Diamond Life

Friday is fun, music, playlists, links, etc — Today it’s a celebration of Sade. The diamond album “Diamond Life” turned 40 this week!

Earlier in the week, I mentioned it was my birthday. It came up organically as part of this short piece:

I first mentioned it in these newsletters three years ago, when my birthday actually fell on a Friday, and because I’ve always been chuffed to know that I share a birthday with one of my favourite drummers:

Well, this year I learned I also share a birthday with one of my favourite albums:

And so, a few days late, but I say happy birthday to Sade’s Diamond Life, turning 40 this year.

Diamond Life is the debut record by British soul/jazz/pop band, Sade. The lead singer is Sade Adu. She had been the backing vocalist for a group called Pride. But her and most of the band regrouped under the name Sade and immediately wrote and recorded some absolute bangers.

Diamond Life, which I’ve been listening to on and off across its entire 40 year life, starts with three hit singles. Smooth Operator, Your Love Is King and Hang On To Your Love. I’m not sure there’s a better sustained start to an album. Maybe Joshua Tree. Maybe not. In terms of the very definition of a sound, the business card for what a band does, it’s all there in those three songs. Which does not mean that’s all the album offers. It’s pretty much all good things, all quality-control. And certainly Cherry Pie is as good as those three first songs, maybe better. Frankie’s First Affair and Sally are the moody ballads that are perfectly placed near the middle hinge, but one nearer the start, the other closer to the end.

It’s about as mid-80s as it gets. Too coked-up and Miami wine cooler-sipping for some. Maybe just the right amount for others?

I was an eight year old kid when I first heard this album. My folks loved it. My aunty had the cassette tape — she’d later give it to me. I have since owned it on CD, and vinyl. And I’m very tempted to take some of my birthday money from earlier this week and splash out on the new vinyl reissue:

Which I sure as hell don’t need and absolutely want — the way it should be with birthday presents bought for yourself from birthday money; that’s when you can guilt-free splurge, right?

Anyway, I’ve always loved Sade. And that wasn’t always easy. The first two albums were everywhere, and a heap of hit singles. The following year’s Promise started almost as strongly as Diamond Life, with the songs Is It A Crime? and The Sweetest Taboo (Taboo in particular is a banger!) And if it wasn’t quite another Diamond, that knowledge was even reflected in the title of this album’s third single (appearing further down the album’s track list): Never As Good As The First Time.

Fortunately for me, my aunty liked it every bit as much, and rushed out to buy the tape. And then gave that to me, a few years on. (We had this good gig going for a while there too, where I’d buy blank tapes and record everything she’d buy, and then after a while she’d just swap with me and let me have the original cassette and keep the ‘dubbed copy’ for herself. Wicked!)

There were five more singles on 1988’s Stronger Than Pride and I very much love the opening track, Love Is Stronger Than Pride. I dig the whole album too. But it’s not quite my favourite. I mostly missed Love Deluxe at the time (1992). And we can blame Nirvana and Pearl Jam for that. But in 1994, 30 years ago now, my Christmas Wishlist included Tony Bennett’s MTV Unplugged, Bob Seger’s Greatest Hits and The Best of Sade — and I was lucky to get them all. Clean sweep.

Those early singles have been moved around a tiny bit — but there they are still doing the work. Kicking off this compilation with the bangers. It also features the band’s sublime cover of Percy Mayfield’s Please Send Me Someone To Love which was recorded for the Philadelphia soundtrack.

A couple of years ago I bought The Best of Sade on CD for $1.

I have been playing it a bunch over the last wee while. It’s grown better with age. Or maybe I just don’t feel I have to look over my shoulder when playing it now. That certainly didn’t seem the case when I was driving around in my car in my final year of high school with a tape-recorded copy of The Best of Sade.

Ten years on it was 80s dross. In some circles anyway.

Forty years on, I still find Smooth Operator struggles under the weight of its ubiquity, but it feels like it has army crawled to the side for a wee breather just recently.

Your Love Is King remains all class. And Hang On To Your Love is the track I dig the most. Those deeper album cuts — When Am I Going to Make A Living, I Will Be Your Friend, and Why Can’t We Live Together — feel like they’ve aged remarkably.

There’s something so perfect about this album for me. The sophistication of this pop music, the precision of the playing, the cool-charm of the delivery and production — and it’s that perfect 80s-album length: 9 tracks, 44 minutes. That was every tape I owned for a while there. The name was Dire Straits (Communique) or Jeff Beck (Flash) or Janet Jackson (Control) or Mick Jagger (She’s The Boss) or Robbie Robertson (Robbie Robertson).

And it was definitely Sade. And Diamond Life.

I thought Sade was just the name of the singer. And she was cooler than Madonna as a single-name singer. (I didn’t like Madonna — until I was much older, and now it’s only really the first four albums). I thought it was even cooler when I found out it was the name of a band. My Sade tapes were safe next to my Alison Moyet tapes. You couldn’t own too many tapes by female artists when you were a boy growing up in Hawke’s Bay in the 1980s and 1990s. I might just have imagined that — but it was how it felt. I had Cyndi Lauper and Janet Jackson and Sade and Alison Moyet. And that was pushing it. So I never got the Whitney Houston albums I wanted. And I had to keep it secret that I really liked En Vogue and Mariah Carey.

But Sade was a band. And so you could hide in that a bit too — mention that you liked the playing of the guys in the band. When really it was all about Sade, her name, her look, her sound. Her songs.

Funny, stupid old world, huh.

No such hang-ups now at least.

Anyways, that’s how I remember it. But buying The Best of Sade in 1994, and clinging to it — and then reconnecting with band’s music for the brilliant albums Lovers Rock (2000), Lovers Live (2002) and Soldier of Love (2010) — wouldn’t have happened where it not for Diamond Life. And my instant love of that music.

There’s still talk of a new Sade album now and then. There was a single about five years ago, for a movie. But Sade Adu has taken time out to raise a family, to enjoy her own life away from photo lenses and column inches; almost never granting interviews. I love and respect that alongside the very best of the music.

She (and band) also influenced the neo-soul movement of the late 90s/early 00s, whilst also being somehow both antecedent and a crucial part of it. There’s no bad Sade album — it’s all immaculate, and each record is some shade of great. (My real worry in buying the vinyl reissue is that I’ll want all six).

So happy 40th Diamond Life.

And, hey, if you don’t feel in the mood for Sade ever, or not today anyway, and you made it this far, you deserve a playlist of some different music. So, as always at the end of a Friday newsletter, here it is: