Most A-list artists who return with a new album after nearly a decade away from the celebrity glare are apt to show signs of nerves, or at least offer some excuses. Not Sade.
The imminent release of Soldier of Love – only her 6th studio collection in a career stretching back 27 years – seems to be a cause of raucous hilarity. On the afternoon we meet in her spacious house in leafy north London, Sade is chuckling at a photograph of a graffitied poster photographed in New York by her guitarist Stuart Matthewman. Above an image of her glamorous self somebody has sprayed the caustic legend This bitch sings when she wants to. Never one to miss a chance to laugh at herself, Sade thinks this is hilarious.
As a broad summary of her last two decades, it’s hard to fault. She is very much her own person, unswayed by managers or her record company. Since the start of the 1990’s, Sade has released just 3 albums of new material. There’s been a 10 year gap between Soldier Of Love, which arrives in February, and her 2000 offering, Lovers Rock. The third Love Deluxe dates back to 1992. For much of that time she has been, as is her habit nowadays, virtually invisible. Her friends have taken to calling her “Howie” after the millionaire recluse Howard Hughes.
Sade doesn’t look to have aged at all during her long absence. On the eve of her 51st birthday, her face is unlined and she still possesses a striking physical presence. She is taller in person than she appears on stage; and her height (about 5′ 8″) in combination with her large, domed head, the coil of jet black hair which frames it and those wide set almond-shaped eyes, still lend her an exotic allure which she professes not to care a fig about. “People always used to say, what’s it like to see your face on the cover of a magazine? I don’t really see it. I don’t connect with it.”
She has years of privacy to prove it. And given that she has only done a handful of interviews and one tour in the past 15 years, you can’t help wondering what has now lured Sade back to the pop marketplace. Having sold 50m albums – the biggest tally by a British female artist ever – she has earned all the money she will ever need. And her needs are, as she points out, modest. When she laughingly remarks that “I’m not someone who needs a lot of money. You could break into this house and leave after half an hour without finding anything worth stealing,” it’s hard to disagree.
Her allegiance to these long cherished throwbacks lends a clue as to how she operates. Sade is a creature of obstinately loyal habits, and when her band – the same trio she’s worked with since 1983 – began to agitate to make a new record as the Noughties wore on, she responded to the pressure. “The band were keen to do it, I’d been writing in London but initially I didn’t want the pressure of everybody flying in. I wanted to work at my own convenience. Then after I moved, and the band were still antsy, I said OK let’s do it. I did think maybe it had been zapped out of me. I always think that after every album, but then I just went headlong into it.”
Soldier Of Love was mainly written and recorded in 2008/9 over series of fortnightly sessions at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio, near where she lives.
Although her personal circumstances were much happier by now, thanks partly to a new relationship begun in 2005 with her present partner , a former Royal Marine, the songs still bore the unmistakably melancholic imprint of classic Sade. Why? “It’s what I do, I can’t help it. Sadness dealt with well brings happiness, I think. It purges you and enables you to leave it behind. Happy songs can actually make you feel worse. I’m not a moper but I do have a tendency towards melancholia. Somebody told me once that I’m a Capricor born under the saddest star. Who knows?” Sade says she loves the old English expression “Into every life a little rain must fall.”
Soldier Of Love is out now after debuting at No. 4 on the ARIA charts.
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