Virgin Records.
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Neneh Cherry was born in Stockholm Swede in 1964 and
grew up in a converted school house three hours drive
from the nearest city. She began raveling when she
was two years old, accompanying her mother, Moki, a
painter, and her stepfather, Don Cherry, the
celebrated Jazz Trumpeter and global music pioneer,
on his tours of Europe, America and the Middle East.
She remembers meeting Miles Davis when she was four
years old and going to a James Baldwin play
in Paris the same year. "Back then, much to my
embarassment, Don would play the flute walking down
the street" she laughs, "and I used to wish my
parents would be just like normal folks. Now, of
course, I'm eternally grateful for all the
experiences we had."
Between travels, most of Neneh's school years were spent in New York. There, in 1979, she joined a "pseudo-ska-punk" outfit called The Nails, playing bass and singing backing vocals oa set of songs that included a cover of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Were made For Walking". She remembers finding her "voice and confidence to get up and do it" after hearing Poly Styrene's extraordinary vocals on X Ray Spex's Punk classic "Germ Free Adolescents". By this time too she had made contact with Bristol iconoclasts, The Pop Group, and their fellow conspirators, The Slits, A British all girl punk oufit who had toured with Don Cherry back in 1978. For a year, Neneh and Ari Up, The Slits volatile lead singer, became best friends and "went on a mad adventure" that began in Battersea, South London, and ended back in New York. Broke, in the Big Apple, she worked briefly as a cleaner util, some time in 1981, a call came through from London. A new band, formed by ex Pop Group members, Bruce Smith and Gareth Sager, were lookng for a lead singer. They were called Rp Rig & Panic, after a Roland Kirk song. At 17, Neneh Cherry suddenly found herself taking center stage for the first time. Like their anarchic antecedents, The Slits and The Pop Group, it is dificult to decribe Rip Rig & Panic to anyone who did not expperience them in full flow. Merging freeform jazz, punk, funk and even traces of classical music, they were, on a good night, like nothing beofre or since. By turns, scared and exhilerated. Neneh's baptism of fire as a lead vocalis as ultimately a liberating experience. "I suddenly realized that there were no rules - that everthing I'd heard and experienced musically while growing up cpuld come into play. Before, I had been on a mad search but being in Rip Tig & Panic taught me that music had to do with renewal and reinvention, that it was about drawing our inspiration from wherever you wanted and doing whatever you wanted". In 1984, after three albums, Rip Rig & Panic splintered into the short lived Float Up CP, "an altogether straighter, more commercial roup," featuring Neneh on lead ocals alongside a lineup that included Gareth Sager, (guitar) and the late Sean Oliver (bass). When Float Up CP split up , Neneh began woring on her first solo demos. Among them was a song clled Buffalo Stance that mutated, via a Tim Simenon reinterpretation, into Neneh's first single for Circa Records. "It just seemed like a bit of diversion at first." The rest, as they say, is history. "Buffalo Stace" was a post-modern pop song par excellence. Stitching together elements of sou. rap and funk into a seamless whole, it cauht the mood of the times, crashing into the pop charts at Number 3. Its sassy mix of dance floor creed and street atitude was enhanced by the appearace of Neneh, now eight months pregnant, on Yop Of The Pops. The record subsequently sold a quarter of a million copies in britain alone and reache the top ten in America. "Buffalo stance" was swiftly followed by the single "Man Child" produced by her long term colaborators, Johnny Dollar and Booga bear, Neneh now describes it as "a very important song because, through it, we found our own sound". By nowm the creative family also included stylist, Judy Blame, and photographer/video maker, Jean Baptiste Mondino, who create the perfect visual accompaniments to the music. At the end of 1988, neneh's debut album, "Raw Like Sushi", was critically acclaime as one of the albums of the year. It sold in excess of 2 million copies worldwide. Between then and 1992, Neneh found time to record Cole Porter's "I've Goot You Under My Skin"" for the AIDS charity album, "Red Hot & Blue". For a while, too, Bristol's finest,Massive Attack, decamped temporarily in her London home. There, alongside Johnny Dollar and Booga Bear, they worked on the demos that would eventually become "Blue Lines" their ground breaking debut album. In 1991, back in Sweden, she began work on her second album, "Homebrew", which was recorded in the old school house where the Neneh Cherry story first bega. "I suppose the second album took a long time in pop terms," she reflects, "but that' the way it is with me, I need to have a life, lived at my own pace, in betwen the albums." A more developed and crafted album than its predecessor, "Home Brew" was the sound of someone stretching out. It yielded the singles, "Money Love" and "Budy X", along side collabortions with Michael Stipe ("Trout") and a Bristolian lad called Geoff Barrow ("Somedays"), who would later turn up as the studio architect of the Potishead sound. In 1994, Neneh began preliminary work on her third album. Her schedule was interrupted when "Seven Seconds", a song she, Dollar and Bear c0-wrote with African super star, Youssou N'Dour, became a huge world wide hit. "It was important for us to work with an African artist, particularly on a son about racism and people's ways abou looking at color." The single stayed at Number one in france for seventeen weeks, selling an extraordinary 3 million copies there.
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