Neneh Cherry

Neneh Cherry was born in Stockholm Sweden in 1964 and grew up in a converted school house three hours drive from the nearest city. She began traveling when she was two years old, accompanying her mother, Moki, a painter, and her stepfather, Don Cherry, the celebrated jazz trumpeter and global music pioneer, on his tours of Europe, America and the Middle East. She remembers meeting Miles Davis when she was four years old and going to a James Baldwin play in Paris the same year. Music was a constant. “Back then, much to my embarrassment, Don would play the flute walking down the street” she laughs, “and I used to wish my parents would be just like normal folks. Now, of course, Im eternally grateful for all the experiences we had.”

Between travels, most of Neneh’s school years were spent in New York, There, in 1979, she joined a “pseudo-ska-punk” outfit called the Nails, playing bass and singing backing vocals on a set of songs that included a cover of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking. ” She remembers finding her “voice and the confidence to get up and do it” after hearing Poly Styrene’s extraordinary vocals on X Ray Spex’s punk classic “Germ Free Adolescence. ” By this time too, she had made contact with Bristol iconoclasts, The Pop Group, and their fellow conspirators, The Slits, a British all girl punk outfit who had toured with Don Cherry back in 1978. For a year, Neneh and Ari Up, The Slits volatile lead singer, became best friends and “went on a mad adventure” that began in Battersea, South London, and ended back in New York.

Broke, in the Big Apple, she worked briefly as a cleaner until, some time in 1981, a call came through from London, A new band, formed by ex Pop Group members, Bruce Smith and Gareth Sager, were looking for a lead singer, They were called Rip Rig & Panic, after a Roland Kirk song. At 17, Neneh Cherry suddenly found herself taking center stage for the first time.

Like their anarchic antecedents, The Slits and The Pop Group, it is difficult to describe Rip Rig & Panic to anyone who did not experience them in full flow. Merging freeform jazz, punk, funk and even traces of classical music, they were, on a good night, like nothing before or since. By turns, scared and exhilarated.

Neneh’s baptism of fire as a lead vocalist was ultimately a liberating experience. “I suddenly realized that there were no rules – that everything I’d heard and experienced musically while growing up could come into play. Before, I had been on a mad search but being in Rip Rig taught me that music had to do with renewal and reinvention, that it was about drawing your inspiration from wherever you wanted and doing whatever you wanted.”

In 1984, after three albums, Rip Rig & Panic splintered into the short lived Float Up CP, “an altogether straighter, more commercial group, ” featuring Neneh on lead vocals alongside a line up that included Gareth Sager, (guitar) and the late Sean Oliver (bass). When Float Up CP split up, Neneh began working on her first solo demos. Among them was a song called “Buffalo Stance” that mutated, via a Tim Simenon reinterpretation, into Neneh’s first solo single for Circa Records. “It just seemed like a bit of diversion at first. ” The rest, as they say, is history.

“Buffalo Stance” was a post -modern pop song par excellence. Stitching together elements of soul, rap and funk into a seamless whole, it caught the mood of the times, crashing into the pop charts at Number 3. Its sassy mix of dance floor creed and street attitude was enhanced by the appearance of Neneh, now eight months pregnant, on Top Of The Pops. The records subsequently sold a quarter of a million copies in Britain alone and reached the top ten in America.

“Buffalo Stance” was swiftly followed by the single. “Man Child, ” produced by her long term collaborators, Johnny Dollar and Booga Bear, Neneh now describes it as “a very important song because, through it, we found our own sound.” By now, the creative family also included stylist, Judy Blame and photographer/video maker, Jean Baptiste Mondino, who created the perfect visual accompaniments to the music. At the end of 1988, Neneh’s debut album, “Raw Like Sushi, ” was critically acclaimed as one of the albums of the year. It sold in excess of 2 million copies worldwide.

Between then and 1992, Neneh found time to record Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” for the AIDS charity album, “Red, Hot & Blue. ” For a while, too, Bristol’s finest, Massive Attack, decamped temporarily in her London home. There, alongside Johnny Dollar and Booga Bear, they worked on the demos that would eventually become “Blue Lines, ” their ground breaking debut album.

In 1991, back in Sweden, she began work on her second album, “Home Brew, ” which was recorded in the old school house where the Neneh Cherry story first began. “I suppose the second album took a long time in pop terms, ” she reflects, “but that’s the way it is with me, I need to have a life, lived at my own pace, in between the albums. ” A more developed and crafted album than its predecessor, “Home Brew” was the sound of someone stretching out. It yielded the singles, “Money Love” and “Buddy X, ” alongside collaborations with Michael Stipe (“Trout”) and a Bristolian lad called Geoff Barrow (“Somedays”), who would later turn up as the studio architect of the Portishead sound.

In 1994 Neneh began preliminary work on her third album. Her schedule was interrupted when “Seven Seconds, ” a song she, Dollar and Bear co-wrote and sang with African super star, Youssou N’Dour, became a huge worldwide hit. “It was important for us to work with an African artist, particularly on a song about racism and people’s ways of looking at color. ” The single stayed at Number One in France for seventeen weeks, selling an extraordinary 3 million copies there.

Neneh Cherry’s new single, “Woman, ” was released on 22nd June. It is a wry take on James Brown’s “It’s A Man’s World” that manages to pay homage to the original and, simultaneously, update and subvert that songs message. “Woman” is taken from her forthcoming third album, intriguingly titled “Man,” due for release in September. “Man” she says, is “a record about love, sex, life and death.” It is also her most intimate and fully realized album yet: songs that range across the emotional landscape form reflection to regret, sadness to sexual desire.

“There’s new energy on this record which I think comes from the fact that this is a more song based album. The songs are little narratives, fragments that deal with the various emotional states we find ourselves in.” To this end, the record runs the whole gamut of emotional experience, from the reflective, childlike beauty of “Carry Me” to the unbridled sensuality of “Kootchie,” a direct and upfront paen to spontaneous sexual desire. “It’s about one of those moments where you look at someone and realize that everything about him gives you the horn.”

The album is also suffused with a palpable sense of loss, not lease because Don Cherry, Neneh’s Stepfather and musical and spiritual mentor, died at the end of last year. “It’s very much a life and death album. I think that each song defines its own mood and, at least three songs, are about accepting and letting go. In that way, and just about every way, it’s more of a grown up record.”

From the stark beauty of “Golden Ring, ” where Neneh reinterprets the old American Gypsy rock song as a Spanish, flamenco-tinged ballad, to the characteristically edgy pulse of the Tricky collaboration, “Together Now,” “Man” is an album that is both diverse and, in its fragmentary way, strangely cohesive. “We still like to mess things up a bit but, this time around, the songs seem more direct and simple. This album is more up front in what it says and how it says it.”