Diamond Life

Three celebrated debut albums emerged around this time from producer Robin Millar's Power Plant Studios in London, engineered by Mike Pela: Everything but the Girl's Eden (1984), Working Week's Working Nights (1985), and this record. It was a period when enticing British music, scented with bossa nova and jazz, came pouring in.

These three albums did more than merely follow a fashionable style, as their songs' content makes clear. Here, for example, Sade closes with Timmy Thomas's ‘Why Can't We Live Together,’ a plea against racial discrimination. Perhaps the most painful line on the record is the one in ‘When Am I Going to Make a Living’ asking whether, even as we starve, they will still offer no compromise. Sade's way of singing love and society has not changed thirty years on. She continues to give herself over to smooth sound, perhaps recalling her own background. A major star representing Britain past and present.