Sade – Never as Good as the First Time

The single edit added a vocal the album left off

Epic released Never as Good as the First Time on 5 March 1986. It was the third single from Promise, after The Sweetest Taboo and Is It a Crime?. Music & Media, in the issue of 10 May 1986, called it the highest new airplay entry in Europe that week and identified it as that third single. Sade Adu wrote the words. She and Stuart Matthewman wrote the music. The production credit is split four ways: Robin Millar, Ben Rogan, Mike Pela and Sade. The album cut runs 5:00. The single runs 3:57, with a vocal introduction that is not on the album and a slightly different vocal mix. The B-side is Keep Hanging On.

The song had been tracked in 1985 during the Promise sessions at the Power Plant in London and at Studio Miraval in Provence. Next to The Sweetest Taboo it is faster. The lyric argues that the second time will not match the first: good times come and go, the rose is what people remember, the thorns are what they forget. Matthewman’s guitar and saxophone sit in the same place in the band as on the rest of the record, but the tempo is quicker.

Brian Ward directed the video in black and white. Adu rides a horse through El Rocío, Almonte and Huelva, in Andalusia, the same region used for the desert scenes in The Sweetest Taboo. The clip runs about 3:55, in line with the single, not the five-minute album track. There is no loft, no rain machine, no glasses on a cafe table. The picture is a rider and open country.