Sade Lady

There is no finer art in pop music than that of knowing when to disappear.

Sade, it seemed, did it almost as soon as she had arrived: two dazzling albums—Diamond Life and Promise—which sold 15 million copies between them; a Grammy for best newcomer; and the front cover of Time's international edition; and then.. .nothing.

The explanation that "I'm not very good at the business of being a pop star'' may ring like a conceit, but therein lies the truth. Sade began to wilt under the pressures of sudden fame and the unwelcome attentions of the gossip press. After two years in the spotlight, a world tour that felt "like running with a gun at my head,'' and amid rumors of marriage, divorce, drug addiction, and a nervous breakdown, she decided to call a halt.

The rumors were groundless. Stepping off the treadmill, she fell in love with Carlos Scola, a Spanish film producer, and moved to Madrid to write, ride horses, and spend time with friends. She now commutes between the home she shares with Scola and her own apartment in London; here the theme is precision and simplicity: scrubbed wood floors, white walls, acres of windows with no curtains, a few carefully chosen possessions. As an aspiring fashion designer and sometime model she lived wildly beyond her means. With more money in the bank than she can bother to count, she now lives far below them. "I'm a victim of my own taste," she says with a sigh. ' 'It would be so much easier if I could just accept anything, but I can look at shoes in Paris, London, and New York and not find one single pair that isn't a compromise. It's tiring being like that."

The same fastidious perfectionism applies to her new album, Stronger than Pride. Recorded at leisure in the Bahamas, Provence, and Paris, it plays on the familiar Sade themes of bittersweet passion, couched in the svelte kiss-and-sigh of uptown soul. The allusions to upwardly mobile sophistication and high-fashion iconography are, she hopes, a thing of the past. "I hate all that. It wasn't necessarily correct, and such a cliche. I think people are more concerned now with what the music

sounds like than what I'm going to be wearing. "I think it's tiresome that musicians have to be in the public eye at all. I mean, once upon a time you had to be Elizabeth Taylor before anyone cared about your love life.

I'm really happiest at five in the morning, in the recording studio, surrounded by the boys, having made something nice..."

Singer Sade, who vanished just as she was hitting the charts, has come out of hiding with a satin-smooth new album. MICK BROWN reports