This memoir by the Buffalo Stance star is a story about identity and roots as much as a story about music. And threaded through all these strands is a lifelong relationship with creativity.
David Bowie’s 1972 appearance on Top of the Pops singing Starman has gone down in history, making him a role model for many fans. But Neneh Cherry’s appearance on the same programme in 1988, singing Buffalo Stance, must go down in history as equally groundbreaking. Full of boldness and style – and unignorably, unapologetically pregnant – she was a new kind of role model for women.
At the time, Neneh Cherry was the coolest woman in pop. But there is another side to her story: from this telling, she also appears to be one of the warmest women in music.
She seems to have a great capacity for friendship: her relationships with Ari Up (the Slits) and Andi Oliver (Rip Rig + Panic) are described with pleasure. And family is central to her life.
It was a complicated family life: Neneh’s stepfather Don Cherry was an African American jazz musician; her white Swedish mother Moki Karlsson was an artist; the father she met later was from Sierra Leone. There are half siblings, step-siblings and three sets of grandparents, and large extended families, all of whom she seems to have embraced.
Don and Moki were the biggest influence, creating a bohemian way of life that was different from their Swedish neighbours. “My parents were developing the idea of family and home as a creative and collaborative journey… There was to be no distinction between the making of art and the making of dinner.” Guess who made the dinner though… There’s a lot of making dinners in this book, and a lot of female nurturing. For Moki, and Neneh after her, food is creativity and community. Both of these are central to the book.
Childhood was also a life in constant transit, because of Don Cherry’s work. Another thread is the sense of place. Sweden, a safe creative hub. New York, a chance to absorb Black culture but also the place where Don’s heroin addiction regularly reappears (there are, Neneh acknowledges, “dark threads” in the story). LA, with Don’s family; Africa, with Neneh’s father Ahmadu’s family; Spain, where she chose to live with her own family for several years.
Growing up, “I had always been aware of my in betweenness”. Too Black for Sweden, too Swedish for America… then she discovers multicultural London, and her musical voice. All the musical threads come together: the New York and London club scenes, punk, reggae, hip-hop, jazz and more.
Listening to music, she has already told us, was “a means to find myself”. Now, “making music was creeping into my being.”
First with the Slits, then the newly formed Rip Rig + Panic, she begins her career as a musician. At the same time, she begins her life as a mother: something she has wanted since visiting Sierra Leone where “I felt proud to be a woman.”
A few years later, as a solo performer, there is that famous Top of the Pops performance. In 1988, she reminds us, “motherhood simply didn’t figure in anyone’s picture of what a pop star should look like. But I wasn’t trying to make a statement. It was just where I was at the time, and why would I hide that?”
At the time, she didn’t understand the media fuss. In hindsight, she appreciates the significance: “Change comes about partly through our choices being seen… We were creating a new rhythm where it was all part of the same thing: our life.”
That’s what is so radical about this story, and the way the author tells it. It shows that there are other ways to be a musician than the old “men behaving badly” clichés. There is a way that integrates family, domesticity and community, a way in which life and art are connected and you don’t have to choose between them – a way, in fact, in which all the threads are allowed to come together.
This review originally appeared on Louder than War.
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