Sade on stage at the O2 World in Berlin, Germany, last year The sleepy part of Gloucestershire where Eighties singer Sade has maintained a reclusive existence since 2005 is not exactly known for its celebrities. But that is just the way the reticent singer likes it.
Preferring days spent weeding, planting and lugging a wheelbarrow around her immaculate garden, few notice her as she browses for bulbs and seeds in her local garden centre, without a scrap of make-up and dressed in scruffy baggy cords, a fleece and a headscarf.
Yet, although to some Sade’s brand of cool jazz might seem as Eighties as brick-sized mobile phones and frizzy perms, she has quietly established herself as our most recognisable and money-spinning musical export — bagging a new breed of adoring and powerful acolytes such as rappers Kanye West and Jay-Z who appeared on her latest album, The Ultimate Collection.
The extent of her enduring international success is revealed by new figures from America, which show that the Essex-raised singer, who had her first hit with Your Love Is King more than a quarter of a century ago, raked in an astonishing $16.4million (£10.5million) last year in the U.S.
Across the pond, Sade has even out-earned the likes of fellow Brits Adele, Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney.
Coming in at number six on the Billboard list of the most profitable artists of the past year, she is just two places lower than Lady Gaga.
For the irony is that although she remains this country’s most successful female singer ever — having sold more than 50 million records worldwide — most Britons may only fondly recall her debut album Diamond Life and its hit singles Smooth Operator and When Am I Going To Make A Living?.
Meanwhile, Sade and other British bands from her era, such as Depeche Mode and The Cure, remain huge crowd-pullers in America where a younger generation has never tired of their brand of Eighties nostalgia and whose moody tracks are constantly used in popular TV shows such as The Vampire Diaries and Smallville.
For the better part of the past 20 years, however, Sade has spent her days cooking at her secluded home, away from the intense glare of the media spotlight.
Her former boyfriend, British radio presenter Robert Elms, says of her: ‘She never wanted to be famous, just to write and sing good songs. She finds celebrity very vulgar.’
Her need for rooted security can perhaps be pinned on an unorthodox upbringing. Sade’s mother Anne was an English district nurse who met and married her Nigerian father Adebisi Adu in 1955 in Britain, then followed him back to his Nigerian homeland.
The couple had a son, Banji, and their second child, Helen Folasade Adu, was born in Ibadan in January 1959. Soon, however, her Christian name was dropped and she became known to her family simply by the nickname Sade.
By the time she was four, with her father now working as an economics lecturer in Nigeria, her parents’ marriage began to crumble and her mother returned to the UK with her children.
They moved into Anne’s mother’s house near Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, although Sade stayed in touch with her father, who remained in Nigeria and died of cancer several years ago.
Unsure about what she wanted to do with her life, a teenage Sade drifted into a fashion course at London’s prestigious Central St Martins College of Art and Design and dabbled with modelling. Money was perilously short, and she ended up squatting in houses in Tottenham, North London.
The pop singer was highly successful in the 80s and appeared on stage at the legendary Live Aid charity concert at Wembley in 1985
Her big break came by chance. In the early Eighties, friends who were starting a band and had never heard her sing asked her to join as a backing vocalist because they thought her exotic looks would attract male fans.
But an early manager pronounced she could not sing, and she and three other members of the group splintered away to form their own band. A few months later, Sade was given her solo role in front of the microphone.
Despite her inexperience, she showed an early shrewdness that would stand her in good stead in the cutthroat world of the music business. In 1983, when she recorded a demo of her first single Smooth Operator, it was originally rejected by every major label. But she persuaded Elms, who worked in the media, to drum up publicity in fashion and style magazines based on her stunning looks, trademark black polo-neck sweater and slicked-back hair.
By the time she performed her first gig at London’s legendary club Heaven in 1984, she had become so popular that 1,000 people were turned away at the door. Equally astutely, the then 25 year-old Sade hired a sharp music lawyer called Brian Carr and insisted that Epic Records, who led the queue to sign her, paid a generous 14.75 per cent royalties rather than the cash advance most new acts settled for.
But by 1988, however, her success in the UK had dwindled and she resorted to remixing one of her old tracks, Paradise. Her singles struggled to reach the Top 30 and her third album, Stronger Than Pride, was mauled by the critics. Meanwhile, there were rumours that she had paralysing stage fright.
A year later, she had all but disappeared from the music business. After splitting from Elms, she dated struggling nightclub owner Spike Denton. But her newfound wealth drove a wedge between them. When they separated, Denton complained: ‘It’s a nightmare for men like me when we fall in love with a rich and famous woman.’
She then fell for Spanish film-maker Carlos Pliego. The couple married in 1989 and the singer moved to Madrid to be with him. But the marriage lasted less than three years. Later, in a rare interview, she admitted it took her five years to get over it.
In the 20 years that have followed, she produced only three studio albums: Love Deluxe in 1992 and Lovers Rock in 2000 before a comeback in 2010 with Soldier of Love.
During her long absences, she has quietly been bringing up her daughter Ila, now 15, from her relationship with Jamaican music producer Bob Morgan. She moved briefly to the Caribbean to live with him in the late Nineties, but they separated.
Making only a rare public appearance in 2002 to accept an OBE at Buckingham Palace for services to music, she settled for near obscurity in the Gloucestershire countryside where, in 2005, she bought a run-down, stone-built cottage to renovate near Stroud.
Neighbours now speak of her trundling around in a ten-year-old Mercedes to visit the local garden centre.
Nonetheless, with a reputed fortune of £40million, she is known as a canny investor, with a property portfolio that includes a £3.5million townhouse in Islington, North London, a West End penthouse that she generously lets friends use, as well as houses in New York and Switzerland.
She has also fallen for a local man, Ian Watts, a former Royal Marine and fireman-turned-scientist, with whom she and her daughter now live, along with Mr Watts’s 20-year-old son Jack.
Perhaps in a sign of her domestic happiness, the singer, who seems barely to have aged since her Eighties heyday, has even been slightly more forthcoming of late about her personal life, recently describing Watts in her local paper as ‘The One’.
In a rare recent insight into her unstarry home life, she joked: ‘I always said that if I could just find a guy who could chop wood and had a nice smile, it didn’t bother me if he was an aristocrat or a thug as long as he was a good guy. And I’ve ended up with an educated thug. I have a lovely stepson who lives with us and I feel lucky, like I’ve won the lottery, finally.’
•Culled from www.dailymail.co.uk
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