"Why Cant [sic] We Live Together", by Sade. (There is no apostrophe on the back cover or inside the gatefold, but mercifully one appears on the label.)
Once every couple of months the YMCA Auxiliary holds a garage sale in and around what looks like an old scout hall near the playground at Yarralumla. There are a few shelves of dusty boxes of dusty vinyl taking up most of one room. I usually have time to get through only a couple of boxes before Carl has ransacked the boxes of old McDonalds toys and such, usually managing to enhance one of his many incomplete sets, and is ready to leave. (We seem to have roughly ten McDonalds toys for each time we have visited that godforsaken place. I suppose it keeps them out of landfill.)
Thus, even though there seems to be very limited turnover of records from one year to the next, I often manage to uncover something that induces a smile. Today, that something was a seemingly unplayed copy of the first Sade album. I was transported back to 1984, the second year of the fabled Nicholson Street shared household. My 1984, musically, was a mixed bag. The first Jesus and Mary Chain album. Talking Heads' "Speaking In Tongues". David Sylvian's "Words With The Shaman", with Jon Hassell. (Also Hassell's own "Dream Theory In Malaya".) Eno's "Apollo". The Michael Brook and Brian Eno album (which I never could get intom although not for want of trying). U F@cking 2's "Unforgettable Fire" (purely on account of Eno's involvement -- see the pattern here?). "Porcupine", by Echo & The Bunnymen. The Smiths. The first two REM albums. The Dream Syndicate's second album, "Medicine Show". Weekend's "La Variete". "Einstein On The Beach". And Sade. What she was doing in there I could never have explained (I may well have had the hots for her, based solely on her singing voice), and when, a couple of years later, I had dived headlong into an unruly diet of Einsturzende Neubauten, Foetus, Sonic Youth and the like there was really no room for her silky smooth tones. (Funnily enough, it was a comment I read somewhere by Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo about Sade, possibly ironic but also possibly not, that got me thinking that I may have been wrong.)
Of course, Canberra's glorious spring weather is the perfect listening environment for something this perfect. It might be slightly ersatz "soul", but you can't fake quality, and quality is all over this record. According to SFJ, writing in the New Yorker, she and her band are still going, and going strong, 26 years later. She sells, like, more records internationally than anybody, and yet you never hear anything about her. Sounds like a good business model.
All I really wanted to say, though, is, and this may sound to some like sacrilege: there is really not much between her version of Timmy Thomas's "Why Can't We Live Together" (apostrophe rightly reinstated) and Massive Attack's cover of "Be Thankful For What You Got". Which, before you start your hate mail, is not intended in the least as a slight to Massive Attack.
