THE RHYTHM OF REFLECTION: NENEH CHERRY

Neneh Cherry revolutionized pop music in the late ’80s, while raising kids and traveling the world. Decades later, she meditates on a legacy where art and family intertwine.

By Frankie Dunn

Neneh Cherry changed everything. Exploding onto the scene in the late ’80s with her debut album Raw Like Sushi, the young Swedish musician promptly won a BRIT Award and was nominated for a Grammy. She gave one of the most memorable Top of the Pops performances of all time: While heavily pregnant with her second daughter Tyson, she sang, danced, and rapped her way through her hit single “Buffalo Stance,” an oversized gold medallion bouncing above her bump. Neneh’s confidence commanded respect and admiration, introducing the mainstream to the idea of the icon as both artist and mother. Emerging from London’s culture-shifting Buffalo movement—a collective of designers, photographers, models, and musicians spearheaded by stylist Ray Petri—she and her friends took elevated street style, androgyny, and inclusive casting to a fashion world in desperate need of a shake-up. Neneh merged her punk roots with elements of hip-hop, R&B, reggae, and dance to create something new, blowing up genre conventions and paving way for the hybrid sounds of today. With her magnetic personality and intriguing London-via-New York accent, she offered the world and the industry something new, fearless, and exciting.

Today, though, Neneh feels drained. Over the past four years, the musician, now 60, has waded through memories both beautiful and difficult while writing her memoir A Thousand Threads. The process itself was therapeutic, but now that it’s finished, she’s emotionally depleted. “Closing the door and coming out the other side feels like when you finally take a holiday, and then you get sick,” she says. “I’ve just recorded the audiobook and reading it through was probably harder than writing it—just being with my story as opposed to figuring out how to tell it.”

Neneh was raised in an old wooden schoolhouse in rural Sweden. Her mom Moki and stepdad Don—an interdisciplinary artist and pioneering jazz musician, respectively—covered the walls with murals and tapestries, soundtracking daily life with unusual instruments. Their home was a utopian hub of creativity for their extended family, friends, artistic collaborators, and local community. But, of course, no childhood is all smooth sailing. Growing up biracial in a largely ethnically homogenous place is one of the many topics Neneh explores in her book. As she comes of age across its pages, life’s vast potential unfolds; she takes us back to visiting Sierra Leone with her biological father Ahmadu Jah, joining punk bands The Slits and Rip Rig + Panic as a teen, collaborating with Biggie Smalls, embarking on Japanese tours with her children in tow. The revelatory book tackles love, loss, addiction, assault, family, motherhood, and legacy. Above all, it centers the importance of grabbing life and art with both hands, no matter what.

We’re standing in a large open-plan kitchen in North West London, where Neneh’s husband of 33 years, producer Cameron McVey, is finishing breakfast. Handing me a mug of coffee, Neneh leads me out to the garden where, against a soundscape of birds and distant power tools, we talk at length. She’s warm, with an incredibly infectious laugh, and generous with both her time and words. She loves books, she tells me. Writing a bad one is her biggest nightmare. Not one to let fear of failure stop her, Neneh’s hesitation was overcome by the need to share her story—one which is very much worth telling.

FRANKIE DUNN: Neneh, your memoir is fascinating. Take me back to the moment you knew you wanted to write it.

NENEH CHERRY: I’m not really into nostalgia but I think you still need to reflect, you know? My children are growing up and doing their thing, and I hit this reality that everything’s happened so fast. It felt really beautiful. A part of me needed to process stuff, too, and I guess I’ve always [done that] through the rhythm of words. I’m proud of the fact that I’m here—but what brought me here? I realized that maybe it’s important to record things before I don’t remember them anymore.

FD: On top of everything else, I’m so impressed by your memory.

NC: It fascinates me actually, brain storage! When you really dig into it, there are whole containers of information that exist, untapped and available. Those boxes of information have so many colors.

FD: The book tells your story, but also that of your parents. Did they keep diaries you could mine for details?

NC: There are just endless amounts of papers and books and photographs. Don wrote some texts, and Moki wrote quite a lot of diaries. Since she died in 2009, there’s been this new interest in her work which led to a process of archiving. A non-profit organization called Blank Forms made a book about them called Organic Music Societies and they needed pictures. It was quite funny getting the family photos out and playing the mystery game of figuring out who some of the people were. Then one August during COVID, Cam and I went to Sweden to visit my family home.

FD: The old schoolhouse in the woods! It sounds like the most incredible place.

NC: It’s the mothership, it’s everything. Tyson was over there at the time doing the six-week practice of The Artist’s Way and she said, “Look, you should do your Morning Pages. I think it’ll be good for you.” And that’s what released me. It was amazing actually being there where so much of it happened. I was trying to understand more about my parents, too. I was thinking about how they must’ve felt when they first got there, their vision, and how amazing that was—how powerful and sometimes painful.

FD: There’s a moment in the book that touches on how, after you moved to London in your teens, Moki started posting you a series of culturally important publications: The Color Purple, and work by Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. Do you think they shaped the way you approached telling your story?

NC: The rhythm and the truths in those books made me a better person. They’ve made me more able to resonate with myself and know the importance of not just “being me,” but also of believing in my own story and believing that it has worth.

The day that The Color Purple arrived in my life, Naima had gone to stay at her grandmother’s for the first time. I was 19 and I had all kinds of plans to go out raving. I got back from dropping Naima off—we had a maisonette on a council estate in Fulham Court—and I went upstairs to lay down for a minute with the book and I just didn’t get back up. I couldn’t stop reading. It was as though Alice Walker had kept me hostage.

FD: That was exactly where you needed to be.

NC: Absolutely. Andi [Oliver, Neneh’s close friend and former bandmate] and I came from very rich cultural communities within our own families, but where we were raised was anything but diverse. I lived spells of my life in New York, which was at the other end of the spectrum to Sweden, but I think even in the world at large, our stories weren’t given the space and the air that they needed. The exchange of information, knowledge, and inspiration that I draw from other women is something else—we need that to feed ourselves and others.

FD: You touched on New York there, where your family would often stay at the Chelsea Hotel. I wonder if there are any stand-out memories of that time for you? And whether you were aware, as a child, of what a special place it was?

NC: What a nutbag place it was! You’d step off 23rd Street and it was like you were walking into a menagerie—almost like it was a stage set where you’d go back year after year, and nothing’s changed except for some of the actors. My parents would go there because there were other artists around, and because they knew they could cut a deal for a weekly rate on the room. I went back with Mabel and Tyson like 10 years ago, and there was still this old guy working there. I told him, “We used to live here! I’m Don Cherry’s daughter!” He was like, “Last time Don came here, he gave me a check for $300—it bounced.”

When we stayed, we’d be coming straight from the woods in Sweden. We were so conscious of how extremely American it was. We went through this transformation of becoming New Yorkers again—really noticing the sounds of the honking horns and the people on the street. I remember navigating through the hotel and out the front doors, buying a slice of pizza and getting an ultra-sugary grape drink from the machine, then listening to Carl Douglas singing “Kung Fu Fighting” on the radio.

FD: Obviously, this is all in huge contrast to your home in Sweden. It sounds like when you were there, your parents had a kind of open-door policy, with people constantly passing through. Is that something you consciously carried over to your own family life?

NC: Of course, there were times when it was quieter and it was just the four of us: me, Don, Moki, and my brother Eagle-Eye. But yeah, that’s definitely how we’ve carried on—the extended families and having a lot of our creativity happen at home. You know, me and Cam have just been recording some new songs up in the bedroom here, while Mabel’s been working on music in the living room. It’s like breathing. It’s a beautiful thing to have inherited and a big part of why I’m sitting here today.

FD: You’ve had close creative partnerships with some incredible people over the years—Ray Petri, Judy Blame, countless more. Do you think you look for particular qualities in your collaborators?

NC: I think, fundamentally, you need to bring something out of each other. The powerful thing, the beautiful thing, the magical thing is when there’s a call and response: You put something forward and the other person grabs it—and that just elevates everything. The interesting thing about collaboration, when it works, is that it takes you into bits of yourself that you wouldn’t naturally find. I was talking to Mabel about this the other day when we were in New York.

FD: Were you there for work or fun?

NC: It was a work trip, but we always go searching for fun. I’ve had a weird thing with New York since my mother died. We had two years of having the loft, my family home in the city, but then we had to give it up. It’s like being a weird orphan—going to New York but not going home. Part of me wanted to think that my mother was still there, because we were used to being apart for some of the year. It’s really affected my relationship with New York. But this trip was so beautiful! We saw so many kids of color being so fucking expressive in what they were wearing and how they carried themselves. That punk essence, that freedom of expression, makes me so happy.

FD: Motherhood is quite a central theme in your book, and you often return to the topic of navigating the dual role of artist and mother—of existing somewhere between the two. Your daughter Tyson recently had a baby. Given she’s also a musician, did you give her any advice on finding that balance?

NC: I was raised by a mother who was committed to having us, to being a creative person, and to us being a family within that world. She was also committed to embracing creative ideas—and the family was at the core of that! My mother’s words, when I was gonna have my first baby at 18, were that you don’t separate. This is life. You’re simply bringing another life into your life. So the idea of motherhood felt very clear to me and very natural. With my tribe of people and the family that I’ve made here, there was no question that we’d bring our child into what we were doing. That was my revolution, in a way; the fight against the idea that you couldn’t do that. And for me, creativity has always come out of what I’ve had in the center. The idea of being a mother is very powerful and beautiful and sensual. For a long time, it was like, Well, that’s it, you’ve had a kid now, you’re done. But I always felt like, Well, no… It can be where we begin.

FD: Something that kept taking me aback while reading was how much life you lived while you were still so young. By your mid-20s, you had a hugely successful music career, two children, and had moved around the world extensively.

NC: Back then it was easier to go out and live in different places and do things without having any money. Everything’s so fucking expensive now. But, you know, we weren’t necessarily fucking sensible! We just thought we could do everything. I have to say, I look at old pictures now and think, Fucking hell! Look at the state of us! We literally look like babies.

FD: Yeah, it seems like you just got on with things.

NC: Because there was an environment where we could! I don’t think we necessarily had a plan. That’s kind of just how it was. We were living in real time in the sense that we didn’t have mobile phones. If you wanted to do things, you had to go out and find people. We were just out on the battlefields.

FD: You’re now on the other side of this reflective process of really delving through your family lore, tackling some tough topics along the way. Was there a moment that was particularly difficult for you to revisit?

NC: No. [Writing about] one thing just led to another—even with the bits that were quite hard, like when my dad OD'ed, his substance abuse, my own issues with alcohol, the chapter where I wrote about being raped. I needed to tell these stories and I feel like, as I did, I was passing through them. There was a kind of cleansing happening.

FD: Is it the same feeling as when you put an album out?

NC: Yes, but it’s personal in a different way. This feels more naked.

FD: What have you learned about yourself during the process of writing this book?

NC: That I’m still learning about myself!