Happy 67th birthday to Sade!
Photo: Jaime MartΓnez
"I wasn’t someone who had a lot of music around me when I was a child, really. I was quite deprived of music, because my mom wasn’t particularly into music. My father is totally into music and surrounds himself with music, but I didn’t grow up with him. When I got to be about 13, I started listening to pirate stations and that really did change my life, because I wasn’t that interested in the pop stations. There are more licensed stations now, but when I was growing up, there weren’t many options. When I was ten, I quite remember liking “Maggie May,” but that was it. I loved that song; I can’t remember liking anything else I heard on standard pop radio. I wasn’t really a Rod Stewart fan, but that one song…Then, when I was 13 I discovered a pirate radio station that played all sorts of stuff: folk, rock, soul, everything. They played really good music, basically. So, that got me interested and I started collecting albums. At that time, not many girls bought records; they were just listening to the same records as their boyfriends. There was a station called Radio Caroline. The first time I listened to it I heard “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” and I was like, “Wow!” In fact, that’s when I also heard “Why Can’t We Live Together” for the first time.Did you start listening to jazz at that time?I got into that later. Or, slightly later, when I was 14 or 15 I started listening to Billie Holiday and Miles Davis; Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain. I didn’t like his more rocky stage; I wasn’t so keen on that.Why? Because you’re a purist?No, I wouldn’t say that, but I’m not a real jazz buff. There are just certain things that I really love and I can understand. What I could immediately grasp, I took in. I tended not to venture into the stuff that I didn’t understand.Would you consider your own music jazz?No, not really, but we are influenced by it. You just try to make a record that you like, that you would buy yourself. We don’t consciously say I want this song to sound like that one, but it creeps in there. "
Michael A. Gonzales 1992 Interview
