“You can buy any kind of love but you can’t get love deluxe.” The album title comes from Adu’s concept of love: “The idea is that it’s one of the few luxury things that you can’t buy,” she said in an interview at the time. They worked for four months, a shorter and less dislocated session than the ones that generated some of their previous recordings, and the album they made, Love Deluxe, is their most monolithic in sound. In 1992, Sade returned to the studio after a short break following their tour for Stronger Than Pride.

In reality, Adu’s songs are less romantic in form than they are glassy vehicles for a more introspective melancholy, seamless projections of love, devotion, and heartbreak that also seem to have just barely escaped the inner depth that produced them. Sade had also acquired, through their numerous love songs, the reputation of a generally romantic band. Their music was a portal through which one could effortlessly simulate such an experience, a virtual vacation in which the more severe physical edges of reality had been dissolved. Top 10 hit “Smooth Operator” described the jet-setting lifestyle of a debonair, dangerous, Don Juan-type, Sade came to signify a kind of cosmopolitan exotica-where one could travel to distant places on luxury airplanes, absorb an endless, glossy flow of champagne, and slowly sift through a hangover in a hotel bar. Just two albums later, on 1988’s Stronger Than Pride, songs like “I Never Thought I’d See the Day” and “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” seem to flow out of and recede back into a gently-constructed nowhere.Īs their first U.S. They were capable of producing a floating, haunted kind of music, and over time their attentions and their albums grew more absorbed by it. Often the mixture would produce crisp staircases of soul, like “Your Love Is King,” or liquid-crystal pop-funk, like “Hang on to Your Love.” Sometimes they slipped into a less material space in live performances of the Diamond Life B-side “Love Affair With Life,” Hale’s piano, Matthewman’s saxophone, and Adu’s voice are held together by the song’s vast margins, given a ghostly shape by its silences. During the sessions for their first record, Diamond Life, they would listen to Gil Scott-Heron, Marvin Gaye, and Nina Simone, and try to synthesize the sounds into a more seamless design. As Pride eventually fragmented, the band Sade solidified, with the final lineup including bassist Paul Denman and keyboardist Andrew Hale. Stuart Matthewman auditioned for Pride after reading an ad in a magazine seeking a saxophone player for a “fashion conscious jazz-funk band.” At the audition, he met Sade Adu, then one of Pride’s backup singers after Matthewman joined the band, he and Adu started writing together. Sade began as a reduced lineup of the Latin jazz band Pride.

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