Life & Sex & Death

Neneh Cherry talks about the death of her stepfather, the jazz trumpeterr Don Cherry, Sydney, music breaking th stereotypes and her new albuuum, Man. Interview by Stuart Hitchings.

---

Neneh breaks off mid sentenve, look sup and laughs. "God this room reminds me of Godfather 3," she says, gestring toward the elaborate glass ceiling that adorns the small lounge on the top floor of Sydney's rather swish Sheraton on the Park hotel. "You know, the scene where the wedding guests get shot up and all the glass is raining down." Casually dressed, hip-hop style, in baggy jeans and an over size jacket, she gathers herself up into a ball, hugging her knees as to protect herself from the flying shards, and glances upward again. s me eyes follow hers the sky is brilliantly illuminated by a spectacular lighteing bolt, followed by a crack and a long, rolling peel of thunder. Like children watching a fireworks display we both go "wow" at the same time before the singer returns to the task at hand. "Um, where were we?" she asks.
"You were telling me about your childhood."

Neneh Cherry was born in Sweden in 1964 and gre w up in a converted rural schoolhouse thre hors drive from the nearest city with her mother Moki a painter, and her stepfatehr Don Cherry, the acclaimed American jazz trumpeter. Don Cherry was an exponent of world music long before the term existed, and his work often required him to travle. Frequently Moki, Neneh and her brother, Eagle Eye, would accompany him, puncuating the stability of their home life with the stimulus of visiting new lands.
Some of Cherry's earliest memories sound incredubly exotic to a boy who grew up in Australian suburbia. She recalls meeting Miles Davis at age four, and watching saxaphne genius Ornette Coleman rehearse in a New York loft a few years later. She remembers the way her stepdad would embarass her and Eagle Eye by playing his flute on the subways and in the street, insisting that they sing alog. But to suggest to Cherry that her upbringing was in any way bohemian and she screws up her nose in disgust.
"I know it sounds exotic, but it was really very normal in a way," she says, her accent a blend of Brooklyn and cockney thatreflects her nomadic upbringing. "What was great about it was that it was really matter-of-fact. My parents weren't hippies or anything, its that they made no distinction between their art and their family life. So when they needed to move, say so my dad could do some sort of musical project somewhere, it was always accepted that we would all come along and do it as a family."
Dispite their peripatetic existence, the converted schoolhouse (the same one featured on the artwork of her second album, Homebrew) remained the family's stable base until Cherry was almost 15. By this time she had reacted gainst the conservatism of rural Sweden by becoming a difficult teenager. "I felt oppressed by the smalltown Swedish way of life," she recalls. "I was bored, so I used to hang out with the bad boys, the rough guys - guys into motor bikes and big American cars. It wasn't really me, you know, but they were the only people I found at all interesting nd exciting.
"nywy, we left when I was nearly fifteen to move to New York with stopover in London. and while I was in London I discovered punk. It was like, "Whou!" Inspirtionl. I immediately went out and put l this wild color into my hair and identified."
Over the next few years, despite her relatively tender age, Cherry commuted regularly bewtween London and New York, forging an alliance with legendary UK all girl punk group the Slits, with who Don Cherry had toured in 1979. Through her friendship with Ari Up, the group's lead singer, she became friends with the Pop Group, and when that band splintered she was aked to front one its offshoots, Rip Rif & Panic, an outfit that blended punk, funk and jazz into a frequently incendiary whole. The year was 1981 and Cherry was all of 17 years old.
Within yer she was also a mu, thanks to the arrival of daughter Naima, but still found time to combine motherhood and music as Rip Rig & Panic later morphed into Float Up CP. Then that group also dissolved, and when cherry re-emerged in 1989 both she and her music had undergone a radical change. Raw Like Sushi, produced by Cameron McVey, Cherry's husband, with Johnny Dollar, was soulful dance record that along with Soul II Soul's debut, perfectly captured the mood of the new club culture emerging in Britain at the time. The appeal of sogs like "Buffalo Stance" and "anchild" however, proved universal as Raw Like Sushi went on to sell two million copies around the globe.
Raw Like Sushi established Neneh Cherry's public persona: sassy and strong, yet not afriad to reveal vulnerability, and sexy in a way that appealed to men and women. An extra dimension - a sort of earth mother factor - was added when Cherry undertook promotional duties while heavily pregnant with her second child, Tyson. For all these resons, and probably as many more as there are Neneh Cherry fans, the singer established a strong rapport with her audience.
The long-awaited follow up, 1992's Homebrew,was a relative dissapointment in commercial terms despite generally strong reviews. Suggest to Cherry that the albums sparseness, hop hop feel and lack of dance-floor friendly tunes was an attemp to put some distance between herself and the dance floor diva stereotype the success of Raw Like Sushi had established and she agrees wholeheartedly. "Oh, very much so. There was always much more to my approach to music than just that, as anyone who ever saw Rip Rig & Panic knows. I felt like I'd been pigeonholed, and that was the last thing I wanted.
Hombrew might have broken the mould, but its diminished sales and long gestation also served to put pressure on Cherry, once again causing her to re-evaluate her music - for someone so outwardly confident, Cherry admits to surprising bouts of self-doubt. Resisting the urge to panic, she retreated once more, not emerging again until "7 Seconds," her duet with African star Youssou N'Dour, was released in early 1995. On paper, an anti-racism song sung partially in French would appear an unlikely comeback, yet its brilliance made it a worldwide hit, reaching Number 3 in Australia and topping the French charts for 17 weeks.
The success of "7 Seconds" renewed her self confidence to recommence work on her third album. By this time, Cherry, Cameron and familt had agin relocated, to the south of Spain. ("One of the great things my childhood gave me is the realisation that it's quite possible to live like that - to have kids and still travel and make music." she adds.) Recording, however, was interrupted by the arrival of her stepfather, who had been diagnosed with liver cancer and knew he was dying. Simultaneously, Neneh discovered that she was pregnant with her third child. During his last days, she says, Don Cherry spent long period sjust sitting with his hands on er swelling belly. "It was just mad coincidence because althoiugh I knew he was ill, I had no idea he was dying when I got pregnant," says Cherry. "I felt it was like a gift. There was a new life coming while his was ebbing away. And I know that he felt the same way about it."

Little wonder, then, that Cherrydescribes her current album, Man, as a record "about life and sex and death." ut even before its release there had been a few clues as to what to expect. "7 Secods" was the first taste, and another came with the appearance of her version of "Trouble Man" on a Mavin Gaye tribute album. "Why did I choose Trouble Man as my Marvin song?" says Cherry, repeating my question. "Becasue I'm a woma. It's like 'Woman' being my take on James Brown's 'It's a Man's World', the whole gender-bender thing. I love that."
Cherry is, in many ways,the ideal person to cover Gaye's work because both have the ability to alternate seamlessly bewteen material with a strong social conscience and outright celeation of lust and love.
"Well, I'm not sure that my music really stands comparison with someone like Marvin Gaye but I will say this: I write about those two sides of thins because hey're what's on my mind," she says. "I think a lot about sex and love at the same time I' ery aware of the important issues, or whatI think are the important issues. I'm drawn to beauty, but I'm aware that not everything is beautiful and that those darker sides of life need to be faced."
The third preview was her collaboration with Tricky, "Together Now." which initially appeared on his Nearly God side project. Tricky and Cherry go back a long way; like Rip Rig & Panic, Tricky hails from Bristol, and Cherry and McVey's home studio in London was where Mssive Sttack, with Tricky in tow, recorded much of their classic Blues Lines album. Cherry says that there are around ten more nreleased tracks the pair have recorded together, so it seems curious that both should choose to put the same cut on their albums. "It was just the song that fitted in the best with the rest of Man. The others didn't have the right feel, but there's some great songs there that I'd like to put out as an EP. It probably needs to stand alone."
I mentiion to Cherry my surprise at meeting the Tricky Kid; I'd imagined him as morose, introspecive and pessimistic, a permanently stoned cyic, and discovered instead a friendly, funny, outgoing bundle of nervous energy. Cherry laughs in recognition at my description. "And he has the best laugh. Did you notice that? If I shut my eyes now I can hear it and it always lifts my spirits."
"I think he's a genius. The thing I respect about Tricky is his sence of urgency. He never wants to just talk about things. If someone has a good idea he'll be, 'Geat. Let's do it. let's go to the studio now.' Theat's beattiful because so many people have ideas and never follow up on them, they never come together, but he's so fluent and spontaneous. I don't know what else to say about him. He just ... is."

Towards the end of recording Man, Cherry hit a creatve peak that resulted in what she feels are the slbums strongest songs, and a blueprint for her further direction.
"The later songs - 'Kootchie', 'Hornbeam', 'Beastiality', 'Carry Me' - were written in a rh while Don was really sick," she explains. "That's where the stuff about this record being about love and sex and death comes from, and perhaps accounts for the mor epic, big song feel that those trcks have. The other thing is we'd just come back from a tour and we really wanted to keep that feeling live ha given us. So we got the gyutars out and tried to keep things loose and those songs all came in about a week of intense creativity.
"It was like a slap to the head and now I feel like I've kind of been recycled. The pure excitement reall brought me out of myself, the feeling of moving on, of being in transition. It's like I've been opeing up all these doors, trying them to find out which one was really me, and then it was like, 'Ah, it's the blue door.' And we all just went through it and it was so much fun. We all had such a laugh and the tunes just seemed to fall together. It was liberating."
There's also a vague Austarlian connection as far as these songs are concerned. Cameron McVey and David Allen had just produced the Frente album and were, in Cherry's words, "really firing together". And the pair had come to admire the playing of Frente's bassist, Bill McDonald, so he was drafted to play in on these final sessions. It sonds as though it could be the start of a more concrete relationship with Australia. Gazing out over a stormy Sydney Harbour, Cherry enthuses about her visit in a amneer that goes beyond the usual platitudes from visitin celebrities.
"I've been really enjoying myself here," says the seasoned traveller. "It's a new place on the planet I really want to investigate and spend some time in. I've never been here before, so I didn't know what to expect. But I've met all these people and I really get on with and now I'm like, "yeah, I like this. I'm going to come and hang out here.'It's really exciting to discover a new place to hang out. I've travlled around loads, so it's grea to go somewhere and you've never been before and feel sort of connected."

In the meantime, however, Cherry wants to capitalize of the creative flourish that saw Man wrapped in double quick time. The long breaks bewteen albums that have marked her career are the result not of laziness, nor lack of inspiration, but the demands of motherhood and her desire to have something approaching a normal family life bewteen projects. But now, despite the recent arrival of her third child, Mabel, she wants to strike while the iron is hot.
"The need for atability and time out has certainly been a factor in the past," Cherry admits, curling her legs underneath her on the plush sofa. "I also felt a need to recap what I'd done and where I was and where I was oing after those first two records, but I don't feel that this time. I feel mch more at home with this new stuff, on a more even flow. Now, instead of wanting to sit back and evalate, I just want to keep moving while I've got this momentum. It's like being reborn."