We’re back to an album with some heavy airplay – Smooth Operator and Your Love Is King have barely been off the radio for the past forty years and thus sound as familiar as an old jumper. But, it has to be said, in a good way. Old jumpers are nice and soothing.
Here’s something it’s taken me forty years to learn – Sade is the name of the band as a whole, and not just a soloist name for the singer Sade Abu (shortened from the Anglo-Nigerian Helen Folasade Abu). Abu started life as a backing singer with a band called Pride but progressed to the fore, taking other musicians with her, most notably saxophonist Stuart Matthewman. Matthewman’s smooth playing, alongside Abu’s effortless singing, give the whole album its cocktail lounge feel.
In context, this is very much the birth of a new direction of R&B/soul using light jazz elements and sophisti-pop styling to make a very radio-friendly easy-listening experience. Which is not to belittle it as simplistic. I mentioned way way back at the beginning with Frank Sinatra that it’s actually quite hard to make something sound easy. The style is known as “quiet storm” after a Smokey Robinson track of the same name, and this is by far the earliest example. It does, however, have that Eighties polish to the music, as well as that slightly unconventional slant you’d expect from English/Nigerian input rather than American MTV conventions.
The question always with albums where there a couple of massive singles – do the rest of the tracks match up to their famous siblings? And I’d say that, yes, they do. Cherry Pie is a great lengthy funky groove. Sally has a blues-jazz feel and sounds at first like it’s about a woman free with her affections - “Sally, you opened out your arms to all those young men, and girl you had room for every one of them” but as the verses describe the men to whom she opens her arms, it becomes clear that “Sally” is probably “Salvation Army” or similar charitable endeavour; lyrically it’s probably the most powerful track on the album that’s not just an easy love song. Different kind of love, I guess. Why Can’t We Live Together? is a cry for an end to hate and racism (oh well, keep trying on that front...) but has a great strong yet laid-back groove with elements of African rhythms to it, akin to Joan Armatrading – for me probably the strongest track on the album that could have gone on forever.
This isn't my favourite kind of music and, like all soul, has a tendency to just slide past my consciousness. But there were some interesting album cuts on here that were more than just love songs.
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