You know, I often find myself wondering about those big-name artists, the ones who are like, household names, but somehow they manage to keep their actual lives under wraps. It’s a real art form in itself, if you ask me. Sade always popped into my head as a prime example. Her music? Absolutely everywhere, timeless stuff. But her personal business? Pretty much a closed book.
So, one quiet afternoon, I got this sudden urge. Not in a gossipy way, nah, that’s not my style. It was more like, a genuine curiosity. How does someone that famous actually pull it off? I plonked myself down with my old tablet – still kicking, that thing – made a cuppa, and just started poking around online. Figured I’d do my own little bit of digging, see what I could piece together.
I wasn’t using any fancy detective software or anything, just the usual search engines. You know how it is, you type in a few keywords, sift through articles, read bits of old interviews. It’s a bit like putting together a jigsaw puzzle, really. You follow one clue, it leads to another. Sometimes you hit a dead end, other times you find a little nugget.
First off, I just went back over her early days, kinda refreshed my memory. And man, what a journey. She was born in Nigeria, right? Then moved to England when she was just a kid, around four. Schooled at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, which is pretty prestigious. I even read she did some fashion design and a bit of modeling before the music thing really exploded. That happened when she joined a band called Pride back in the early ’80s. After that, well, her own band took off and the rest is history, as they say.
Then, naturally, I started looking into who she’s been connected with over the years. With folks this private, it’s usually a bit murky. I saw stuff about her being married once, to Carlos Scola Pliego, a filmmaker from Spain. And a couple of other names came up from her past – Robert Elms, a journalist, and then Bob Morgan, who was a Jamaican music producer. Pretty standard life stuff, really, people come and go in your life.
But what really got me thinking was her current setup, how she keeps things so low-key these days. And that’s when, after a fair bit of clicking and reading, this name – Ian Watts – kept cropping up. Not in big, flashy headlines, mind you. More like, just stated as fact: her current partner. They seem to have built a life well away from the crazy celebrity bubble.
It was a pretty interesting little rabbit hole to go down, that afternoon. Just made me realize, it really is possible to be a massive global star and still keep a part of your world just for you. Finding out about Ian Watts, and that they’re together now, kind of rounded out the picture for me. Felt like, good on her, she figured out how to make it work. Takes some doing, that.
