Neneh Cherry on her life’s work: ‘I just feel like breaking the rules’
On the morning I’m due to speak to Neneh Cherry, I wear my biggest earrings: a pair of shoulder-grazing, tortoiseshell hoops that jangle with every movement. Maybe it’s because I’ve been blasting Buffalo Stance on repeat, but it only felt right to pay tribute in the presence of a pop icon, especially one as supremely stylish as Cherry. To my delight, it doesn’t take long for her to spot them.
‘Do you know what? I’ve just been sitting here looking at your earrings! They’re so cool,’ she exclaims, drawing closer to the screen over Zoom. ‘My beady eyes were like, “Hm, look at those earrings,”’ she smiles. ‘They’re so great.’ Cherry herself is looking nothing short of fabulous – skin glowing, a pair of oversized gold glasses perched on her nose (‘because, literally, otherwise I wouldn’t see you’). It’s hard to believe she’s 60, although when I tell her she looks fantastic, she jokes that there’s probably Vaseline over my camera lens.
She’s speaking to me today from her youngest daughter [singer and songwriter] Mabel’s house in London, where she’s been living for nearly two years alongside her husband and long-time collaborator, the producer Cameron McVey. They’re renovating a house three doors up, but they moved in as Mabel didn’t want to be alone. ‘We’re such a funny, weird family, because we’re all really close,’ she says. She speaks slowly and thoughtfully, her accent a curious blend between American drawl (‘beau-di-ful’) and King’s English (‘li-truh-lee’), albeit with a distinctive Swedish twang. ‘I’m thankful, actually, because I’m so close to my kids. We’re sharing a life, rather than being in each other’s lives. And as a mother, I don’t know what else you could wish for. It’s such a beautiful gift.’
Family is everything to Cherry, as is perfectly clear in her new memoir, A Thousand Threads. Part of a lineage of music royalty, Cherry was born in Stockholm in 1964 to Monika ‘Moki’ Karlsson, a painter and textile artist, and Ahmadu Jah, a Sierra Leonean musician. When they separated, Karlsson married American jazz trumpeter and composer Don Cherry, who raised Cherry from birth alongside her half-brother Eagle-Eye Cherry. The family lived a colourful, itinerant lifestyle between rural Sweden and the bustling streets of New York, putting on exhibitions and performances as they travelled, always inspired by the beauty of other cultures.
‘That was so genuine, you know?’ says Cherry. ‘It was something very beautiful that placed them in the world in a very unique way because they were able to translate all those influences, all that cultural richness, into something that gave their lives meaning. And we were at the centre of that.’ She gets defensive when people assume she grew up in a ‘hippie dippie’ commune because her parents were disciplined in their mission of bringing music, art and family together in the same space. 'There was a kind of order, there was a passion and there was a commitment to the things that they were studying.' Indeed, the richness of her heritage is part of the reason she decided to write the book. 'I feel so conscious of what that means, you know, and like, served, in a way. That's probably why I wanted to count those blessings.'
While her parents made strides to moved beyond the mainstream, Cherry struggled with being seen as different. In her Swedish neighbourhood, her family was the only one of African heritage. 'I didn't want to stick out, I didn't want to be seen, so I worked really hard at not disappearing myself, but just trying to blend in, which was basically impossible.' All that changed when she moved to London as a teenager. She had visited for three days in 1978 with her mother, and fell in love with punk, dyeing her hair fire red and listening to Poly Styrene, which made her feel 'fearless'. The anti-authoritarian spirit of the music allowed her to 'shed some sh*t', and when she returned to London in the spring of 1980, she was ready for reinvention. 'Coming here, I wanted to be seen. I felt like, okay, here is a space where I want to be visible.'
It didn't take long for Cherry to find her people, quickly making friends with rebellious, free thinkers that were 'going against the grind rather than with it.' She formed a sisterly bond with Ari Up, front woman of the all-female punk band the Slits, who introduced her to guitarist Viv Albertine and bass player Tessa Pollitt. Her creative family also included bandmates from post-punk collective Rip, Rig + Panic: Gareth Sager and Bruce Smith (who she’d later marry in 1983 and with whom she shares a daughter, Naima), Sean Oliver and his sister, the celebrity TV chef Andi Oliver, who actually calls Cherry halfway through our conversation. ‘They’re still my family, they’re still my really close friends,’ she says. ‘And there’s something so deep in that, because we know who we are. I also have lots of other friends, newer friends, but I think there’s something really valuable about having people around you who just wouldn’t let you go too far off the f*cking bend, you know?’
Musically, Cherry also steeped herself in counterculture. Alongside the newly acquired spirit of punk, she had arrived in London carrying the influence of jazz and the essence of hip-hop from New York. Here, she discovered reggae music, Rastafarianism and sound- system culture, which provided a social focus for West Indian communities. It was proud, politically engaged and about, ‘knowing yourself and breaking out of the shackles’, she recalls. She remembers going to dances in South London, being in a room full of people in the dark and ‘feeling all that power’. It made an indelible imprint on her, but it would be a few more years before she’d begin writing songs herself, thanks to the encouragement of McVey.
For many, Cherry will forever be synonymous with her game-changing performance of Buffalo Stance on Top Of The Pops in 1988. Dressed in a black micro-skirt and hi-tops with a gold medallion swinging over a seven-month baby bump, the pregnant Cherry was a vision of unapologetic femininity on prime-time TV. There was something revolutionary, she remembers, in standing there as a woman who had a ‘sexuality and an identity that didn’t just say mother, that a mother is of many things’; not least because at the time, motherhood didn’t factor into anyone’s vision of what a female pop star looked like. ‘It wasn’t like now, everybody’s getting their bellies out and that’s how we carry on,’ she says. ‘In those days, it was like, “Well, maybe you should wait.”’ She was aware that conversations about her pregnancy were happening at her record company. ‘I didn’t give them the option to say, well, maybe we’re going to have to put everything on hold,’ she adds firmly. ‘I didn’t create a situation where we could even have that conversation. It was just like, “This is what we’re doing.”’
Buoyed by the success of Buffalo Stance, Cherry’s debut album, Raw Like Sushi, peaked at number three in the UK album chart and established her career as a solo artist. But despite mainstream success, Cherry was worn out by fame and began to feel ‘slightly allergic’ to songs with quirky ad libs. While she was recovering from the pop bubble, McVey was busy working in their spare room with the future Massive Attack on their first album, Blue Lines. ‘It was deeply healing, and it helped me find where we needed to go, you know, with the next lot of music,’ she reflects. Her second album, Homebrew, was a continuation of Raw Like Sushi, but it also represented evolution. ‘I just feel like breaking the rules. And I don’t mean by being a f*cking upstart all the time, but just breaking your own through your own patterns and trying to just not do the same things in the same way each time you do them.’ Certainly, no one could accuse Cherry of being formulaic: over the years, she has released five studio albums and collaborated with everyone from experimental jazz collective The Thing and Swedish pop legend Robyn to Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, with whom she made the hit song 7 Seconds in 1994.
Cherry talks about McVey with a mixture of devotion and pride. She has a ‘dependence – but a good one’ on their creative partnership, which began before Raw Like Sushi. ‘I will offload a bunch of stuff, and then he pushes it through the sieve with his vision,’ she muses. ‘And then we have a thing at the other side that’s nicely puréed.’ A lot of hard work has gone into their relationship, she says, but they have a fundamental connection. ‘You know, of course, you go through sh*t. You need to talk about it. You need to sort things out. We laugh through things in the studio. We fight through things in the studio. But there’s that fundamental thing of two circles that are joined, you know?’ she says, intertwining her fingers.
Her mission going forward is to simply become freer. ‘I feel that I need to cherish my talents more and be more disciplined and sit still more and work harder to ultimately be better at letting go.’ Sometimes, she can feel the songs and melodies, ‘pumping around in my blood and veins’, but her tendency to overthink stops the natural flow of expression when she sits down to write. ‘I just want to be more open.’ She looks thoughtful. ‘I think, actually, you’re never going to be in a euphoric space where you are just free-falling. You know, it’s like a tug of war, isn’t it? That’s why it’s hard work.’ As if on cue, a dog starts barking manically, interrupting Cherry’s flow. ‘Imani, shut up,’ she sighs. ‘And, in a way, it needs to be hard because that’s why we respect it.’
She is ‘kind of terrified’ about her book being released into the world. ‘It’s quite a weird new level of nakedness, I feel very nude.’ But it was the right time. ‘I think that I just reached a place within myself where I needed to understand more. To be with the actual journey, and to reflect and tell the story, even to myself.’ Now that she has written the book, Cherry is getting the urge to make music again. ‘Cam and I have actually been working on some new tunes in our bedroom in Mabel’s house,’ she smiles.
For now, though, quality time with the family is calling. ‘I feel like I can sit here and say, “Yeah, I am proud to have got this far and I’m proud to be the age that I am with the beautiful kids that I have and grandkids that I have,” and to still feel that there’s so much more, you know?’
A Thousand Threads (Vintage) by Neneh Cherry is out now
This interview is taken from the November 2024 issue of Red
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