Tag Archives: 2011

2012 ➤ All about reclusive Sade, the singer who trumps Adele in US list of top earners

Posted on 13 Mar 2012 | 1 comment

Sade Adu, Letterman, TV shows,Billboard, Top 40 Money Makers,

Launching her album in Feb 2010: Sade meets US TV host David Letterman. (Videograb from his Late Show on CBS)

➢ Sade proves to be highest-earning British musical act in America last year — read Caspar Llewellyn Smith in today’s Guardian…

“ Viewers of the 2012 Grammys awards last month watched Adele, the 23-year old girl from Tottenham, north London, walk away with six awards, but the top-earning act from the UK in America last year was an artist who fans back home have to some extent forgotten.

BILLBOARD’S TOP EARNERS
1 Taylor Swift: $35.7m
2 U2: $32.1m
3 Kenny Chesney: $29.8m
4 Lady Gaga: $25.4m
5 Lil Wayne: $23.2m
6 Sade $16.4m
7 Bon Jovi: $15.8m
8 Celine Dion: $14.3m
9 Jason Aldean: $13.4m
10 Adele: $13.1m
[Touring and record sales 2011]

Sade raked in $16.4m (£10.5m) in 2011 on the back of her first tour in North America for a decade and the release of The Ultimate Collection. The 53-year-old singer came sixth on a list of the biggest-earning acts of last year, compiled by the American trade publication Billboard, eclipsing Adele, the only other Brit in the top 10, who earned $13.1m.

Sade [say it “Zhah-Day”] is the most successful solo female artist Britain has ever produced, selling more than 50m records in a career that stretches back to her 1984 hit Your Love Is King. Famously reclusive — nicknamed Howie by her friends, after millionaire hermit Howard Hughes — she toured the world for eight months last year, but the bulk of the tour was devoted to North America, where she played 59 shows. The tour started 18 months after the release of her US No 1 album Soldier of Love, a record that reached No 4 in the UK… ” / continued at Guardian Online

➢ Smooth Operator Sade is surprise US smash,
beating Adele and Take That to be Britain’s biggest music export
— today’s Daily Mail feature

➢ Billboard’s Top 40 Money Makers 2012

FLASHBACK TO SADE’S 2010 ALBUM LAUNCH

Rolling Stone described Sade’s studio album, Soldier of Love, as “unimpeachably excellent” … Billboard said: “It’s been 10 years since Sade released an album, but be forewarned – the giant has awoken” … People magazine said Sade’s enduring appeal was as “the voice of comfort to the wounded heart”

❏ In her American fan forums black guys are besotted with Sade, and here in an audience for a live TV performance we see doting female fans for whom she is a role model. On Jimmy Kimmel’s show in February 2010 (above), Sade performed Soldier of Love live as her eponymous album hit No 1 in the US (502,000 copies sold there in its first week — the best sales week for an album by a group since AC/DC in October 2008). Susan Boyle, the finalist from the Britain’s Got Talent contest, was holding steady at No 9.

❏ Backstage video interview with Sade by The Insider, June 2011 (above) — “I’m really a country girl. I don’t give too much of myself away. When I go in a studio I lose all my shyness.”

➢ Read Sade: The Billboard Cover Story by Mitchell Peters, August 19, 2011 — Preparing for a 100-plus-date international concert tour is daunting for even the most seasoned musical acts… “I do the opposite and pretend it’s not going to happen, immersing myself in the details of production as a way of distracting myself from reality,” says English singer Sade Adu. “When the time comes, I don’t test the waters — I just jump straight in.”

❏ Listen to The Moon and the Sky (remix featuring Jay Z):

SADE’S EARLY CAREER AT SHAPERSOFTHE80S

Sade’s debut with her own band in Aug 1983 at the Yow club, London, Paul Denman to the fore. Photographed © by Shapersofthe80s

➢ 1981 — Pix of fashion designer Sade’s Demob outfits during the first Blitz invasion of the US

➢ 1982 — Pix of Sade helping backstage during Steve Strange’s fashion show by Londoners in Paris

➢ 2010 — Her first interview in 10 years finds comeback Shard comfy as ‘Auntie Sade’ — On her new man, Ian Watts, who has been in turn Royal Marine, fireman and scientist: “I always said that if I could just find a guy who could chop wood and had a nice smile it didn’t bother me if he was an aristocrat or a thug as long as he was a good guy. I’ve ended up with an educated thug!”

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Posted in Economics, Fashion, London, North America, Pop music

Tagged 2011, Billboard, Demob, Ian Watts, Interview, Money Makers, Sade, Soldier of Love, Video

➤ DJ Mark Moore’s 40 tracks and 8 albums from the old year

Posted on 9 Jan 2012 | Leave a comment

❏ “A bit late but here are my faves of 2011. I actually think 2011 has been a great year for music but, more so now than ever, you just had to get through a hell of a lot of dross to find the good stuff.” Moore places S.C.U.M. at number 4.

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➢ Other picky people’s year-ending Best Ofs in music of all styles

PS — 100 MORE FROM DAZED & CONFUSED

❏ Listen online to the mammoth 6½ hour Top 100 Dazed & Approved tracks of 2011 which is pretty wild, they say… starting with Africa HiTech, AlunaGeorge and A$AP Rocky all the way to WU LYF, Zola Jesus and Zomby.

❏ iPAD, TABLET & MOBILE USERS PLEASE NOTE — You may see only a tiny selection of items from this wide-ranging website about the 1980s, not chosen by the author. To access fuller background features and site index either click on “Standard view” or visit Shapersofthe80s.com on a desktop computer. ➢ Click here to visit a different random item every time you click

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Posted in Clubbing, London, Pop music

Tagged 2011, albums, Dazed & Approved, DJ, favourites, Mark Moore, Mute Records, S.C.U.M., singles, Video, Whitechapel

2011 ➤ Downloads explosion plus new definition of singles results in biggest sales for years

Posted on 3 Jan 2012 | Leave a comment

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❚ 2011 WAS THE BIGGEST YEAR for single sales in the history of the Official Charts (founded 1997), according to Official Charts Company data released by the BPI, which operates the OCC jointly with the Entertainment Retailers Association. Over the past seven years, the singles market has been redefined to include legitimate downloads. Since 2004, sales of singles have increased by more than five times, from 32m in 2004 to a record 177.9 million in 2011. The vast majority (99.3%) were sold as digital tracks and bundles. Last year, 1.1m CD singles were sold, representing just 0.6% of the total. All of the top 20 best-selling singles of 2011 sold more than 500,000 copies apiece.

Adele bagged two places in the 2011 year-end singles chart. The recorded and live performance of Someone Like You — recorded at the BRIT Awards — together sold 1.2m copies to become the top-selling single of 2011 overall, with Rolling In The Deep ending the year at No 9. Maroon 5 and Christina Aguilera’s mega-seller, Moves Like Jagger, finished the year in second place and has now sold over a million copies despite never actually reaching No 1. LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem comes in at No 3. For all Lady Gaga’s exposure [above], Born This Way made only No 14.

GOVT ATTACKED FOR UK ALBUM SALES SLUMP

❏ Overall sales of albums fell by 5.6% in 2011 to just 113.2m, and the UK has fallen behind Germany as a music market. BPI chief executive Geoff Taylor said: “While other countries take positive steps to protect their creative sector, our government is taking too long to act on piracy.”

In the UK Adele’s 21 was by far the biggest selling album of 2011, ending the year with nearly 3.8m copies sold — more than double the 1.8m sales achieved by 2010’s top album, Take That’s Progress. 21 became the highest-selling album of the 21st century in December, achieving more sales in a single calendar year than any other album in British chart history. 2011 ended with Adele’s debut album, 19, in fourth place, alongside Top 10 placings for Michael Bublé [above], Bruno Mars and Coldplay.

BRITS DOMINATE TOP-SELLING DEBUT ALBUMS

❏ Out of all the debut albums released last year in the UK, eight of the Top 10 are by British acts, topped by award-winning London singer Jessie J’s Who You Are [right] and Ed Sheeran’s +, which holds the record for the fast selling digital debut album in Official Charts Company history.

HMV’S ALTERNATIVE ALBUMS OF THE YEAR

❏ Totally at odds with the official year-ending charts, retailer HMV’s Poll of Polls announces its own Top 50 albums of the year, headed by an entirely different Top 10 for 2011 led by P J Harvey, Bon Iver and Fleet Foxes… The Dorset-born musician and singer-songwriter Harvey, who in September claimed a second Mercury Prize for her tenth studio album Let England Shake, scored an impressive 21 nominations in total from the 35 media outlets surveyed, including “album of the year” selections from NME, Mojo, Uncut, The Sunday Times and BBC music writers.

➢ Shapersofthe80s proposes a bunch of other
picky people’s musics of the year

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Tagged 2011, Adele, albums, bestsellers, BPI, downloads, Ed Sheeran, Germany, Jessie J, Official Charts Company, P J Harvey, piracy, sales, singles, Someone Like You, Video

2011 ➤ Other picky people’s year-ending Best Ofs in music of all styles

Posted on 31 Dec 2011 | Leave a comment

BEST ALBUMS OF 2011 AT ALLMEDIANY

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❏ AllMediaNY.com offers the next step in the evolution of modern journalism — “free media” — an outlet where journalists and readers together decide on what is newsworthy and what is not. Editor-in-Chief Drew Kolar says it was “a great year for real music”, sadly marred by the death of Amy Winehouse.

50 SEVENS THAT REALLY STRUCK ME AT DIS

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❏ At Drowned in Sound Wendy Roby whittles her year’s reviewing down to a top 50 “that really struck me”, starting at Africa Hitech’s Do U Really Wanna Fight, via Metronomy’s The Look and ending on Jamie Woon’s Lady Luck.

POPJUSTICE READER POLL’S BEST SINGLE

❏ Rihanna — We Found Love feat. Calvin Harris.

RUSTY EGAN: WHAT’S ON MY IPOD MIX

❏ An hour’s-worth of vintage sounds mixed by former Blitz Club deejay Rusty Egan: “Some lost classics here plus some bands born in the 80s that sound like they wrote and recorded the songs in the 80s.”

CHRIS SULLIVAN’S TEN BEST MUSIC
DOCUMENTARIES EVER

❏ A Great Day In Harlem (1995) — “A must for any serious black music aficionado,” writes Zeitgeist-Meister Sullivan at RedBull.com. This documentary by Jean Bach tells the story of one summer’s day in 1958 when 57 musicians from jazz history met at 126th Street in Harlem to have their picture taken by Art Kane for Esquire magazine. Keen eyes will spot such greats as Horace Silver, Charles Mingus, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, English-born Marian McPartland OBE, Sonny Rollins, Lester Young, Gerry Mulligan, Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie. Kane called it “the greatest picture of that era of musicians ever taken”.

KATY PERRY’S FIREWORK SHOCKER

❏ The video for Firework not only outraged British TV stations into censoring the gay kiss, but it then won Video of the Year at the MTV Video Music Awards. Result: the single remained in the UK charts for 58 weeks, way longer than in Billboard’s.

J J WHEELER’S JAZZ PICK

❏ A refreshing selection of five CDs and five gigs from 2011 offered at The Jazz Breakfast by a much-lauded British drummer/percussionist currently studying at the Royal Academy of Music after graduating from Birmingham Conservatoire. Listen to clips from his own quintet’s imminent album Unconventional at Soundcloud.

MUSIC BOOKS ROUND-UP

❏ A broad survey of the year’s music books by the Evening Standard’s David Smyth reveals that in his collected lyrics Jarvis Cocker says “seeing a lyric in print is like watching the TV with the sound turned down: you’re only getting half the story”… Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco and Destiny gives us a tour of the fascinating life story of Nile Rodgers [pictured] — conceived when his mother was 13, raised by beatniks who’d have Thelonious Monk over, he joined the Black Panthers and jammed with Jimi Hendrix, all before he wrote a vast collection of mega-hits, virtually lived in Studio 54’s bathroom and produced Madonna and David Bowie.

LADY GAGA: GOOD THING, BAD THING?

❏ PopJustice’s 2011 In Review asks singer Will Young: As a notorious homosexual, did you feel empowered by Born This Way by Lady Gaga?
Will replies: “When it came on the radio I thought ‘She’s basically written this song for me’. Amazing. I actually think I shed a tear as I was driving up to Wales. I stopped at a petrol station and I thought ‘You know what, I don’t care what they think’ and I brought some pink bon bons. Normally I would just go for a Wispa.”

STEVE NORMAN’S HOTTEST DANCE VIDEO

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❏ Tightrope by Janelle Monáe feat. Big Boi — “Amazing. Here’s to a year to remember, like 1981 only better!” says Spandau’s sax player Steve Norman.

➢ Don’t miss: Other picky people’s year-ending
Best Ofs from fashion, TV, web and film

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Posted in Culture, Film, London, Media, North America, Pop music

Tagged 2011, Amy Winehouse, Art Kane, Books, censorship, Chris Sullivan, disco, gay kiss, Great Day In Harlem, Janelle Monáe, Jazz Breakfast, Le Freak, Nile Rodgers, photography, Rusty Egan, Steve Norman, Video, Will Young

2011 ➤ Picky people’s year-ending Best Ofs from fashion, TV, web and film

Posted on 31 Dec 2011 | Leave a comment

BEST TV SHOWS OF THE YEAR

❏ DIY claims to be one of the most visited underground music sites in the UK. Its TV watcher David Bedwell reckons TV in 2011 was arguably stronger than it ever has been, and picks his ten best shows, from Smallville to Being Human [pictured]. Of series three he writes: “Proud to be able to put a UK show at the top of my chart this year — there was no better central cast than Lenora Crichlow, Russell Tovey and Aidan Turner. They all have the ability to make you laugh or cry, sometimes even both.”

ANDREW LOGAN’S ALT BEAUTY PAGEANT

❏ The British Guide to Showing Off was a new movie by Jes Benstock celebrating the 12 incarnations over 40 years of Andrew Logan [pictured] and his Alternative Miss World contest — “Mashed potato for daywear. For evening wear she was a giant chip.”

CHRIS SULLIVAN’S TEN BEST FILMS

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❏ No 4 in ZeitgeistMeister Sullivan’s choice at Red Bull is Almodovar’s stylish thriller The Skin I Live In.

A FEAST OF ART BOOKS

Weather Project ,Olafur Eliasson , Tate Modern , art books,

Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson at Tate Modern, photographed by Dan Chung for the Guardian

❏ The Guardian critic Peter Conrad weighs up the year’s art books discussing the point of galleries and installations such as The Weather Project by Olafur Eliasson at Tate Modern [pictured]. He finds David Hockney enthusing like a teenager about the iPhone and iPad, and genius springing from the man who gave us the shower scene in Psycho.

I-D: A YEAR IN PICTURES

❏ Magazine publisher Terry Jones brought us “32 covers that capture fashion’s diversity” from a year of designer collaborations, and parties such as the i-D and Alberto Guardiani Milanese fashion week rave “which will go down in history”.

PRINCESS JULIA’S TIP-TOP TUMBLRS TO FOLLOW

❏ In her wider wrap-up of the year, the international club deejay and Blitz era icon, Princess Julia, elicits even more fave Tumblrs from the five bloggers she chooses, who include the epitome of all that is beautiful and girly, lingerie-designer and artist, Hannah Metz [above].

DONNY SLACK’S 12 PERSONAL HIGHLIGHTS

❏ The socialite musician, actor and spirit of the night Donny Slack records these highlights of his year at Facebook … Patti Smith’s Mapplethorpe book, Keith Richards’ book,  PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake,  Adam Ant at O2, Last Tuesday Society Halloween Party , The Chap magazine , Metronomy album, Patrick Wolf’s Lupercalia , John Waters at the Festival Hall, Alice Cooper’s Welcome 2 My Nightmare album and I’ll Bite Your Face Off single, A Child Of The Jago collections, and Earl of Bedlam launching.

➢ Now visit: Other picky people’s year-ending
Best Ofs in music of all styles

THE THREE BEST-PAID MODELS

❏ Forbes magazine lists the top earners of 2011 beginning with the Brazilian Gisele Bündchen ($45m, pictured), Heidi Klum ($20m) and Kate Moss ($13.5m)… There is no list of the highest-earning male models because they earn a lot less than female models. According to Forbes: “A top male model may take home anywhere from $200,000 to $500,000 annually, but most make a less glamorous living from catalog work.”