She studied at Saint Martin's School of Art in London and gained modest recognition as a fashion designer and part-time model before joining the band Pride in the early 1980s.

In July 1985, Sade was among the performers at the Live Aid charity concert at Wembley Stadium, and the next year, she appeared in the film Absolute Beginners.

[16] Her parents are Adebisi Adu, a Nigerian lecturer in economics of Yoruba background, from Ikere-Ekiti and Anne Hayes, an English district nurse; they met in London, married in 1955, and moved to Nigeria.

Hayes returned to England with Sade and her elder brother, Banji, to live with their maternal grandparents near Colchester, Essex.

[15][17][19] After completing a three-year course in fashion design, and later modelling briefly, Sade began backup singing with British band Pride.

[20] Her solo performances of the song "Smooth Operator", co-written with Ray St. John, attracted record companies' attention, and in 1983 Sade and Matthewman split from Pride, along with keyboardist Andrew Hale, bassist Paul Denman, and drummer Paul Cook, to form the band Sade.

[23] The album was also a hit internationally, reaching number one in several countries and the top ten in the US, where it sold in excess of four million copies.

[27] In Europe the song fared well, peaking at number 19 in the UK,[28] and reaching the top 20 in Austria, Switzerland, France, and Germany.

[32] Eventually, the album went on to sell four million copies in the region and was certified four times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

[35] Sade was so popular that some radio stations reinstated the '70s practice of playing album tracks, adding "Is It a Crime" and "Tar Baby" to their playlists.

[36] In 1986, Sade made her acting debut in Absolute Beginners, a film adapted from the Colin MacInnes book of the same name about life in late-1950s London.

Sade played the role of Athene Duncannon and lent her vocals to the film's accompanying soundtrack.

[50] Following an eight-year hiatus, the band released their fifth studio album, Lovers Rock, on 13 November 2000 and received positive reviews from music critics.

Following the release of Lovers Rock, Sade took a ten-year hiatus, during which she raised her child and moved to the Caribbean.

During this time, she made a rare public appearance for an award ceremony that took place in 2002 to accept an Order of the British Empire (OBE) at Buckingham Palace for services to music.

[62] The first single and title track, "Soldier of Love", premiered on US radio on 8 December 2009[63][64] and was released digitally on 11 January 2010.

[65] Subsequent singles, "Babyfather" and "The Moon and the Sky", were played by US urban adult contemporary radio on 13 April and 24 August 2010, respectively.

In March 2018, she (and the reunited Sade band) released the acoustic ballad "Flower of the Universe" for the soundtrack to the Disney film A Wrinkle in Time.

"[73] Later that year, Sade released "The Big Unknown" for the soundtrack to the 20th Century Fox film Widows.

"[74] For a couple of weeks in 2022, the band visited Miraval Studios in France for the first time since recording some of their albums Promise and Stronger Than Pride.

BBC called her songwriting "sufficiently soulful and jazzy yet poppy, funky yet easy listening, to appeal to fans of all those genres.

[80] Talib Kweli stated he learned about precision from Sade due to her performance of Love Deluxe in its entirety at Madison Square Garden.

Hip hop group Souls of Mischief stated they grew up listening to Sade's music.

[80] In reaction to the newly released album Soldier of Love, rapper Kanye West wrote, "This is why i still have a blog.

In 2016, on National Coming Out Day, Sade's child, Izaak Theo Adu, came out as a transgender man.

[91] In the fall of 2024, Sade and the Red Hot Organization's TRANSA project released "Young Lion", a song dedicated to her son.

[93] Sade was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 2002 for services to music, and stated her award was "a great gesture to me and all black women in England".