Sade: Soldier Of Love version on CD in Standard edition. This particular edition was published in Europe in publishing company RCA in cooperation with Epic and Sony Music on 11. February 2010.

Biography "Soldier Of Love" is only the sixth studio album released by the British band Sade during their 25-year career. There is a ten year gap between their last release "Lover's Rock" and their new LPm. But for singer and frontwoman Sade Ada, integrity and authenticity in songwriting is paramount: "I only make a record when I think I have something to say. I'm not interested in releasing music just to have something to sell. Sade is not a brand." The band came together in 2008 at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios, near the singer's home in rural southwest England. It was the first time all four band members had reunited since the end of the "Lover's Rock" tour in 2001. Bassist Paul Denman had returned from Los Angeles, where he led his son's teenage punk band Orange. Guitarist and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman took a break from his work on film soundtracks in New York, and Andrew Hale said goodbye to his job as an A&R consultant. A series of fortnightly sessions at Real World studios produced material for a new album, which all four musicians immediately considered their most ambitious to date. This is evident on first listen to the title track (and first released single), which features sounds and beats that are very different from songs the band has recorded in the past. Andrew Hale: "At the very beginning, the big question for all of us was: do we really want to do this again and still get along as friends?" Soon the answer was clear to everyone: an unqualified "yes". In the summer of 2009, the work, most of which took place in the "real world", was completed. With the new songs, Sade have noticeably moved away from the downtempo soul feel of the previous album and present themselves in a much more versatile way than ever before. On some tracks, the band sounds like they did in their early days, such as when Matthewman rolls out some very fine sax on "In Another Time" or the anthemic "Long Hard Road." However, with the lively and quirky reggae track "Babyfather" and the very dramatic album opener "The Moon And The Sky", Sade enter new musical territory. "I never want to repeat myself," explains singer Sade Adu, "and the longer we work together, the more interesting the challenge becomes." Helen Folasade Adu was born in Ibadan, Nigeria. Her Nigerian father taught economics at the university there, and her mother was a nurse from England. The two met during his studies at LSE in London and moved to Nigeria shortly after their marriage. When their daughter was born, the English first name did not catch on very well and a shortened version of her middle name was used instead. When she was four years old, her parents separated and Sade's mother brought her and her older brother back to England, where they first stayed with her grandparents in Colchester, Essex, where she first heard American soul music, particularly the musicians Curtis Mayfield, Donny Hathaway and Bill Withers, who were popular in the 1970s. As a teenager, she saw the Jackson 5 at the Rainbow Theatre in the Finsbury Park area of London, where she worked in a bar at weekends. "I was much more fascinated by the audience than the action on stage. There were children, mothers with children, old people, white people, black people. That really moved me. That's the kind of audience I always wanted to reach." Music, however, was not her first choice. She first studied fashion at St Martin's School Of Art. It was only when two school friends asked her to help out with singing in their failing band that she started singing. Although she felt extreme nervousness when singing, to her surprise she really enjoys writing songs. Two years later, she had mastered stage fright enough to perform regularly as a backing vocalist with Pride, a Latin funk band from North London. "When I went on stage, I was shaking. I was really scared. But I took it upon myself to do my best. And if I decided to sing, I would sing the way I talk because it's important to be yourself." Sade spent her long apprenticeship years touring with the group Pride. From 1981, she played for three years across the UK with seven other band members, often sitting behind the wheel of a tour bus. There was a section of the Pride show where she performed some quieter, jazzy numbers as the lead singer of the quartet. One of the songs, titled "Smooth Operator," which Sade co-wrote, soon piqued the interest of some talent scouts. Suddenly, every record company wanted to sign her - but without the rest of the band. But her loyalty to her friends was stronger than her desire for a deal - so she refused to leave Pride. After eighteen months, she finally relented, but only on the condition that the deal include the three musicians who still make up Sade: saxophonist Stuart Matthewman, keyboardist Andrew Hale and bassist Paul Denman. With their first single, "Your Love Is King", the quartet managed to jump into the top ten of the UK charts in February 1984 - an achievement that changed the singer's life and that of the group forever. The music's unabashed elegance combined with her appearance - indefinably exotic and exuberantly sophisticated - made Sade Adu the instantly feminine face of the decade's style. Magazines queued up for her cover. "It wasn't marketing," she explains today, "it was me. And I certainly wasn't trying to push an image." When her first album, Diamond Life, came out, the singer's life was anything but paved with diamonds. She and her then-partner, journalist Robert Elms, lived in a renovated fire station in Finsbury Park. There was no heating, so she had to go to bed fully dressed. The toilet, which sometimes froze in the winter, was by the fire escape. The bathroom was also the kitchen. "While the first three albums, "Diamond Life" (1984), "Promise" (1985) and "Stronger Than Pride" (1988), sold millions of copies worldwide, the rest of the 1980s were spent more or less constantly on tour. A working principle that has lost none of its relevance to this day. "If you only perform on TV or make videos, you are nothing more than a tool of your record company. Then you're just selling a product. But when I'm on stage and playing with a band, I know people love the music. I can feel it. Sometimes I long to be on tour again. Over the years, the media's brazen interest in her private life has led to an increasing refusal to participate in mainstream promotional processes. Because she has often been misrepresented in the press, Sade now gives interviews very rarely. "This Fleet Street mentality is terrible. If something looks simple and easy, then there must be something wrong with it." Over the past 20 years, the singer has always prioritised her private life over her professional one - so it's no surprise that only three albums of new songs have been released in that time. Most of her time and attention has been taken up by her marriage to Spanish film director Carlos Scola Pliege in 1989, the birth of her daughter in 1996 and, in the early 2000s, a move from north London to rural Gloucestershire, where she now lives with a new partner. And quite rightly, "You can only develop as an artist if you give yourself the opportunity to mature as a person," he explains. "We're all parents now, our lives have moved on, I couldn't have made 'Soldier Of Love' before now. And even though the fans have waited an incredibly long time, which is very disappointing, I'm very proud of the album."

Album spans genres Jazz, Funk / Soul and Soul-Jazz.