Immigrant may be its most powerful expression, simmering with anger, filled with small, but sharply observed detail: “They gave him his change, but didn’t want to touch his hand.” 15. Sade’s music always had a bleak social realist strain that belied the popular misconception of them as a tasteful yuppie soundtrack.

‘No one does small-hours heartbreak quite like Sade.’ Photograph: David Graves/Rex/Shutterstock 16. Babyfather (2010)įar closer to lovers rock than anything on the Sade album named after the genre, Babyfather is melodically beautiful, bedecked with Jamaican-accented backing vocals and given a slight shimmer of darkness by the sense that the song’s narrator may be reassuring her daughter of her father’s undying fealty in the absence of any hard evidence. Lovers Rock’s closer is hushed and intimate – just an organ and occasional piano – but incredibly potent: weirdly, the rich, multitracked vocals and the atmosphere of sadness tinged with flickers of hope seem to prefigure the work of James Blake a decade later. It’s Only Love That Gets You Through (2000) The cool-but-impassioned vocal and minimalist slo-mo funk of Cherish the Day was sampled on the late Nipsey Hussle’s If U Were Mine, a tribute to how the singer, in Rakim’s words, “took out even the hardest hood at the knees”.

Sade’s hip-hop fandom is legendary – Drake, Rick Ross, Missy Elliott and Jay-Z are stans. Sade’s approach to making music is so well-considered – six albums in 36 years – it largely precludes the idea of deep cuts, but here’s one, a 1984 B-side, never subsequently rereleased and unlike anything else they (Sade is a band, not just the singer) ever recorded: up-tempo, chattering, dancefloor-facing, euphoric.

Youtube music sade by your side