The making of “Your Love Is King” by Sade: “It was like the world stood still”
Robert Elms can remember the precise moment when Sade became a singer. It was in the back of a transit van on the way to Cardiff to see Blue Rondo À La Turk. The driver, Lee Barrett, then manager of a band called Arriva, asked Sade if she could sing. “She said she could,” remembers Elms, Sade’s boyfriend and a journalist at The Face. “I thought there had been no evidence of this, so asked her about it when we stopped at a petrol station. She said, ‘How hard could it be?’”
Robert Elms can remember the precise moment when Sade became a singer. It was in the back of a transit van on the way to Cardiff to see Blue Rondo À La Turk. The driver, Lee Barrett, then manager of a band called Arriva, asked Sade if she could sing. “She said she could,” remembers Elms, Sade’s boyfriend and a journalist at The Face. “I thought there had been no evidence of this, so asked her about it when we stopped at a petrol station. She said, ‘How hard could it be?’”
A couple of years later, Arriva had become Pride had become Sade – who were on Top Of The Pops with her debut single, “Your Love Is King”. How hard could it be? The record opens with a sax line played by co-writer Stuart Matthewman, before Sade’s unique voice takes over. This music was very different to the rest of the charts – sleek, minimalist, poised, with a hint of jazz, lover’s rock and soul in the percussion and arrangement.
Record labels hadn’t known what to make of Sade – born Helen Folasade Adu – but she had friends in the press who could help with that. “Suddenly she was in The Face looking gorgeous and they started to listen,” says Elms.
Sade had been a student at St Martin’s. She’d already been making waves in the Soho club scene, centred around venues like Le Beat Route and the Wag: a breeding ground for artists, musicians, writers and photographers. She met Elms in New York at a Spandau Ballet gig, where she was part of a fashion show featuring some of London’s bright young designers. After discovering she could sing, she began to write, gradually finding a smooth, tasteful, less-is-more aesthetic that allowed her voice to shine.
“Your Love Is King” was an instant hit and one of the most distinctive debut singles of the 1980s, introducing a calmer voice to counter the exuberance of New Pop. Its studied cool and understated drama was followed by “Smooth Operator”, million-selling albums and appearances at Live Aid and in Absolute Beginners.
“There are certain voices where there is something in them that you know people are going to like,” says Sir Robin Millar, who produced “Your Love Is King” and Sade’s Diamond Life. “Bing Crosby had it. Adele’s got it. Sade’s got it. It’s in the tone of the voice that makes people listen. You can’t forget it and it’s impossible to imitate.”
STUART MATTHEWMAN (co-writer, sax): Sade was living with Robert in a squat above a fire station in Wood Green. I’d hang out and we’d write together. With “Your Love Is King” she’d been out with friends when the melody came into her head. She said she had to try and remember it while she was going home on the bus.
ROBERT ELMS: She would work on songs by singing to Stuart, who could play anything. She would sit on our horsehair sofa singing the melody to “Your Love Is King”. I was her boyfriend and I’m not saying it was about me, but it was first sung to me on that sofa.
MATTHEWMAN: I started strumming chords and we began arranging it together. I had never done anything in 6/8 time, but I had a waltz setting on the drum machine that we sped up. We wrote it pretty quickly then took it to rehearsal.
ANDREW HALE (keyboards): Stuart and Sade brought the cassette with “Your Love Is King” to rehearsal. My strongest memory was that the other songs we did came from the Pride era. This was the first one that captured the sound of what this band would become.
ELMS: Sade had been the backing singer for Arriva and Pride, but it became clear to anyone with ears and eyes that she was the star. Lee Barrett brought in Stuart, Andrew and Paul Denman, and the music took on a more soul-jazz direction. It stopped being Pride and became Sade as everything else fell away.
MATTHEWMAN: Pride had three singers. The idea was that they’d all have a little set, but when Sade sang, it was immediately so different; it became obvious that people were more interested in her than the other singers. When we were introducing the different sets we’d say, ‘Here’s Sade,” and that became the name of the band. The alternative was “Here’s Barbara,” which was the name of the other singer.
HALE: We all liked different music but the club scene was where we all came together. It had this fascinating mix of people revolving around music.
ELMS: Places like Le Beat Route and the Wag were hothouses. We’d all grown up around punk, with that message: you can do it. Start a band, start a mag, start a clothes shop. It was incredibly liberating. We saw our friends doing it and wanted to do it too. Punk turned us from consumers to creators. Sade’s music might be as far away from punk as you can get, but the attitude was the same.
ROBIN MILLAR (producer): I got involved with the Chilean Solidarity Campaign, who wanted to draw attention to the fact that General Pinochet had been in power for 10 years. I invited Latin jazz musicians to the Power Plant and about 30 turned up. We made a record with Tracey Thorn and Robert Wyatt called “Venceremos”, which means “We Will Win”. The following afternoon I got a call from Lee Barrett, who said two members of Pride had been in the studio and he had some music I might like to hear.
MATTHEWMAN: The Chilean Solidarity band was Working Week. I remember there were a lot of incredible musicians at the studio.
MILLAR: I’d set up the Power Plant studio the year before. The plan was to use dead time to record acts with potential but no money and we owned the masters. Lee brought a demo of “Your Love Is King”. It was a groove and a vocal. I couldn’t sleep after hearing it. I rang my dad and told him I’d heard this voice and if I got it right, I’d cracked it.
ELMS: Sade has quite a limited voice in some ways, but it’s very potent. She’s not a jazz singer. I don’t know what kind of singer she is, but she’s the opposite of those people doing vocal gymnastics on TV every Saturday night. She sings like she looks and dresses and holds herself, very stripped back and precise.
MATTHEWMAN: Sade has more vocal cords in the low end of her voice, which gives her a thicker sound at the low end. We weren’t incredible musicians, we hadn’t grown up in gospel and soul. Sade had grown up watching Top Of The Pops like the rest of us. She did none of those R&B vocal riffs. She drew you in by telling a story. It wasn’t a performance, it was storytelling.
MILLAR: I met Sade and we chatted about Gil Scott-Heron. She was incredibly impressed I had worked with him. I think that got me the job. We talked about Ray Charles, Dinah Washington, Sinatra. I told her I’d give them a week, but we’d have to duck and dive around paid sessions.
HALE: Robin really believed in us. He saw the potential. Musically, we were very young but had confidence in the vision of what we were doing. It was very exciting being in this posh studio with free food and Robin at the helm, not knowing what this was going to lead to.
MATTHEWMAN: We went in to record “Your Love Is King” and “Smooth Operator”. Robin helped arrange it, put in some stops and starts. We had some live drums and a Linn drum machine and a delay unit that allowed us to sample. Robin helped make it a lot tighter.
MILLAR: We recorded “Your Love Is King” and “Smooth Operator” in a week. We recorded the backing tracks, then I told them what we needed to add and where. “Your Love Is King” needed a crescendo in the vocal, a few changes to the lyrics. I told them how percussion can maintain momentum without crowding the vocal.
MATTHEWMAN: It was about keeping it simple but tight. We wanted additional brass, so my brother came in to play the trumpet and Robin brought in a percussion player, Dave Early, who ended up playing drums with us for years.
MILLAR: They were good players, but I was very exacting. I had this concept of doubling the Rhodes and piano on the chorus. Andrew had to do that by ear. He had good discipline. I made him do it again and again to get it precise. I was asking for session player skills even though they were kids who had never set foot in a studio before.
HALE: That was a lesson he taught me. A musician would usually play two different parts, but Robin wanted me to double the same part to add something to the sound.
MATTHEWMAN: In rehearsal I had wailed out the sax and we decided to use it for the intro. On the solo, I wanted the final note to be this really high, perfect note but I couldn’t hit it. So Robin slowed down the tape, I played a lower note and he sped it up.
HALE: We were in the studio every spare minute.
MATTHEWMAN: I was doing the sax parts really early one morning when we heard this funny noise. It was the cleaning lady running round with the vacuum cleaner because she didn’t expect anybody to be in that early.
MILLAR: The third verse still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up when Sade and Stuart sing together. I told them to do it in one mic – it was all about how the mic reacted to their combined voices as they faced each other. It’s like the Rhodes and piano being so in tune you can’t tell what the instrument is and just enjoy the sound, a single voice from their two voices.
MATTHEWMAN: I knew that Sade had such a unique voice that anybody else singing with her stands out, so I wouldn’t quite pronounce the end of words properly – that helped it blend more.
MILLAR: We worked all week and mixed them at 10pm on a Sunday. When I played them to people, they were amazed. If you asked people about instruments, the only thing they’d noticed was the sax, otherwise it was her voice.
HALE: Robin added dynamics, introducing different instruments but still retaining our less-is-more approach. There was simplicity in the songwriting. It was about not losing that beneath layers of orchestration.
MILLAR: Lee shopped the tracks around and nobody was interested. They said they were too long, too jazzy, not enough synths or drum machine. It was seen as old-fashioned.
ELMS: Record companies were looking for the next Spandau. I was in [editor] Nick Logan’s office at The Face and had this print of Sade in a backless Fiona Dealey black dress taken by Graham Smith. An advert for the back page of The Face fell out at the last minute; I had this photo, Nick said she looked great so let’s put her in the space. That got the record companies interested.
MILLAR: They booked Heaven on Charing Cross Road and Robert rang up all his mates. I told her not to say anything. I said the only voice people should hear was her singing. But what mattered was that 600 people were turned away and it was in all the papers.
MATTHEWMAN: We did one gig at Ronnie Scott’s and our manager invited the record companies and then told the man at the door, who I believe was Steve Strange, not to let any of them in. That was the punk way of doing things. It meant record companies wanted it even more.
MILLAR: The phone began ringing off the hook from all these labels that had already turned her down.
ELMS: Suddenly she was the hot new thing. I’d already been through this with Spandau. It happened to Boy George. It happened to Visage. I was only 23 or 24 so it seemed natural and inevitable. And I knew she was brilliant. She looked great and sounded great and wrote great songs, so that’s not a bad start.
HALE: It didn’t sound immediately like a hit. It was contemporary but alluded to classic soul in a way that a lot of other things in the 1980s didn’t. The fact it connected surprised people.
MILLAR: It was supposed to come out Valentine’s Day but came out just after. I was working with Tom Robinson and he came into the studio having just seen “Your Love Is King” on Top Of The Pops. He said there had been three or four drum-machine pop songs and then this oasis of calm and this face and voice and torch song. He said everybody held their breath and listened. It was like the world stood still.
ELMS: When she was asked to do “Your Love Is King” on Top Of The Pops we were still living in this old Victorian fire station with the bath in the kitchen and an outside toilet on the balcony that was always broken. The label sent a limo to take her to the studio but before she left, she had to pee in a bucket. When she left the house, we literally did not have a pot to piss in; by the time she came home, she was a millionaire.
MATTHEWMAN: What I think is amazing about a lot of our songs – “Your Love Is King”, “Smooth Operator”, “No Ordinary Love” – is you could never study them in music school. They break all the rules. We did that unintentionally. We just did what felt right.
HALE: It was reassuring as a musician to see the power of the song and how people could connect with it emotionally. Once you strip away the context, there is Sade’s voice, the song and the sound of a record that touched people. That’s how music cuts through.
