The first thing you hear on The Sweetest Taboo is weather. Rain falls, thunder rolls somewhere in the distance, and then — out of the storm — a groove assembles itself: a soft drum loop, a round bass line, percussion that seems to be made of raindrops, and Sade Adu’s voice arriving like the calm at the centre of it all. It is one of the most atmospheric openings of any 1980s record, and almost nothing about it happened by accident. The rain came off a sound-effects disc. The percussion was partly played on bottles and drinking glasses in the studio. And the song itself began not with the band’s famous frontwoman, but with its drummer, a loop on a Yamaha drum machine, and a handful of chords.
By the time the record reached the top five in America in the spring of 1986, it had also quietly settled the biggest question hanging over Sade’s career: whether the phenomenon of Diamond Life — the debut album that had made a former fashion designer and her band of old friends into international stars — could possibly be repeated. The Sweetest Taboo was the lead single from the follow-up album, Promise. It did not just repeat the success. In America, it deepened it.
A Drummer’s Loop
Most Sade songs are associated with the songwriting partnership of Adu and Stuart Matthewman, the guitarist and saxophonist who shaped the band’s sound. The Sweetest Taboo started somewhere else entirely. Martin Ditcham, the percussionist and drummer who worked with the band in the studio and on the road, came up with the germ of the track: a programmed drum loop built on a Yamaha RX11 drum machine, over a simple sequence of chords. He brought the loop to the others, and the song was then shaped collaboratively, the band building it up section by section — a group composition in the truest sense, assembled around a machine’s pulse until it breathed like a band.
There is something fitting in that origin. Sade, the band, had always insisted on being a band — Adu famously refused to sign a record deal as a solo artist, holding out until her musicians were signed alongside her. A signature song that began as the drummer’s homework rather than the star’s inspiration is perhaps the purest expression of how this group actually worked. The star’s contribution — the lyric, the melody, the voice of cool devotion — would be laid over a foundation built by the collective.
The pressure on the sessions was considerable, even if the band’s unhurried manner concealed it. Diamond Life had sold in the millions, won the Brit Award for Best British Album, and turned a group of club musicians into unlikely global stars; its follow-up would decide whether Sade were a phenomenon or a mood that had already passed. The band carried that weight in their own way — slowly, between London and the French countryside, across six months of sessions. Even the album’s title carried a private meaning: Promise came from a letter written by Adu’s father, in which he spoke of the “promise of hope.” The lead single would have to carry that promise in public.
Bottles, Glasses, and Borrowed Thunder
The Promise sessions ran from February to August 1985, split between Robin Millar’s Power Plant studio in London and Studio Miraval in the south of France. Millar, who had produced Diamond Life, again led the production, with engineer Mike Pela capturing the band’s increasingly organic way of working. Where other mid-eighties records were being built from sequencers and samples, Sade’s team kept reaching for real objects and real air.
The most famous example came in the song’s pre-chorus. Dissatisfied with conventional percussion sounds, drummer Dave Early and Ditcham set up an impromptu instrumentarium of glasses and bottles around the studio, tapping them with various implements and blowing across the bottle tops to coax out hollow, chiming tones. Those homemade sounds became the track’s distinctive percolating percussion — part rainstick, part wind chime, part child’s toy — and they define the record as surely as any saxophone line. The rain and thunder that bookend the song, meanwhile, were flown in from a sound-effects disc, the oldest trick in the record-maker’s book, placed with such restraint that generations of listeners assumed the band had simply recorded a storm. Some of the chorus’s sticky bongo figures, Pela later revealed, were samples triggered from the kick drum track on an Emulator II — the modern and the handmade, layered so smoothly that no seam shows.
Around those homemade textures, the band played with the restraint that had become their trademark. Paul Denman’s bass, recorded largely direct into the desk for definition, carries the song’s slow sway almost single-handedly, while Andrew Hale’s keyboards spread a humid haze over the top and Stuart Matthewman threads guitar and saxophone through the gaps. Nothing in the arrangement hurries, nothing shows off. Music critics would soon file the result under “quiet storm” and “sophisti-pop,” but in the studio it was simply the sound of a band that trusted space more than volume.
Adu’s vocal, by contrast, needed no construction at all. Where many Sade tracks were assembled from pieces of many performances, The Sweetest Taboo was sung in complete takes, the singer standing behind a screen at the back of the control room, delivering the whole song in unbroken passes through a Neumann U87 microphone, her voice treated with the gentle glow of an EMT plate echo. You can hear the completeness in the finished record: it sounds less like a performance that was produced than like one that was overheard.
A Quiet Storm, Named in the Song
The lyric contains its own tribute. “There’s a quiet storm,” Adu sings, “and it’s never felt like this before” — a deliberate nod to the Quiet Storm, the late-night radio format of smooth, romantic soul named after Smokey Robinson’s 1975 album A Quiet Storm. Sade were effectively the British heirs of that format, and in The Sweetest Taboo they acknowledged the inheritance in the words themselves. The song’s subject is a love so fulfilling it feels forbidden — the sweetest taboo — and its lyric has proved happily ambiguous for forty years, read by different listeners as a hymn to a lover, to music, or to something less mentionable. Adu, characteristically, has never settled the matter.
The Slow Burn to Number Five
Released in October 1985 as the first single from Promise, the song began slowly — in Britain it would peak at a modest No. 31, a reminder that Sade’s homeland never quite embraced them as ardently as the rest of the world. America was another story. The single climbed steadily through the winter, spent a full six months on the Billboard Hot 100, and in March 1986 reached No. 5, matching Smooth Operator as the band’s biggest American pop hit. It went to No. 1 on the Adult Contemporary chart — their second consecutive chart-topper there — and No. 3 on the R&B chart. Powered by the single, Promise became the first Sade album to top the charts in both Britain and America at once.
The accompanying video, directed by Brian Ward, split the song’s personality in two: the band performing in a New York loft, cool and interior, intercut with sun-blasted desert scenes filmed in Andalusia, Spain — the storm and the heat of the lyric made visible. The story Ward began in the video was even continued in the clip for the follow-up single, Is It a Crime?, an unusually serial touch for the era.
Four decades on, The Sweetest Taboo remains the record that defines Sade for much of the world: the rain, the bottles, the unhurried groove, and a voice that treats ecstasy as something to be murmured rather than announced. It was made, fittingly, by a band working the way the song sounds — patiently, collectively, and with a storm kept carefully at the edges of the room.
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