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Helen Folsade Adu
BORN: January 16, 1959, Ibadan, Nigeria
Lovers Rock is the first collection of new work by
Sade in eight years. But it's a record that says
less about those years gone by than the promise and
vitality of the here and now. It's an album that's
by turns moving, elegiac and beautiful. Like the
tender, acoustic guitar-driven first single, 'By
Your Side', a song about the tensile strength of
love, it is music stripped back to its essential
elements: voice, melody, and meticulously arranged
instrumentation. The result is a record of bare,
sometimes startlingly, immediacy.
But then Helen Folasade Adu is a woman who has never
had anything to hide. Born in Ibadan, Nigeria and
raised in Colchester, Essex, where she moved at 4
after her English mother separated from her Nigerian
father, she's spent her life trying to do what feels
right, honest and true. Because by comparison
nothing else has seemed as important. When she was
growing up, Sade would listen to soul artists like
Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway and Marvin Gaye.
Singers uniquely attuned to the complex
sensibilities of heartache and hope, who were
skilled enough to create from those feelings,
something lasting and transcendent. Still she didn't
think about singing herself.
Rather, she studied fashion at St Martin's art
college, only signing on as vocalist when a couple
of old school friends started a band "until
they found a proper singer". From there to
singing with early Eighties Latin funk collective
Pride, she discovered a rare delight in songwriting.
It was while she was with that group, Sade co-wrote
'Smooth Operator' with Ray St. John, and it was from
there that Sade abandoned diffidence and finally
stepped centre stage to form her own group with
fellow Pride members Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale
and Paul Spencer Denman.
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