Songfacts®:

• "Your Love Is King" is a song so smooth it practically slides off the plate. Sade serves up a helping of soft jazz, topped with Stuart Matthewman's sultry tenor sax and her sensual vocals. Written by Sade and Matthewman, the track is a romantic letter to the power of love adorned with regal metaphors that transform emotions into crowns and sovereigns.
• Released in the UK in January 1984 as the lead single from Diamond Life, Sade's debut album, the song radiates the understated sophistication that would become her hallmark. But life wasn't always so polished. At the time, Sade and her boyfriend, writer Robert Elms, were squatting in a disused fire station.
  
  "It was freezing," Elms later told Mojo magazine. "We had one tiny electric heater, a bath in the kitchen, and the day she went to perform 'Your Love Is King' on Top of the Pops, the toilet had frozen over."
  
  CBS Records sent a glossy black limousine to collect her. By the time Sade returned home, everything had changed. Stardom had arrived - and it was piping hot.
• The song climbed to #6 on the UK Singles Chart. Across the pond, it was released in June 1985, following the success of "Smooth Operator," and, while it only reached #54 on the Billboard Hot 100, it performed solidly on the Adult Contemporary and R&B charts.
• "Your Love Is King" was a crown jewel in the success of Diamond Life, an album that went multi-platinum, selling over 10 million copies worldwide, the best-selling debut by a British female vocalist in the 20th century. It won the 1985 Brit Award for Best British Album and established Sade as a major force in the 1980s music scene. For Sade, this was nothing short of a coronation as the "Queen of Smooth Jazz."
• Sade wrote "Your Love Is King" with guitarist and saxophonist Stuart Matthewman in her squat above a fire station in Wood Green, North London. "Sade was living with Robert [Elms] there. I'd hang out and we'd write together," Matthewman told Uncut magazine. "One night she'd been out with friends when the melody came into her head. She said she had to keep humming it on the bus home so she wouldn't forget it."
  
  Robert Elms remembered, "She would work on songs by singing to Stuart, who could play anything. She sat on our horsehair sofa singing the melody to 'Your Love is King.' I'm not saying it was about me, but it was first sung to me on that sofa."
• Matthewman recalled how the track came together: "I started strumming chords and we began arranging it together. I'd never done anything in 6/8 time, but I had a waltz setting on the drum machine that we sped up. We wrote it pretty quickly, then took it to rehearsal."
• The song's signature saxophone intro almost didn't happen the way fans know it. "In rehearsal I'd wailed out the sax and we decided to use it for the intro," Matthewman said. "On the solo, I wanted the final note to be this really high, perfect note, but I couldn't hit it. So Robin [Millar, the producer] slowed down the tape. I played a slower note and he sped it up."