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Her middle name, Folasade, means honor confers your crown. Her parents, Adebisi Adu, a Nigerian lecturer in economics of Yoruba background, and Anne Hayes, an English district nurse, met in London, married in 1955 and moved to Nigeria. Later, when the marriage ran into difficulties, Anne Hayes returned to England, taking four-year-old Sade and her older brother Banji to live with her parents. When Sade was 11, she moved to Holland-on-Sea, Essex to live with her mother, and after completing school at 18 she moved to London and studied at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.

While in college, she joined a soul band, Pride, in which she sang backing vocals. Her solo performances of the song "Smooth Operator" attracted the attention of record companies and in 1983, she signed a solo deal with Epic Records taking three members of the band, Stuart Matthewman, Andrew Hale and Paul Denman, with her. Sade and her band produced the first of a string of hit albums. Their debut album Diamond Life appeared in 1984. She is the most successful solo female artist in British history, having sold over 110 million albums worldwide.

She squatted in Tottenham in the 1980s, with her then boyfriend Robert Elms. In 1989, she married Spanish film director Carlos Pliego. Their marriage ended in 1995. Sade has a son, Izaak, from her relationship with Jamaican music producer Bob Morgan. (She moved briefly to the Caribbean to live with him in the late nineties, but they later separated and she returned to England.) In 2002, she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for services to popular music. She lives in the English countryside and, prior to the release of Soldier of Love in 2010, the Daily Mail described her as "famously reclusive".
In 2002, she received an OBE from Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace for services to music, and she dedicated her award to "all black women in England".