I recently read Neneh Cherry's autobiography A Thousand Threads. It's a reflective and honest look at her extraordinary, bohemian life, a life with moments and people that leave you feeling she was near the centre of almost everything that was interesting. Her childhood was unconventional and filled with experiences. Her mother Moki, a Swedish artist and 60s beatnik met Ahmadu Jah in Stockholm. He was a student on a scholarship, one of six men who left from Sierra Leone to study engineering. They moved in together and Moki got pregnant. Not long after, when she was five months pregnant, Moki found out that Ahmadu and monogamy were incompatible. Neneh was born in 1964. The year before Moki had met musician Don Cherry. When Ahmadu moves on, amicably, Moki and Don get together at a jazz gig in Stockholm and become a couple. Neneh is from thereon the child of three parents.
Moki and Don spend Neneh's childhood shuttling between a life in idyllic Sweden, the family living in a converted school house that Moki has made the centre of her world, one where art and family life are one and the same, a home and performance space, and life in 70s New York. Don is a heroin addict and when in New York he often disappears for a couple of days to 'take care of some business'. The family accept Don's addiction and work with him and it but the terror of Don not coming home or dying in their flat creates a lifetime of issues for everyone.
As well as Sweden and new York the family move to London. Neneh is transformed by punk, meets and befriends Ari Up, joins The Slits, starts a relationship with Bruce Smith (drummer in The Pop Group and later The Slits and New Age Steppers), has a child (at 16!), splits up with Bruce, meets Cameron McVeigh (producer of Massive Attack), makes her solo album, appears on Top Of the Pops eight months pregnant... its a whirl of art and culture and life, Neneh constantly inspired and inspiring.
She's honest too- she admits that the moving around of her childhood was something she continued into her adult life and that maybe her own children might have benefited from a more stable home life. She l about her spiraling alcohol issues that follow Moki's death and the long periods where she writes and releases nothing, totally consumed by being a mother.
One of the most affecting chapters describes her first visit to Sierra Leone. She arrives in full punk clobber, army boots and trousers, a Clash t- shirt and leather jacket, and as she is taken in by her African relatives she discovers and embraces that side of her family. When she returns to the UK and appears in the Earthbeat video (from The Slits second album) she is wearing the African clothing she brought back with her.
Writing the book as a grandparent, she is clearly still getting her head round some of it. She is as proud of her achievements as a women and a mother as her ones as a musician. Race and sex are never far from the story. Her upbringing in Sweden as the only mixed race kid in the school. Her fusion of punk, hip hop and street soul into Buffalo Stance. Her adventures as a teen in New York's early 80s downtown clubland. Her first transatlantic flight as a five year old (flying solo, aged five). A trip to Japan as part of Ray Petri's Buffalo posse with The Face. An international smash hit single in the 90s with Youssou N'Dour. It's all there and more. She's funny, wise and insightful, unapologetic in some ways but clear minded too and has lived a life.
Some music...
Buffalo Stance is one of the late 80s best pop singles, a streetwise and sassy piece of pop- hip hop scratching and house grooves with Bomb The Bass' Tim Simenon producing (it was worked up from a B-side for a Stock Aitken and Waterman single Looking Good Diving that husband Cameron McVey and Jamie Murphy had recorded). Buffalo was Ray Petri's outfit, a bunch of artists, models, musicians and stylists who enjoyed a burst of fame in mid- to- late London. A Buffalo Stance is an attitude, a mode of survival in urban life- 'We always hang in a buffalo stance/ We do the dive every time we dance'.
Woman came out nearly a decade later, a riposte to James Brown's It's A Man's Man's World and song about female empowerment. Dramatic strings that echo James Brown's, trip hop beats and written at a time when fame was on the verge of destabilising her completely.
Blank Project came out in 2014, an album produced by Keiran Four Tet Hebden. Sparse, minimal, electronics via jazz and soul. Uncompromising. I loved it back in 2014 and haven't listened to it for ages- it still sounds like a powerful piece of music.
