Sade doesn’t do many interviews. She doesn’t like doing them and mistrusts what they might subsequently turn into. It’s not that she’s not intelligent enough to distinguish between the media’s sleazier elements and those, like us, who value and maintain an interest in her [and the band’s] music; it’s just that it’s the one part of the process of being a recording star that she’s never learned to love.

For Sade, the good bits are all about creating the song: getting together with the band – Paul Denman, Stuart Matthewman and Andrew Hale – plus regular producer Mike Pela to cut the tracks. In her eyes, after that it doesn’t require a lot of explanation: the stuff you really need to know is to be found within the album itself – within all the group’s albums. As for the other fluff, any gossip about her private life and the apparent demand that today our music idols must also provide us with every last detail of their private lives, well, she’s not interested now and never has been.

All of which explains why we’re one of a very few publications that Sade agreed to talk to prior to the release of the new album, Soldier Of Love.

As usual there’s been a considerable gap between Sade albums. The last one, Lover’s Rock, came out in 2001. Since then and the subsequent tour the four band members have all gone their separate ways:..........

Like Bobby Womack, Marvin Gaye and Calvin Richardson, Angie Stone is one of those soul stars whose life is a constant drama. Last time we spoke to her, on the release of her debut Stax album The Art Of Love & War, she had just recovered from a serious illness – carcoidosis, most often heard about these days as a suggested diagnosis on Hugh Laurie’s TV medical series House, in reality an inflammatory disease that provokes an overreaction from the body’s immune system, commonly affecting, as it did in Angie’s case, the lungs. Thankfully she is now fully recovered from what can be a fatal condition.

A year or so on, right in the middle of recording her follow-up set for Stax, the soon to be released Unexpected, her father died suddenly, aged only 66. Being essentially a daddy’s girl, Angie took the blow especially hard: she had to give up recording to deal with her and her family’s grief. And when that seemed like too big a burden to bear, she went
back into the studio, channelling the hurt into inspiration for an album that is quite unlike the rest of her impressive solo catalogue.

This time it isn’t aimed directly or solely at her regular soul audience: it’s majority is slanted towards a younger, more R&B/pop crowd. The reason she called it Unexpected, however, mainly refers to her father’s death – it’s concerned with our reaction to life’s unforeseen curveballs. From the listener’s point of view, what’s really unexpected about the album is not only its musical direction but, in particular, Angie’s use of the dreaded Auto Tune on one track. I, for one, didn’t see that coming. Or desire it either......

The biggest surprise is that it’s taken this long for some enterprising person to write a book like How To Rap: The Art And Science Of The Hip-Hop MC. So well done Paul Edwards.

It’s a question that’s been troubling lovers of the music and culture for decades.

Hip-hop has been a multi-billion dollar industry for nearly as long and that can’t be ignored. It’ll be interesting if in around five to 10 years the superstars of the day namecheck Edwards’ book as one of the tools that helped them do it.

It isn’t a massive stretch of the imagination. It really is a comprehensive guide to all that a young’un on the come up would need to master. Edwards touches on everything from content, flow and rhyme schemes to ghostwriting, vocal techniques and live performance.

“I had been looking for something similar about five years ago,” he says about his inspiration for writing the book, “just to see how MC’ing worked. I was trying to figure out why some MCs sounded complex, why some sounded simplistic, and what some were doing that others weren’t. Since I couldn’t find a book on it, I thought, gee, there is a huge gap in...........

This is not the album Corinne Bailey Rae meant you to hear. On the back of the success of her debut, what we were probably heading for was something more like the jaunty, sexy, kittenish, folky-soul-pop we’d already heartily approved. But then life, or rather the opposite, stepped in. The unexpected accidental death of her husband tore apart Corinne’s world just as it had begun to make sense. She had to go away, recover and rebuild. And she had to channel some of that deep hurt into what came out next.

So The Sea is, inevitably, a post-trauma piece of work. It is also quite wonderful. Yes, it does contain lyrics that mourn her late man, that express her sense of loss at so unexpected a tragedy, but it also celebrates him, sings love songs to him and contemplates, ‘Where now? In the lyrical sense it isn’t, sometimes, an easy listen. Even the single, I’d Do It All Again, wells up like the last scene in a particularly potent romantic drama. But that gorgeous voice is even more compelling: you can’t help but want to hear more, to get a window into the pain. And the arrangements, a half-step away from the soulier end of her vibe and more towards a singer-songwriterly, crossover sound that takes in rock and jazz as the mood requires, are very high quality. And live.

Those hoping for a rival to the soul perfection of Til It Happens To You.......
Chris Wells