy. Exactly.
And then Sade comes in with Diamond Life, and
it's quiet. It's warm. It's dry. It has room
tone. It breathes. It draws from jazz and soul,
but it strips away all the indulgent noodling.
It's incredibly disciplined. I want to dig into
that word discipline, especially with the band.
You mentioned the bassist, Paul Denman. His playing
is fascinating to me because he plays. He does.
He's a huge reggae fan, and you can hear it.
If you isolate the bass lines on tracks like
Smooth Operator or Your Love is King, they're
very prominent, very melodic, and they sit just
slightly behind the beat. It gives the music
this heavy, almost dub -influenced anchor. It's
what makes you nod your head. It's the foundation.
Yeah. Then you have Stuart's saxophone, which
is so soulful, but it's never screechy or over
the top. It's restrained. And then floating on
top of all of that, you have Sade's voice. The
New Yorker had a brilliant quote about her voice,
describing it as a grainy contralto full of air.
And they said she values imperfect dignity over
a show of pain. That is the crucial distinction.
That phrase is perfect. Think about the other
great female vocalists of that era. Whitney Houston,
later on Mariah Carey. Power. houses. Absolute
power houses. The style was melisma. It was vocal
gymnastics. It was about showing you how high
you can go and how loud you can bell. It's a
look what I can do style of singing. Exactly.
And Sade does the absolute opposite. She whispers.
She holds back. She implies emotion rather than
screaming it at you. It's cool in the truest
original sense of the word. It's lowered temperature.
It draws you in instead of pushing you back.
And the world was clearly ready to cool down
because Diamond Life sold over 6 million copies.
It went on to become the best -selling debut
album ever by a British female vocalist. A record
that stood for a long time. And it just set them
up perfectly for the follow -up, Promise, in
1985, which was somehow even bigger. Promise
hit number one in both the UK and the US. It
gave us the sweetest taboo. A song which stayed
on the Billboard Hot 100 for six months. Six
months is an eternity in short years. It's just
unheard of. And it wasn't just commercial success.
It was critical acclaim. She won the Grammy for
Best New Artist in 1986. Which was a watershed
moment. The first Nigerian -born artist to win
that specific award. A huge moment. And you can
see her influence spreading. She dabbled in acting
right around this time in the 1986 film Absolute
Beginners. But she didn't stick with it, did
she? No, not at all. She played a jazz singer,
a character named Athene Duncanon. So it was
a role very, very close to her stage persona.
Typecasting, basically. A little bit, yeah. But
by all accounts, she hated the experience of
filmmaking. She didn't like the lack of control,
the endless waiting around, the fakeness of it
all. She realized her medium was music, where
she and the band could control every single variable.
That control freak tendency, and I mean that
in the best possible way, seems to be a running
theme throughout her whole career. It is. So
they released Stronger Than... Pride in 88, which
is another huge success. Paradise becomes a number
one R &B hit. Then comes Love Deluxe in 92. And
Love Deluxe is where I feel the sound shifted
a bit. It got darker. More melancholic. It got
more atmospheric, I think. Love Deluxe is just
a masterpiece of mood. This is the album with
no ordinary love. Of course. The production becomes
more spacious. You can really hear the influence
of the emerging trip -hop scene coming out of
Bristol at that time. That slow, down -tempo,
moody vibe. That's a great point. It feels like
a late -night album. And visually, this is her
absolute peak. The album covers Say Topless,
covered her chest, with that sleek ponytail and
the red lipstick is iconic. It's so vulnerable
and yet so armored at the same time. Perfectly
put. So by 1992, they are untouchable. They've
had a decade of nonstop hits. They're rich. They're
respected. And then the pattern changes. This
brings us to what I think is the most fascinating
part of her entire career strategy. The hiatus.
The strategy of scarcity. But was it really a
strategy, do you think? Or was she just tired
of it all? I think it started as life. After
the massive world tour for Love Deluxe, the band
was just exhausted. And Saida Du's personal life
was in flux. She'd had a brief marriage to the
Spanish film director Carlos Pliego that ended.
And then she gave birth to her first child in
1996. Right. And she moved to the Caribbean for
a while. She basically just stepped off the carousel.
She wanted a real life away from the spotlight.
But stepping off for eight years. In the 90s.
The decade of Britpop and grunge and gangster
rap. I mean, that was considered career suicide.
Conventional wisdom says yes, absolutely. The
industry model is built entirely on momentum.
You tour, you do press, you release an album,
you repeat. If you stop, you lose your spot.
But Sod proved that if the product is premium
enough, the normal economic rules just don't
apply. Exactly. Think of it like luxury fashion.
H &M or Zara, they need to have new clothes in
the store every single week to keep you coming
back. Right. Hermes can have a waiting list for
a Birkin bag that lasts for three years. Sod
became the Birkin bag of music. I love that analogy.
By not being available, she actually increased
her value. The demand just built and built. It
did. So when they finally returned in the year
2000 with the album Lovers Rock. Yeah. It wasn't
just another album release. It was a major cultural
event. And Lovers Rock was a huge sonic pivot,
too. A major one. They stripped away a lot of
the overt jazz elements. They leaned very heavily
into acoustic guitars and reggae rhythms. Hence
the title, Lovers Rock, which is a specific subgenre
of romantic reggae. Exactly. The whole album
was warmer, more domestic, more intimate. It
sounds like a band playing together in a living
room, not a slick studio. And it worked. It won
the Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Album. And the
tour. Yeah. The Lovers Rock tour was gigantic.
It was the 13th biggest tour in North America
at the time. Which just proved that the fan base
hadn't left. They hadn't gone anywhere. They
had just been waiting patiently. And so, having
seen that this works, she tests them again. She
disappears for another 10 years. 10 years. A
full decade between Lovers Rock and Soldier of
Love. That is just... It's an incredible amount
of silence in the music business. And think about
the decade she skipped from 2000 to 2010. That's
when the entire music industry was turned upside
down and reinvented. Right. Napster came and
went. The iTunes store took over everything.
Social media was born. Facebook, Twitter. And
yet sold was nowhere to be found. She was living
in the English countryside, raising her child,
renovating a house, just living. And when Soldier
of Love finally drops in 2010, it debuts at number
one on the Billboard 200 chart. After a 10 -year
absence, that is staggering. It broke a record,
actually, for the longest time between number
one albums for a group. It was almost 25 years
between Promise hitting number one and Soldier
of Love doing the same. Wow. It showed that her
appeal is completely multi -generational. You
have the original fans from the 80s who grew
up with her, and then you have this whole new
generation who had discovered her through sampling
and, you know, cultural osmosis. Okay, let's
talk about that cultural osmosis, specifically
the hip -hop connection. Because on paper, it
really doesn't make any sense. It seems like
a mismatch. A huge one. You have these rugged,
often - aggressive rappers obsessing over this
quiet, elegant, British -Nigerian woman singing
these soft songs about love and heartache. But
spiritually, it's a perfect fit. Hip -hop at
its core values cool. It values authenticity.
And it values someone who stays in their own
lane and just completely dominates it. She has
an undeniable mystique. She does. And the pioneers
loved her. Rukim, arguably the god MC, has said
in interviews he grew up listening to her. He
even references Smooth Operator in his classic
track, Microphone Fiend. And it's not just the
lyrical references, it's the samples. The sound
of her music is woven into the DNA of so much
hip -hop. The production of Sade, that heavy
bass, the clean drums, the space between the
notes, it's ready -made for hip -hop loops. The
producer Jay Dilla used her. MF Doom, maybe the
greatest underground rapper ever, sampled her
extensively on his album Operation. And it gives
those tracks this instant layer of sophisticated,
melancholic cool. It does. Then you have Kanye
West back in his blog era, just geeking out,
posting SADE IS BACK in all caps because he was
so excited for her return. And then there's Rick
Ross, who literally has a tattoo of her face
on his body. On his leg, I think. He's the ultimate
super fan. He is. Rick Ross said, and I quote,
there's never been a bad SADE track. And I think
what rappers like him respect is the game. SADE
has ultimate game. Explain that. What do you
mean by game? She doesn't beg for attention.
She doesn't chase trends. She doesn't show up
to every party. She releases music on her terms
when she feels it's ready, and the world stops
to listen. In a genre like hip -hop that is so
often about posturing and power plays, side represents
this quiet, unshakable power. It's a different
kind of authority. A different kind. Talad Kweli
said he learned precision from listening to her.
That's a great word for it. She never wastes
a single note or a single word. So she's the
queen of Quiet Storm, but she's got the undisputed
respect of the streets. It's such a unique position
to hold in music. It is. And all of this has
cemented her legacy. Rolling Stone put her at
number 51 on their 200 Greatest Singers of All
Time list in 2023. And she was inducted into
the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2023, nominated
for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She is canon
now. Utterly. I want to pivot to the personal
side briefly because for someone so intensely
private, the few glimpses we do get are very
telling about her character. We mentioned she
moved to the countryside. Yes. In 2005, she bought
a rundown cottage in Gloucestershire. And this
wasn't one of those celebrity, I bought a farmhouse
situations where they hire a famous contractor
and then just show up for the photo shoot. She
was deeply involved in the renovation herself.
Apparently, she really likes manual labor. She
likes building things, fixing things. It grounds
her. It's that practical district nurse mother
influence coming through again. No nonsense.
Absolutely. And she's been with her partner,
Ian Watts, who is a former Royal Marine since
2007. It's a very stable, very un -Hollywood
life that she's built for herself. But the most
significant personal story to emerge in recent
years has been her relationship with her child,
Isaac Theo Adu. Yes. Isaac is her child from
a relationship she had with the Jamaican music
producer. Bob Morgan. And in 2016, Isaac came
out as a transgender man. A journey he documented
very openly on social media. He did. And this
was obviously a major moment for their family.
And by all accounts, from Isaac's own words,
Sade was incredibly supportive through the entire
process. He's posted some very moving tributes
to her online, thanking her for standing by him
during his transition, during the surgeries.
He called her his rock. And what I find so beautiful
and so quintessentially Saad is how she handled
it publicly. She didn't issue a press release.
She didn't do an Oprah interview about her journey
as a parent. No, she put it in the music. She
put it in the music. Yeah. In 2024, she released
a track called Young Lion as part of a Red Hot
Organization compilation album for trans awareness.
The song is dedicated to Isaac. Young Lyon. Such
a powerful, protective title. It just shows that
even in her 60s, she's still using her art to
process the most intimate, most important parts
of her life. And that's why the music resonates,
isn't it? It's real. It's not just product churned
out for the algorithm. Not at all. So that brings
us up to the present day, more or less. We've
had Young Lion. We had those two brilliant soundtrack
songs in 2018. Right. Flower of the Universe.
For Disney's A Wrinkle in Time. Yeah. The director,
Ava DuVernay, said she basically just put it
out into the universe, never thinking a million
years that Sod would actually say yes. But she
did. She did. And she also did the big unknown
for Steve McQueen's movie Widows. And the reason
she said yes to that was because the original
TV series from the 80s resonated with her as
a story about women surviving against the odds.
She picks projects that have real artistic merit.
But the big question that every fan is always
asking, is there another album? It's been 14
years now since Soldier of Love. There is smoke,
so there might be fire. The sources have confirmed
that in 2022, the band, the original four, Saad,
Stuart, Andrew and Paul, reconvened at Miraval
Studios in France. Miraval, that's legendary.
That's where they recorded Parts of Promise and
Stronger Than Pride back in the 80s. Exactly.
Returning to the scene of the crime, Brad Pitt
actually owns the studio now, along with a French
producer named Damien Quintard. So they were
there in the studio. They were there. Quintard
himself confirmed it. He said they were working
and that Sod and the band were special people.
Now, does that mean an album is coming next month?
With Sod, you never ever know. But the machine
has been turned on. So we wait, as we always
do. As we always do. You know, as we wrap this
up, I keep going back to this idea of her career
as a masterclass in mystique. In a world where
we are just drowning in content, where everything
is disposable and forgotten by next week, Saad
feels like an heirloom. She is an heirloom. That's
a perfect description. She represents a completely
different value system. She proves that you don't
have to play the game by the industry's rules.
You can just opt out. You can live in the countryside.
You can take 10 years off to be a mother. You
can refuse to do 99 % of interviews. And if your
art is true, if it is of a high enough quality.
The world will wait for you. It's actually a
really comforting thought. It suggests that maybe
we aren't as addicted to the new as we think
we are. Maybe we're just starved for the good.
I think that's it right there. We don't actually
need more. We need better. Inside is always,
always better. Here's a final thought to leave
you with. In this age of AI -generated music
and constant digital noise, what does it say
about us as listeners that the thing we might
crave most is the scarcest resource of all, an
artist's patient, human, and deliberate silence?
Something to think about. Thanks for diving in
with us. We'll see you on the next one.