The US instantly fell in love with the band, too, particularly the seductive tale of a playboy, Smooth Operator, which made the Top Five there. The seductive, jazz-inflected soul was a world away from the outré bravura of the New Romantic scene. Debut single Your Love Is King – a No.6 hit in the UK –immediately caused a sensation and Diamond Life followed swiftly in its slipstream. Labels were initially reluctant to sign Pride but after Adu became hot property following appearances in style bibles like The Face, they signed the singer and Pride’s Stuart Matthewman, Paul Denman and Andrew Hale came with her as part of the package. Although Adu first saw singing as a hobby, gradually an interest in songwriting grew into a burning passion. When their original singer left, Adu was asked to audition: “They just assumed I could sing because I was black,” she told MTV. Sade formed out of the ashes of Pride, a London funk/Latin outfit. And it’s a group, Adu aside, that remain almost totally anonymous except to the most fervent of fans, despite selling more than 75 million records worldwide. Many forget this is, in fact, a band rather than the solo project of frontwoman Sade Adu. Sade, now a byword for understated sophisti-pop, were singularly and wilfully out of step with the times when this debut arrived on the day-glo, effervescent pop scene of 1984.Ĭonfusion still reigns, of course, exactly what the Sade ‘entity’ actually consists of. I n a circus of freaks, it’s the ‘straights’ who end up standing out from the crowd.