neneh cherry

Grammy-nominated, Brit-winning singer Neneh Cherry has spent more than 20 years inside the crucial developments in British subculture.…

… She spent her childhood living 50/50 between a loft in New York and in an old school house in the forest in the south of Sweden with her mother and stepfather, the legendary jazz musician Don Cherry. As a toddler, she would crawl around on stage while Don toured the world. She’s been lifted up on to Miles Davis’ lap, Allen Ginsberg regularly passed through their home in an evening and, as she got older, she could pop in on Arthur Russell, Talking Heads and The Modern Lovers who all lived in the same loft complex in Long Island City New York. At 14, she started taking trips to Harlem with Ari Up of the Slits at a time when few would venture so far uptown.

Soon after, she left home and moved to London. As post-punk became the musical location of 80s Britain’s artistic and political resistance, she helped form Rip, Rig + Panic, the anarchic multi-ethnic multi-genre band. Neneh was one of the first to bring hip-hop culture to a British audience, with “Buffalo Stance” and the album Raw Like Sushi. Although at points her career has had brushes with the mainstream, Neneh has remained staunchly counter-culture. When she won her Brit Award for Raw Like Sushi, she got the legendary style maven Judy Blame to melt it down and make it into jewelry.

In the 90s, Neneh’s then London family home became a studio, record label, management company and ground zero for emerging British music, much of it emanating from the UK city of Bristol. Massive Attack were often burrowed away in her spare bedroom (aptly named ‘The Poo Room’). She called her house and company “The Cherry Bear Organisation” and ended up providing financial and management support to many new acts.

Neneh always arriving at moments in musical history when there is an opportunity to subvert ideas of popular culture – from post-punk’s adherence to mixed-race line-ups and anti-government stances, to UK rap’s refusal of the conventions of pop, trip-hop’s connection with the politicized elements of rave culture and on, through her 1996 album, which included the mammoth “7 Seconds” single with Senegalese singer Youssou N’Dour, when she brought elements of the Senegalese language, Wolof, to mainstream Western audiences for the first time.