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- Behind the music: the secrets of Sade's success
Singer's former producer, Robin Millar, reveals an improbable route to global success
She's sold 50m records worldwide – almost half of them in the US – and has had a career spanning four decades, all of it on her own terms, while barely compromising her sound. Throughout, she's kept herself out of the limelight, avoiding the usual press junkets associated with releasing a new album. So what's the secret behind Sade's continuing success?
When Robin Millar, who produced the band's first two albums, first metthem in 1983 they'd never been in a proper studio. The 24-year-old Sade Adu had just finished studying fashion design, while working on her creative writing skills. They had some rough, homemade four-track demos of Your Love Is King and Smooth Operator that sounded like a funk band playing free jazz. "It was basic, but the songs were good – and then there was that voice," Millar says. "I've always thought there are certain voices that make people feel better: Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Ella Fitzgerald. And when I first heard Sade I really felt she had it ... She also had an amazing effect on people in the studio, both men and women – her charisma and how she looked."
He booked them in for a week. The limitations of not having computers had an impact on the sound. "We used a real piano and a Fender Rhodes piano, painstakingly synching them up," Millar recalls. "Of course, three years later you could do this easily, using midi. But it probably wouldn't have sounded the same. To do this we had to formalise the parts, getting away from the free-jazz thing."
The band's manager took the demos around to record companies – and every label turned them down. "They said the tracks were too long and too jazzy," says Millar. "They said: 'Don't you know what's happening? Everything is electronic drums now: Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode.' This was a bit of a blow, because when we played them to people who came by the studio we'd get a fantastic reaction."
What they needed was some DIY thinking. Sade's boyfriend played the tracks to friends who worked at style-bible the Face. They liked both Sade and the music and put her on the cover with the headline: "Sade, the Face of 1984." The band quickly organised a gig at the club Heaven, inviting journalists who witnessed 1,000 people being turned away at the door. The next day all the record companies tried to sign them. Most of the labels wanted to send her to the US to work with big producers such as Quincy Jones. But Sade had a clear vision of what she wanted to do – so instead of the biggest offer, she took the deal that allowed her to finish what she started. "The versions of Your Love Is King and Smooth Operator on Diamond Life are exactly the way they were at the end of that first week," Millar says. "We never remixed them or remastered them. They're the same versions that were rejected by everybody."
They recorded 15 tracks in six weeks. Then Sade insisted on cutting the album down to the nine tracks in which she most she believed. The label wanted to send a few tracks to the US for some "cool" mixes but Sade refused, saying the album was exactly how she wanted it. It was quite a battle, which she won. (Hearing remixes by Jay-Z and the Neptunes on her newly released greatest hits album, part of me wishes she'd continued to resist tampering with her music.)
It was clear Sade was good at realising the bigger picture, right from the start. While recording, she worked with the label's PR and marketing departments, using her background in fashion and creative writing to crop pictures and look at copy – not allowing a sentence, snapshot or picture to go out unless it fitted. Once the album was released it was apparent that the label had been right in allowing Sade to hold the reins. Diamond Life went top 10 all over Europe and sold more than 10m copies worldwide. "It turned out there were an awful lot of people who didn't want to buy another Tears for Fears and Talk Talk album," Millar says. And Sade sounded like nothing else.
They went on to court the American R&B audience with Hang on to Your Love, which went to No 1 in the R&B charts, followed by Smooth Operator, which broke her in the US. The album ended up selling almost 4m copies in the US with the follow-up, Promise, selling 4.5m (9.3m worldwide) – the first British black artist to hit that big in America.
These numbers are almost unheard of today. But Sade's success has continued through the decades, despite seven-year gaps between each release. Millar attributes some of this success to the fact Sade makes records you can play all the way through. "I think that's one of the reasons they haven't dated, going back to the first album when she threw out the uptempo tracks, because they didn't fit in." There is, of course, also the sexiness of the music – and the fact that having never followed trends gives the music a timelessness. TA Sade album is instantly identifiable.
Sade is still more comfortable in the studio than on stage, Millar says. "It's to do with style. You can craft something to perfection and you can crop pictures, but when you walk on stage you're going to look how you look and sound how you sound." She told him the reason she didn't move on stage for the first few years – which everyone considered cool – was because she felt rooted to the spot. "I feel like even if I just shuffle my feet I'll look ridiculous," she explained. A tour manager I spoke to said she looked absolutely petrified before going on stage at Live Aid.
Millar is grateful that Auto-Tune didn't exist then.. "One of the things that makes a string section sound great is that they're all playing with a slightly different sound, pitch and timing. If you tune them all up they sound smaller and thinner. Where it [Auto-Tune] sounds most inappropriate is with someone such as Michael Bublé. Sinatra used to sing slightly flat all the time, and so did Sade – that's what gave her that melancholic sound.
"Mind you," he concludes, "it doesn't seem to affect sales."
• Sade: The Ultimate Collection is out now on RCA
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - New music: ANR – Stay Kids
Fancy listening to some anthemic summer sounds? Then check out an exclusive video by this duo from the Sunshine State
Florida-based ANR (or Awesome New Republic as they used to be known), are Brian Robertson and Michael-John Hancock, a duo who have somehow been compared to both Red Hot Chili Peppers and MGMT. Their debut album, also called Stay Kids, was released in March and they're currently on a brief UK tour before, we imagine, playing a lot of summer festivals – perfect for their slow-building, but ultimately anthemic, sunshine pop. In the video for Stay Kids – a Guardian exclusive – the pair are joined by a bunch of cute-as-a-button kids who are given free rein, bashing at Moog synths, cymbals and then a monster-shaped piñata, while balloons and streamers dance. It's the perfect visual representation for a song that, like children of a certain age, seems to flit between hushed calm and fevered panic in just four minutes.guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More FeedsПереслать - Going solo: creative side-project or egomania?
When a band member made a solo album, it used to signal the death of the group. But is it actually a mark of rude health?
Time was, if a band's vocalist put out a solo album it meant only one thing: irreconcilable differences, singer and guitarist chewing each other's throats out over who slept with who's girlfriend, the beginning of the end of the band. Lennon released his first Plastic Ono Band single in August 1969 and the Beatles were toast within the year. Phil Collins and Bryan Ferry snuck off from their Genesis and Roxy Music motherships to build the groundwork for solo careers over some years, but ultimately it was the Other Blokes who got sidelined. And in pop the practice was even more mercenary – at least Beyoncé gave her Destiny's Child brethren a farewell album and tour after the success of Dangerously in Love proved her the golden goose of the group. No such luck, The Rest of Boyzone.
The solo album was invariably a toe-dip into the murky pool of individual success, and if the waters were found welcoming, the singer dived in. But of late there's been a shift in attitude; solo albums have become legitimate pressure valves for singers' creative steam. Inspired by autonomic US collectives such as the Wu-Tang Clan or Animal Collective – where solo projects went hand-in-hand with group releases – the past 18 months has seen a positive glut of solo albums. Brandon Flowers, Julian Casablancas, Kele Okereke, Interpol's Paul Banks and Maximo Park's Paul Smith have all put out their own records while insisting their band is merely "on a break", and in the coming months Noel Gallagher, J Mascis and ex-Rascals and Last Shadow Puppets linchpin Miles Kane join the lone ranger ranks.
Kane, whose sexually charged slab of 60s-flecked roots rock Come Closer is released this month, puts his solo launch down to simple bandmate fatigue. "The band I was in [the Rascals] was the funnest couple of years of my life. But you think something's gonna happen and then it doesn't and it was running dry. It took me a while to write tunes on my own and do this album, but there's that many bands out there, rather than starting something again I wanted to something more honest."
But why so many singers nipping off from their bands for a crafty solo album on the side? "Particularly within indie rock culture there's side-projectitis," says Jenny Lewis, whose projects with the Watson Twins and Jenny & Johnny have kept her "main" band Rilo Kiley on indefinite hiatus since 2007. "All my friends have started three or four side projects – Ben Hibbert, Conor Oberst – so I wanted to keep up."
Keeping up with the Obersts is an unusual explanation for going it alone: the most common reason is a fear of creative inertia or an inability to stop writing during down-time. After five years and three albums of solid touring and promotion, many bands crave a hefty dose of R&R, but frontmen, it seems, get itchy. "After six years on the road you feel like you need a bit of time to yourself," Okereke told website State, "but once I was by myself, it came out faster than I ever thought it was going to." In NME Brandon Flowers echoed the sentiment: "From talking to the guys in the band it was clear there was going to have to be a long break between records. But … I'm overflowing with songs right now. I've just got this fire in my bosom that's still burning. To be honest, I personally would prefer it if this was a Killers record [but] I'm getting something out of my system."
Tim Burgess of the Charlatans suffered from a similar bout of Songwriter's Splurge after their Wonderland tour, resulting in his 2003 solo outing I Believe. "George Harrison said he had about 400 songs so he had to put out a solo album and it had to be a triple album," he says. "I was more thinking of putting out an EP of Gram Parsons-flavoured desert rock, but more songs kept coming."
Is this rampant ego at play though? Can a singer not face a year without regular doses of adulation and applause? "Not for me," says Alex Ebert, ex-Ima Robot frontman, now singer and chief songwriter of 11-piece LA outfit Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros and about to release his debut solo record. "It's more not wanting to take a break without creation. That's the passion, it's not to be attended to or have everyone pointing their gaze in this direction. However, that is part of it. If that wasn't any part of the motivation then no one would try to gain fame for anything."
"It's not about the touring," adds Jenny Lewis, "it's about the output of songs. If I've got a batch of songs ready to be recorded now, I want to record them before I forget them. Music is your job, so having a side-project was kind of my hobby."
The argument that their solo material somehow "didn't fit" with their band – despite making said band sound like a bunch of furrow-ploughing luddites – crops up often. Thom Yorke told the Observer that 2006's The Eraser came about because "[Radiohead] was getting boring and self-perpetuating ... one of the things I had wanted to do for ages was get stuck into a bunch of things that I had been mucking around with that didn't fit into the Radiohead zone." Julian Casablancas claimed that the Strokes ("a tough crowd to please") weren't interested in the synth-heavy songs that made up his solo album Phrazes for the Young: "I started having songs that felt more for Strokes and some that felt different," he told NME. "With the band it's hard for me to bring in songs. You might have a crazy idea where you had three different drumbeats on top of each other … and other people might say 'that's not what we're about'."
When Maximo Park singer Paul Smith found himself penning personal ballads hinting at his childhood influences of Talk Talk, Big Star and Neil Young, he faced the same dilemma. "Maximo Park wouldn't have recorded stuff with loads of reverb on the vocals. It always felt like maybe the lads would want them at some point. It never felt like the songs had been rejected, it was more that I'd agreed they didn't really suit Maximo Park. But in some ways it's nice to show the rest of the lads that I'm not inept. It allows me to have the long middle eights that just go off on one, all the reverb and backwards guitars."
Indeed, the crafty solo album gives singers the creative freedom to explore the more esoteric crevices of their talent without any Neanderthal xylophone players nixing their 47-minute Swedish jazz concept "piece". "I got to the point with some ideas where I knew it was crazy but I wanted to do it regardless," says Casablancas, "I wanted to follow an idea to the end, even if it ended badly." Okereke claims that Bloc Party had been too "organic" to accommodate his dance leanings, while Yorke was excited about "using beats and some of these sounds that I had, writing to that rather than good old-fashioned acoustic instruments [to dispel the idea that] it's not a song unless it's got a fucking guitar in it."
For Carl Barât – solo simply because Dirty Pretty Things had disbanded, the Libertines reunion had played out and "I didn't want to be in a band any more … it's always been a distraction from my actual songwriting" – his recent self-titled album was a chance to explore his inner whimsical crooner, taking in music hall nuances, ballsy torch ballads and twisted circus tunes that resemble Cabaret crossed with Hostel: Part II.
"Even subconsciously," he explains, "when you're writing, a band sounds limited to four guitars because when are you going to be able to afford a brass or string section? But when you're on your own you can be as cinematic as you like. It's a double-edged sword – working together you feel obliged to sacrifice a part of the creative process, but once you don't have any brothers-in-arms you're accountable for all the glory or the shame. It's quite a naked thing to do. It's very exposing, having your name and face on it."
But by plastering your mugshot all over a record and packing it full of your long-constrained Nicaraguan Gypsy trance influences, is a solo album unavoidably more personal and revealing? Is it the singer's chance to unveil "the real me"?
"I guess so," Barât considers. "For me it feels like growing up. Bands feel like schoolmates and gangs."
The most cynical view of the solo album, however, remains the mercenary front-person considering the shelf-life of their band and the attention span of their audience and deciding to cut loose the dead wood while they're still popular. And that, surely, signposts the end of the band?
"I think it does a little bit," Barât says. "With bands it's literally all or nothing. That is cracks beginning to show."
Ebert disagrees. "The perception that I've had of solo albums is that it's someone trying to really make it on their own and if it fails the group gets back together. But in other instances like the John Frusciante album it doesn't come off like that, you don't think this is him trying become famous without them. Yeah, it is selfish, it's entirely selfish. But selfish has a strange history of being a negative word. Going out and getting some food is selfish. Creating [has] inherently got that selfish element. Was Picasso selfish?"
And as Smith points out, technological advances now allow musicians to knock out laptop solo albums inside an hour in the splitter van from Aberystwyth to Rhyll. "It's easier now to do it. Too many people in the past have probably thought 'am I going to destroy the brand of the band or destroy the bond between people' whereas music these days is more transient than it ever was. It makes no difference, if the music's good then put something out."
So perhaps we've entered a new era of unhampered creativity, where singers finally feel unrestrained by their bands and the music never need stop? A boundless musical utopia indeed – until we get The Gospel According to Saint Dappy …
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