On the train to speak with Neneh Cherry about her fifth album, Broken Politics, I get an email from her publicist. “Just to let you know,” it says, “Neneh’s dad died yesterday.”
It is hard to imagine anyone would be in the mood to talk to a journalist after hearing such news. The death of her mother Monica in 2009 floored the musician, something she wrote about on her 2014 album Blank Project (“Since our mother’s gone, it always seems to rain,” she sang on Across the Water); and earlier this year she also lost Judy Blame, the stylist and close friend who was instrumental in her image and helped to create 1989’s iconic Raw Like Sushi cover.
While another loss might have made for an impossible situation, Cherry arrives and is happy to talk. She has a kind of wise Buddha vibe at the best of times, so a life-changing moment only makes her seem more sage-like. Broken Politics is a sparse, unguarded record. As with Blank Project, it was co-written with Kieran Hebden, better known as the producer Four Tet, and Cherry’s lifelong collaborator and partner Cameron McVey. The record moves its focus from the internal demons of Blank Project to the hopeless state of the world and a renewed resolution to do something about it. Its lyrics reference the refugee crisis (she volunteered at the Calais migrant camp), increased violence in cities and the rise of the far right in Cherry’s home country of Sweden (she says she thinks young men are voting for the far-right Swedish Democrats because they mistakenly think it an act of rebellion). Does making political music feel like the right response in a time of crisis? “Music is the only weapon I carry,” she says. “Sometimes the political begins with self-examination.”
While that may sound a little slam-poetry when written down, it doesn’t when she says it. Whether that’s from a lifetime spent being creative or the rawness of her current situation, Cherry doesn’t do cynicism or small talk; the agenda is exclusively important things.
Where was she when she found out about her dad? “My sister was with me in my house in west London; we were together, thank God. I was saying to her: ‘We’re different now than what we were this morning. We woke up and we didn’t know where this day was going to take us.’”
Cherry has not talked much about her father before. Her stepfather Don Cherry, the jazz musician, has always played a more prominent role both in her life and her musical narrative. But she says she met her biological father, Ahmadu Jah, when she was around eight years old and that he had a major impact.
He was born “really in the bush” of Sierra Leone, she says, before moving to the US, the UK and eventually Sweden. Within a week of arriving, he met Cherry’s mother. “He brought a lot of records with him, introduced her to a lot of music and he taught her how to cook.”
Cherry says that the first time she met him, it was overwhelming, “because he was so happy to have me around and I think maybe also slightly guilty. In the beginning, perhaps I was a bit confused by how much he loved me and the bond between us.”
That relationship with her father forms just one part of a childhood unlike any other. In the early 1970s, mother Monica and stepfather Don bought a 19th-century schoolhouse in southern Sweden. They wanted to make, not a commune exactly, but “a place people could come and do things together, where they were going to bring us up”.
However, that kind of unconventional upbringing brought with it some unsettling moments. “One summer, there was just like 15 women who were all in the process of leaving their husbands,” she recalls. “One woman had a nervous breakdown and took all of our pots and pans and hung them in the trees.”
Did she ever think that a normal life would have been preferable? “I’m sure when I was younger, and I wanted to be like the other kids around me. But I don’t feel like that now,” she says. “I was looking at my father the other day in the hospital and thinking: wow, that journey that he made, coming to Sweden in the early 60s and making a life there, learning the language, fighting to be accepted, it’s a big thing he did. Imagine when he went out in the street in the light of day, there’s no black people there.” By comparison, she says, an unusual but loving childhood surrounded by an extended family is not so hard.
In her teens, she moved away from the house, flitting between New York City, Stockholm and London. It was in those nomadic years that Cherry earned her chops in the UK post-punk scene, playing in Rip Rig + Panic and an iteration of the Slits (she lived with the band’s Ari Up in a squat in Battersea). By her early 20s, she was regularly being touted as the new Madonna. She had been signed to Virgin as a solo artist and produced one of the great musical crossover albums, Raw Like Sushi, a melding of punk, hip-hop and pop that was light years ahead of its time and from which TV shows and films are still nicking tracks, such is its perennial coolness. Cherry wrote much of the record with McVey, who would become her husband. In between its release and her winning best international breakthrough and best international solo artist at the 1990 Brit awards, she gave birth to her second daughter Tyson, famously performing on Top of the Pops while heavily pregnant.
But the life of a pop star did not fit with Cherry. The music industry was still entirely dominated by white men and, in the US in particular, there was a seedier side. “When Buffalo Stance came out in the States we were going around doing PR and I spoke to my promotions guy,” she says, “and it was just common knowledge that you go to the radio stations and just pay the heads with coke and hookers to get them to play a record. I did a certain amount of … not that, but ringing around to radio guys and talking to them about their new car, new babies or, you know, ass-licking on that level. I was out one night in New York with this pretty well-known guy and we were meeting the heads of some radio station and he was like: ‘Well if you just kinda give them what they want they’d probably give the record the thumbs up,’ insinuating that maybe if I went into a cupboard with them or something … And I was like: ‘I’m gonna go now, this is too much.’”
She ended up having a musical life but one less focused on ego. She didn’t like being manhandled by other figures. She released two further albums in the 90s but they swung away from pop, exploring the further reaches of world music and trip-hop. She melted down a Brit award and turned it into jewellery. And, just like her parents’ house, her home became a creative commune: Massive Attack recorded much of Blue Lines in her baby’s bedroom.
Then, as her children got older, Cherry started slowly making music again. In 2012 she released an album of mostly covers with the Thing, in 2013 a collaborative record with RocketNumberNine called MeYouWeYou, and then, in 2014, she finally felt ready to release a record under her own name.
I ask whether she sees the two parts of her career as joined up – is the Neneh Cherry who made Raw Like Sushi even related to the one making these mature, world weary-sounding records? “To me it’s all connected,” she says. “I feel that more and more everything is riding on the same spine or umbilical cord and without one thing you don’t go to the other. When I listen to the sounds of the new album, I can hear those rooms that I grew up in, the music that was being made around me when I was a child.”
She says a major part of that spine is McVey, whom she has been with for 30 years. “I still feel like there’s more to it. I know that we’re not done and that’s really interesting,” she says. “We’re still getting to know each other but he definitely knows my digits, you know what I mean? I think it’s a treasure to have relationships for life.”
In the time she’s been making music, Cherry’s body of work has also grown in appreciation. Interestingly, Pitchfork recently published a new version of its best albums of the 1980s. The original list made in 2002, it said, demonstrated a “lack of diversity” both in its critics and their choices. Raw Like Sushi did not make the cut on the first list, but did on the 2018 version. Does she think that, as a mixed-race female artist, she has got short thrift from white male critics? “It’s interesting about Pitchfork, it’s nice of them,” she says. “But yeah: now, it’s like you’re gonna get lynched if you’re not thinking inclusively and with a wider range; you’re gonna get wiped out. Even in the last four years, so much has happened: #MeToo, Black Lives Matter and there’s been more of a dialogue. But still, with actors, film-makers, musicians, it’s still so male-dominated, it’s crazy. There’s been these little ghettos for black music, black film, that’s like: ‘Here’s a couple of things that can get through,’ but it’s too late for that now. The conversation has created reaction and reaction makes change. You start to see things for what they are.”
Today, Cherry has her own adult children and stepchildren, most of whom are continuing in the musical tradition. One of them, Mabel, has become a UK Top 10 pop star in the past couple of years. How does she feel about them entering into such an unequal industry? “I’m really good friends with a lot of my children’s friends and I look at what they’re doing. They’ve got good spirits, they’re good people with good heads on their shoulders,” she says. “This generation of humans, there’s a lot of good people that want to make a difference.”
That is not to say, of course, that releasing records at the same time as your daughter doesn’t come with some home truths. “The other day, we announced the album and Mabel announced her single. Kieran was telling me how well the music’s doing, we looked and the first track already had, like, 2,000 views. Then we looked at Mabel’s and she had, like, 82,000.”
Is that sobering, I wonder. “No! We were like: ‘Go Mabel!’ We can’t compete!”
Cherry’s entire being is imbued with her family, genetic and otherwise. In just an hour, we have run through four generations, from Sierra Leone to the top of the UK charts. Kinship runs through her music, her personality. If anything, she is more the people around her than she is Neneh.
“I was thinking that last night when I was lying next to Cameron in bed,” she says. “I was like: ‘Wow, we’ve been through some things. My father and my stepdad dying, my mum dying, his mum dying, Judy, Ray Petri, the birth of our children.’ The meaning of life has many aspects but the value of that is what it’s all about.”
Broken Politics is out on Friday 19 October
