Sade

Helen Folasade Adu was born in Ibadan, Nigeria. Her father was Nigerian, a university teacher of economics; her mother was an English nurse. The couple met in London while he was studying at the LSE and they moved to Nigeria shortly after getting married. When their daughter was born, nobody locally called her by her English name, and a shortened v... ersion of Folasade stuck. Then, when she was four, her parents separated, and her mother brought Sade and her elder brother Banji back to England, where they initially lived with their grandparents just outside Colchester, Essex. Sade grew up listening to American soul music, particularly the wave led in the 1970's by artists such as Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway, and Bill Withers. As a teenager, she saw the Jackson 5 at the Rainbow Theatre in Finsbury Park, London where she worked behind the bar at weekends. "I was more fascinated by the audience than by anything that was going on on the stage. They'd attracted kids, mothers with children, old people, white, black.Read More