Helen Folasade Adu – better known by her stage name Sade – was a background singer with the Latin Soul band Pride when she started performing her song “Smooth Operator”, co-written with Pride’s guitarist Ray St. John as a solo-performance during concerts. The renditions got such good feedback that she decided to split and form her own band, taking along half of the personnel of Pride. It was a wise move: When they played their first concert at the Heaven nightclub in London they already attracted so many aspiring audience members that about a thousand of them had to be turned away at the door.

Despite the honey-sweet melody the song is about a quite evil actor in high society, a playboy who’s breaking hearts left and right while taking on all sorts of facets of a criminal’s job-description: con-man, gun-fencing, pimping, you name it.

The song was a huge international hit and the stepping stone for Sade’s career as one of the most successful British women in history.

In the extended version of the video the perpetrator is chased over rooftops by the police and falls to his doom.