Simon's Blog

A legend of popular music, Sinead had always been one of my favorite singers, and to hear that she had left us so soon was very surprising. She was a perplexed and complicated person. As a teenager she was arrested for shoplifting and sent to Magdalene Asylum. A place she described as, “a prison where girls cried every day.” She witnessed the horrors of Catholicism up close and personal. As she explains in the “Showtime documentary” “Nothing Compares,” “There was no therapy when I was growing up. I got into music for therapy. It’s not what I wanted. I just wanted to scream.”    Legs McNeil, an American music journalist who knew Sinead well, reiterated on the documentary, “what bugged me was the atrocities Sinead’s mother committed on her.” But Sinead did not hold back on her mother. “She was a very violent woman, not a healthy woman, and she was physically, verbally, psychologically, spiritually, and emotionally abusive. My mother was a beast. Our family is very messed up. We ...

Helen Folasade Adu is a Nigerian born singer, widely known just as Sade. When she was four her parents separated, and her mother returned to England with Sade and her elder brother. After high school, she moved to London to study fashion design. After completing her studies, she got an engagement as a backup singer with the British band Pride. Her stage presence and performances began to attract attention and in 1983 the band became…Sade. By the time the band had performed their first show at the London's Heaven nightclub, they had become so popular that 1,000 people were turned away at the door. In 1983, Sade signed with Epic Records.   Their first album “Diamond Life,” became a big hit internationally, reaching #1 in several countries and top ten in the US, where it sold more than four million copies. In 1985, they released, “Promise”, which peaked at number one in both the UK and the US, becoming the band's first album to reach number one on the US Billb...