Nigerian-born Helen Folasade Adu, aka Sade Adu, might just as easily have made a living in the fashion world as the music world, but most R&B aficionados will be grateful she chose the latter.
For a good chunk of the '80s, her band Sade was one of the few Brit acts to offer restrained soul as an antidote to the prevalent hyper-charged pop music cobbled together from sequencers and soundcards.
When 1984 lead single Your Love Is King set debut album Diamond Life on its path to quadruple-platinum status in the UK (later matched in the US), Frankie Goes To Hollywood's Two Tribes was at the top of the charts, having followed similar runs from the likes of that band's Relax, Duran Duran's The Reflex and Wham's Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.
It was as if Sade had poured a generous dollop of love potion into the nation's drinking water.
Of course, it helped that Adu herself seemed to be the physical embodiment of seductive, jazz-tinged R&B.
Her cat-like eyes, full lips and milk-chocolate skin combined to make a striking image, matched perfectly by a breathy voice that coiled like vapour over the band's music, mercifully free of convoluted flourishes.
The album's opening triptych of Smooth Operator, Your Love Is King and Hang On To Your Love, each of which was released as a high-charting single, reveal subtle shades in Sade's appeal and set the template for all that has followed from the band.
The first trades on Latin rhythms, the second on cocktail lounge chic and the third on slinky dance-floor grooves.
Essentially, Diamond Life has the bases covered when it comes to putting an urbane sheen on some fairly universal sounds, a little savoir-faire that tends to rub off on us all when we dim the lights and break out the bubbles.
Never mind that many of us don't know our Coltrane from our King Curtis.
