Most A-list artists who return with a new album after nearly a decade away from the celebrity glare show signs of nerves, or at least offer some excuses.

Not Sade. She is very much her own person, unswayed by managers or her record company.

Since the start of the 1990s, Sade has released just three albums of new material. There’s been a 10-year gap between Soldier Of Love, which has just been released and her 2000 offering, Lovers Rock.

The third, Love Deluxe, dates back to 1992. For much of that time she has been virtually invisible.

Her friends have taken to calling her “Howie” after the millionaire recluse Howard Hughes. She sees her fellow band members infrequently – two of them are based in America – and she hangs out here mainly with long term friends.

Sade has been living in seclusion near Painswick, where, after spending 30 years in London, she de-camped with her now 13-year-old daughter Ila in 2005.

She refers to her small cottage as “a cave”, a stone-built wreck that five years after she moved in, is finished, “kind of”.

“There are still wires hanging out of places,” she admits.

She is now doing up a nearby farmhouse and enjoys the easygoing privacy, saying nobody pays her much attention.

“They’re more interested in Eddie the Eagle, he’s a bigger star in those parts than I am,” she says.

It may seem a strange choice for a soul singer whose music and lifestyle are construed as ‘urban’. She has never lived down the image of sashaying around in a designer frock singing Smooth Operator. But she is very clear that her family roots lie deep in the English countryside.

“Most of my social life is imported from London but I’m not the most sociable person,” she says. “I’m usually doing something like building, writing or gardening. I love to dig. Its so tangible and real. I’m always amazed, it’s like alchemy to me. You can plant a tiny seed and something incredible grows. Making music is like that. I wonder sometimes where it comes from. I am a country girl at heart.”

The change clearly suits her. Sade doesn’t look to have aged at all during her long absence.

On the eve of her 51st birthday, her face is unlined and she still possesses a striking physical presence.

Given that she has only done a handful of interviews and one tour in the past 15 years, you can’t help wondering what has now lured Sade back to the pop marketplace.

Having sold 50 million albums – the biggest tally by a British female artist – she has earned all the money she will ever need.

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As well as her home in Gloucestershire she also has a spacious house in leafy north London. But when her band – the same trio she’s worked with since 1983 – began to agitate to make a new record as the Noughties wore on, she responded to the pressure.

Soldier Of Love was written and recorded over a series of fortnightly sessions at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studio, near Bath.

By then, her personal circumstances were much happier, thanks partly to a new relationship with her present partner, but the songs still bear the unmistakably melancholic imprint of classic Sade.

“It’s what I do, I can’t help it. Sadness dealt with well brings happiness, I think. It purges you and enables you to leave it behind,” she says. “Happy songs can actually make you feel worse. I’m not a moper but I do have a tendency towards melancholia.”

Sade was born Helen Folassade Adu in Ibadan, Nigeria, the daughter of an English district nurse and a Nigerian university teacher who had met in London five years earlier.

Sade’s parents split when she was four years old which meant returning to England with her mother and her older brother while her father stayed on in Ibadan.

The broken family initially went to stay with her English grandparents near Colchester.

Sade’s grandfather was a Catholic socialist small farmer, whose parents were involved with Whiteway, a quasi-socialist utopian community, formed around the turn of the century on a back-to-the-earth ideology.

Her grandfather stayed in the Stroud area, briefly trained as a monk, and tried to enlist on the leftists’ side in the Spanish civil war. After marrying, he moved east.

“He was always waxing lyrical about the West Country,” says Sade. “He knew the novelist Laurie Lee and he loved that area. We’ve ended up five minutes from his old stomping ground in the Slad valley.”

There’s a spot near her cottage where Sade says she always pictures her grandfather as she drives past.

As a child, while her mother worked all hours, Sade learned her independence early.

Having shown a talent for art at school she won a place at St Martin’s School of Art and Design in Holborn, and pitched into the burgeoning club culture of London in the early 1980s, slogging around in a battered transit van singing back up in a soul band called Pride.

Music wasn’t exactly her choice. But being a black singer in a largely white ersatz soul outfit lent credibility to the proceedings and, as a fan of the American soul giants Donny Hathaway and Bill Withers, she got talked into it.

“I didn’t have any confidence as a singer but I found that I liked writing songs,” she says.

One of these, Smooth Operator, which she sang solo, soon attracted record company talent scouts. In 1983 she agreed to leave Pride and sign to the Epic label – on condition that she took three of her bandmates with her, guitarist and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman, keyboard player Andrew Hale and bassist Paul Denman. They called themselves Sade and have stuck together ever since.

Their debut album – Diamond Life – won Best British Album in 1985 and was nominated as one of the best of the past 30 years at The Brits this week.

There have been arguments over the years, mainly about music, “because my naffometer is much more sensitive than theirs” she claims, laughing, but no break-ups or new members.

Sade learned about the downside of fame as swiftly as she became very famous. With her albums selling by the million all over the world, paparazzi photographers would climb the trees surrounding her London house to get an intimate shot of the face that launched a thousand magazine covers.

False rumours about her personal life irked her, even the funny ones such as the report she was about to buy Fulham Football Club, and encouraged an aversion to interviews that persists to this day.

She has since relented, but only rarely, and it was a relief to her as the 1990s rolled around and she was left alone.

With the British media off her back, and plenty of money in the bank – the Sunday Times Rich List recently valued her as worth £30 million – Sade has moved into a lower gear career-wise and devoted more time to her personal life.

It’s not been an easy ride. Her six year marriage to a Spanish film director Carlos Pliego ended in 1995. A subsequent affair with a Jamaican musician she met in London produced her daughter Ila in 1996, but ended unhappily.

Her new man, Ian Watts, whom she met shortly after moving to Stroud, she believes to be ‘The One’.

“Ian was a Royal Marine, then a fireman, then a science graduate. 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,” she says. “And I've ended up with an educated thug,” Sade laughs like a drain at this.

“I have a lovely stepson who lives with us and I feel lucky, like I've won the lottery, finally.”

She loves the fact that on Soldier Of Love she’s been able to involve her daughter in her music.

“As soon as she arrived she became the centre of my life,” Sade says.

Now that she’s a teenager, Ila knows all about her famous mum, comments on the songs and even sings on one of the tracks, Babyfather.

“Ila told me she thinks my music is very emotional, which means a lot to me,” she says.