Neneh Cherry interview: 'I feel like I’ve woken up'Singer Neneh Cherry, who releases her first album in 16 years later this month, feels like she has woken up from a weird sleep, she tells Rob Hughes .
By Rob Hughes
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/musi ... en-up.html
The afternoon sun is pouring through the window of her publicist’s office in east London, where Neneh Cherry is suitably aglow. At 48 and dressed top-to-toe in black, she still looks amazing, all high cheekbones and hair in a frizz.
Not that much different, in fact, from when she first lit up the charts in the late Eighties with
Raw Like Sushi, the million-selling album that produced the hit singles "Buffalo Stance" and "Manchild", and which expertly captured the emergent club culture of hip-hop and rap. Or when "7 Seconds", her searingly emotive duet with Senegalese superstar Youssou N’Dour, became a global monster in the summer of 1994.
But little has been heard of her since. Her last solo LP was
Man, in 1996. And while there have been a couple of albums with cirKus, a collective featuring her daughter Tyson and husband Cameron McVey (aka Booga Bear), Cherry’s recorded activity has largely been consigned to the odd guest spot on other artists’ records, the most high-profile being Gorillaz’
Demon Days.
Which makes it all the more cause for celebration that she’s finally back. And in typically uncompromising mood to boot.
The Cherry Thing, 50-odd minutes of pulsating avant-jazz that contorts songs by the Stooges, MF Doom, Suicide, Ornette Coleman and more into delirious new shapes, is the result of an encounter with Nordic trio the Thing.
“I feel like I’ve woken up,” she laughs. “It’s like I’ve been in a weird sleep for a long time and now I’m awake. It felt like it was time.”
There’s a deeper impulse to all this than just a bunch of simpatico musicians, though. The Thing first formed in 2000 to play the music of Don Cherry, the late US jazz trumpeter from whose 1967 piece they took their name and who continues to be their chief source of inspiration. He also happened to be Neneh’s stepfather. What’s more,
The Cherry Thing includes a new version of one of Don’s old tunes, "Golden Heart". It’s one of the high points of the set.
“I don’t think you can cover a song unless you love it and have a relationship with it,” explains Neneh. “With 'Golden Heart' I felt a sense of responsibility. And when we were recording it in the studio, it felt almost dream-like. Something you might hear if you were in Senegal, with someone singing from the mosque in the morning just as the sun’s coming up. An impression of sound and colour, rather than a conventional song.”
It’s a vivid analogy that conjures up visions of Cherry’s own upbringing. As the daughter of a Swedish artist mother and an African percussionist, with Don entering her life early when her parents split, Neneh’s childhood was very much a peripatetic one. When she wasn’t in Sweden or Sierra Leone, Cherry would be in LA or New York, or else on the road with her stepdad and his famous pals. One of her earliest memories is sitting on Miles Davis’s lap backstage in Paris when she was four. “People like that were just friends of the family, uncles and aunts that we’d see when we’d be out walking with Don around Manhattan. We’d always be calling in at Ornette [Coleman]’s house, so it was just everyday life. The world you grow up in becomes your foundation and your security.
“When me and my brother Eagle-Eye were kids, life was about hitting the road, getting on the bus. We loved it. Don and my mother Moki called it the Organic Music Theatre, an open floor for a nucleus of musicians who were moving in and out. One summer we did a whole tour where we just camped between gigs. We had our grandparents’ old tent and me and Eagle-Eye had pet turtles. Everything was connected, it was a whole life stage.”
The importance of family is something that’s sustained Cherry throughout her career, both publicly and privately. One of the reasons for her prolonged absence was her devotion to bringing up her children, while perhaps her most defining TV moment came when she performed "Buffalo Stance" on Top of the Pops while seven months pregnant, her sizeable bump covered in tight black Lycra.
Homebrew, 1992’s hugely underrated follow-up to
Raw Like Sushi – Cherry favoured rock and sassy soul grooves over the expected rap-hop – was made in the Swedish schoolhouse where she grew up. Her other half is also her co-songwriter and producer, while Don Cherry recorded with both of Neneh’s earliest bands: post-punk provocateurs Rip Rig & Panic and the Slits.
“Rip Rig & Panic was a milestone for me and I’ve always been really thankful that I did that when I was 16. It saved me for when I suddenly became really successful later on. So even when my head’s been spinning like a banshee, my feet still feel held down to the ground.”
Not that success seems to have ever bothered her much. In 1990 Cherry won two Brit Awards and promptly melted one down into jewellery. “I gave a piece to Jazzie B of Soul II Soul,” she reasons with a chuckle, “because I thought he should’ve got a Brit. Neither 'Buffalo Stance' nor 'Manchild' got to number one, but 'Back to Life' was there for 10 weeks or something. It was huge!”
All of which may explain the relatively low-profile return with the Thing. There is, she tells me, a solo album in the works, too, though she’s loath to elaborate. Other than “it’s a different trip to
The Cherry Thing. I suppose there’s a connection, but my solo record will be more pop, without being mainstream.”
Whatever the medium, she’s clearly got the taste for it again. “You come to these thresholds in your life where you need to remember why you do what you do, to reconnect with yourself. When I look back at something like
Raw Like Sushi, I think I was very much in the right place at the right time. But it was almost a weird domino effect, where one thing led to another. Whereas now I feel more like I’m achieving and thinking about what I want. I’m hungry for it and there’s a part of me that feels like I’ve just started. It’s going to be interesting to roll it out there again.”
