For most people, Sade means a face, a look and a personality. But would it have all been possible without the sound? Even these days success means more than just having a pretty face.

What is it about the girl Sade? What is it about the three sharply dressed and very un-motley guys who make up the rest of her eponymously named band? Two years ago they were wondering how they were going to make a living. They needn't have bothered. Last year their debut album, a collection of smooth and smoochy Soul numbers entitled Diamond Life, not only hit the top of the album charts, but went on to become one of the top selling albums of the year. And all this in the face of an equivocal response from the press, who questioned the music for what they saw as blandness, derided it for appearing to jump on trendy bandwagons, and worst of all, belittled Sade's vocal abilities.

Well for a start, try substituting the word 'bland' for the phrase 'classic simplicity.' Then think of the 'jazz feeling' they were originally criticised for attempting, as a search for real passion and sincerity. Finally, stop criticising Sade for not being Alison Moyet, and instead listen for the warmth and texture in her voice. Remember also that the band's polished and classic music is complemented by a similar image that just refuses to take pratfalls, and there perhaps you have the ingredients that enable a band to sell records on the strength of their music and little else.

So just who are these people? Well Sade is Sade. Saxophone and guitar is Stuart Matthewman, piano and keyboards, Andrew Hale, and on bass is Paul S Denman. These four who first met while gravitating towards a mini-Soul scene happening in a few clubs round Soho, make up the actual band proper. In addition there is Dave Early on drums, and Martin Ditcham on percussion (co-writer of the single Sweetest Taboo) — who have worked with the band since its rise to prominence, and guitarist Gordon Hunt who mainly plays with the band on tours and other live engagements.

The band's second album is just out. It's called Promise and takes up from where Diamond Life left off. In actual fact some of the music of the new album had already been written at the time of recording their first album.

Sade: "There were seeds of four or five of the songs on the album when we recorded Diamond Life; we've sort of come back to them. It's all been due to time, we haven't had time to write a whole load of new stuff."

Promise will leave a lot of critics stuck for adjectives, unless they want to repeat the things they said about Sade's last album. For whilst tracks like Is It A Crime?, War Of The Hearts, and Mr Wrong dig deeper into Jazz harmonies and smooch/rhythms, Sweetest Taboo is almost the perfect Pop tune, and Never As Good As The First Time bears the influence of the big American sound so prevalent in the charts today. The question for the critics is largely whether the music has got better or worse.

Sade: "We've all developed, every one of us. It's something that happens with time. You just become more confident in what you're doing, and it's easier to express what you want to express because you're not being held back by technicalities."

Whilst there has been no radical change in the music of the band, the slight increase in eclecticism has made for an album of songs that are more immediately distinguishable than those on Diamond Life.

Sade: "I think that's really important. There's a difference between knowing what feeling you want to put across and actually being able to do that naturally. By the time you've worked on an idea it's often a long way away from what you originally wanted because you are held back by your limitations."

The technicalities alluded to above do not really refer to production difficulties. From the start Sade's production has been left in the capable hands of Robin Millar, whose acoustic production styles have been closely linked with the band's musical identity. It's the band's playing and songwriting which they feel has become more accomplished. The songwriting is something the whole band take part in, with Sade and Stuart together writing the main bulk of the songs.

Sade: "In most cases there's a certain theme, but the lyrics don't always come first. I don't just come along with some lyrics like a poem and make that the order for the song. The lyrics are as much arranged as the music; it's all woven together. I'll have, say, two sheets with what I want to say on it, and lines will be taken out because they're over stating a point, or lines will be put in to hold things back, but the words are arranged with the music. With a song like Jezebel, I said that I wanted to write a song about a girl called Jezebel and that it would have a certain feel, and Stuart had something that sparked that off."

The harmonic side of writing is mostly provided by Stuart's guitar. It's a point of some hilarity among the members of the band that Sade plays no instruments.

Andrew: "We've tried to teach her!"

Unlike several other 'acoustic' orientated groups like Madness or Big Sound Authority, Sade do not go into record with rigidly structured arrangements. Some songs are written whilst recording is going on.

Stuart: "I had to do some guitar on a track, and they were in the other part of the studio messing about. Then when I'd finished I came through and they'd got a complete song written! I said 'Come and listen to this guitar,' and they said 'No, no, listen to this song we've written!'"

Sade: "Yeah, that was a song called Maureen. It was like a Cliff Richard film...

Andrew: "We were saying things like, 'Hey, what a groovy riff!"

It seems that a lot more attention is focused by the public on the quality of singing voices these days, and this has led to producers experimenting with ways of recording voices more accurately and more flatteringly.

Sade: "Sometimes I sing in the booth with headphones on, using just an AKG valve mike with a pop shield. My voice is recorded flat with reverb added on afterwards. Some songs I sing quite loudly — at its loudest it's like brass really — some songs I don't. I think it's quite difficult to record my voice because it's quite dynamic. Sometimes I overload it because I don't pull away, but some songs I sing very quietly."

Sometimes, however, a different approach is required.

"Sade: "I also sing in the control room without headphones. Robin hangs a sheet of corrugated aluminium in front of me. The speaker goes behind the metal, and the mike is in front of it, and I'm singing into it. The metal is there partly to reflect some of my voice back so that I can hear it, but mostly to cut off anything from the speakers being picked up by the mike. I sing some songs better if I can hear myself in a more real sense. Well, it's probably less real. Sometimes hearing yourself too clearly in headphones can be intimidating and it makes you hold back too much. Because you can hear yourself so clearly, you get frightened of overdoing it."

It's been more common in recent years for bands to write music in a recording studio, and only after that to confront the problem of realising the music on stage. With Sade it is the other way around. They aim in the studio to re-create what they have done live and, as Sade puts it, "in order to compensate for the fact that it's not live sometimes we have to go round the long way; sometimes it's harder." On some of the songs the band resorted to doing simultaneous takes in order to get a more lively feeling.

Paul: "We did 'Is It A Crime?' live, in the studio, with the booths and everything. We just sat down and played it through a couple of times and then recorded it. We just patched up a few things afterwards."

Sade: "I was in the control room singing, and then I just re-did a couple of bits of the song afterwards. In other situations I usually do about eight takes and just take the best one. I just look for the ultimate take."

The band's approach has become more elaborate on some tracks. Fear, in fact, verges towards the bombastic and just misses. Complete with strings arranged by Nick Ingham, Flamenco guitar playing by Carlos Bonell, and Sade herself singing parts of the song in Spanish, the piece quite adequately demonstrates a style that will probably become synonymous with the eighties; DX7 orchestration.

Andrew: "We've used the DX7 quite a lot on this album, but we've been more conscious of using it than we were before, now that every band is using it. We've tried to use it differently by using two DX7s together and changing the sounds that way."

If War Of The Hearts is released as a single in the near future, it will be the second single to have been released by a chart band (along with Lloyd Cole's Brand New Friend) to use a rhythm box as well as real drums for effect.

Stuart: "That wasn't used instead of a drum kit, it was more like using a different instrument. The other drums are actually Dave playing."

Andrew: "It was a sort of rhythm box thing, like you'd get on an old organ. I can't remember what it actually was — something like a Roland Compu-rhythm. You can't programme it, it just has rhythms like Rock 1, Rock 2, Samba and Bossa etc. Because there's so much new technology coming out each week you forget about things like that. It's the same with keyboards, there's loads of really good keyboards that were out about five years ago..."

Sade: "I just hope we haven't used the same pattern as Lloyd Cole!"

The recording of Sweetest Taboo sounds like a riot. The song actually sounds like perfect Pop, but by all accounts it was put together with gay abandon.

Stuart: "We used a lot of percussion and weird noises on that track. It's basically a drum track, with two snare drums, one for rim shots and one as a snare proper. Then Martin played a big shaker, and Sade also did 'Shhh' noises. Then we had two Perrier bottles which we tuned by filling them up a certain amount with water, and Martin and Dave played them by blowing across the necks of the bottles."

Andrew: "Then there was a marimba. Then with all this percussion going on I used the Caliope (DX setting) but playing it like a percussion instrument, and we put two delays on it to make a really weird rhythm."

Stuart: "Then at the end when we were running through it and Sade was singing in the studio, Dave and Martin were just banging along on wine glasses and ashtrays. It picked upon Sade's mike and we ended up using that take!"

Sade: "...I usually do about eight takes and just take the best one. I just look for the ultimate take."

Just as Sade's vocalising shows a greater maturity on this LP, Stuart's sax playing also sounds more confident and expressive. He soars characteristically on Is It A Crime? and does a classic 'cool' solo on Jezebel. Yet all this was in spite of a last minute gear change, necessitated by unforeseen circumstances.

Stuart: "One night I was about to start recording my sax parts, and I set my sax up. But I didn't put it on the stand because I thought it might get knocked, so I put it on this leather chair. In the studio there were all these drum booths — big metal sheets with wood and glass in them, and someone tripped over a wire and fell into them. They started collapsing and falling on top of him, but what broke their fall was my saxophone, so it got completely crushed. The guy came up to me and said 'I think something might have happened to your saxophone,' and I went down to have a look. It was about two inches thick, crushed flat. He held it up and said 'Is that going to make any difference?'"

That saxophone was Stuart's cherished Selmer Mk VI tenor, the type of instrument used by John Coltrane and Coleman Hawkins and now unavailable. It's being completely rebuilt, but in the meantime Stuart had to search for a replacement.

Stuart: "I tried new Selmers and Yamahas but I couldn't get one that sounded the same as mine, so I ended up getting an unknown, Japanese one called Yanagisowa, but it sounded just the same as my other one. On some songs I was miked in the same way as on the last album, with one close mike, and one far away to pick up the ambience. But o Is It A Crime and Jezebel it was a much clearer sound so we just used one mike."

The role of producer in a lot of 'non-synthesizer' type bands these days seems to be quite an important one. Greg Walsh takes part in all of Big Sound authority's pre-recording rehearsals, and Clive Langer has almost become the seventh member of Madness. Robin Millar is another celebrated 'acoustic' type producer, but his role in producing Sade is altogether more invisible.

Stuart: "Basically we have all the arrangements, and we know what's going to go on in terms of percussion etc, so Robin's job is more to get that down on tape rather than arranging things."

Andrew: "He handles the technical side, you know, the DBXs and compressors and things we don't know about."

Stuart: "We try to explain a sound, and he just knows the technical way of getting it."

Sade: "We're basically in the studio all the way through. We're never not there."

Sade as a band do not admit to any self imposed limitations except one; they won't generally record anything in the studio that they can't play live. Playing out is therefore an overriding concern for them, and they have received critical acclaim for their stage performances, many of which have enabled them to dispel doubts about Sade's vocal prowess.

Sade: "The way I sing, it's harder to get across because I don't belt. I can belt. I don't actually think belting is the hardest thing in the world to do. If anything, the louder bits on our recordings are much easier to sing, you go into this different mode where everything is all on one level and it's much easier."

Doing it live is generally the bastard as far as singing is concerned. How does Sade find it?

Sade: "Because you're thrown into a situation you suddenly discover this power. It's easier than singing in rehearsals. It's like, if you were on a boat and you were thrown into the swimming pool on board and you can't swim, you'd probably still not be able to. But if the boat capsized you'd probably be able to swim then because you'd have to. I think it's a bit like that."

Speaking in a husky tenor that fills the room with ease, Sade's claims about the power of her voice seem perfectly reasonable. A smoker, both her speaking voice, and the recordings on the album, would seem to indicate that as time goes by her voice is likely to become more textured, perhaps even approaching the ravaged sound of a Billie Holiday. Sade has in the past taken steps to prevent this.

Sade: "I took about four lessons from this opera singer just to preserve my voice really — so it doesn't get any more husky — but I gave upon it. I've got a lot better, but I feel I've still got quite a long way to go."

If the essence of cool is unpretentiousness, then Sade have it in abundance. The band aren't afraid to admit that many of the people who buy their records would also buy records by Abba and Johnny Mathis. They are more interested that the people who buy their records value them as part of their collection. Questions of longevity and Pop commercially they dismiss with disinterest.

Andrew: "If in five years time Joe Public doesn't like the music that we do then we'll end up on the rubbish heap..."

Stuart: "If we're recording something, we're trying to get what we want to hear. Not a specific sound, like a commercial sound or anything..."

Sade: "Even the straight Pop bands think in terms of going on forever. I think if we're part of the Pop rubbish now then we'll be on the Pop rubbish heap in three year's time..."