Whatever you think of Drake and/or his music, it can't be doubted that for a certain kind of self-subscribing millennial the soppy, sing-song Canadian softie has boundless appeal. People, it seems, love Drake. Drake is a huge deal. To a generation raised on regurgitated nostalgia and relatable memes, Drake is the closest they've got to a genuine icon. So it naturally follows that when Drake approves of something, or someone—be it butter chicken, Stone Island jackets, or other rappers—his audience follow suit. This, of course, is how celebrity has always worked and how it likely always will.Just recently, in between binging on halloumi at Nandos and nipping into the Co-Op for washing detergent, oven chips, fennel or whatever it was he dropped by to pick up, Drake posed for an admittedly charming photo with "two very important ladies" in his life: to his right was his mother, Sandi Graham, and to his left was one of the most simultaneously celebrated and overlooked artists in British music.Helen Folasade Adu was born on 16 January 1959 in Ibadan, Nigeria. The daughter of a Yoruban economics lecturer and an English nurse, Helen would spend much of her childhood on the fringes of the Essex coast—a distinctly unmemorable part of the country, an indistinct but sprawling patch of shingle, sand, and net-curtained caravans. By the tail end 1983, Adu, a fashion graduate, was big enough of a deal to have a thousand people turned away from the doors at Heaven, in London, and to have made a debut American performance at the Danceteria, one of the most legendary clubs in New York nightlife history. Somewhere in the intervening 24 years, Helen had stopped being Helen; Helen had become Sade.Read more on thump.
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