Kitchen Table to Club Fable

Neneh Cherry
A Thousand Threads
Fern Press

If life is a movie and you’re the star what kind of movie is it? In Neneh Cherry’s case, to begin with, it is an experimental film shot both in black and white and vintage technicolour, directed by pioneer artists from the USA and Sweden, telling the story of a search for artistic and emotional freedom on the edges of capitalism’s comforts.

At its end, it’s a sad movie about the consequences of an almost forced nomadic life, of never quite belonging, for most of the main characters but particularly for the main one.

The Neneh Cherry most of us know is the iconic pregnant and pugnacious singer of the classic pop song, Buffalo Stance. From this image and others from her, actually quite brief, blast of mainstream fame, it would be easy to presume she joined a slipstream of inevitable super-credibility and eventual major pop success, one that she just rode without much effort by dint of who she happened to be.

This moving autobiography tells a different story, one more familiar to those who have read the personal stories of other, ‘iconic’ female pop stars - the Dusty’s and the Patti’s - one that describes a struggle to find a true identity amidst pressure to maintain an image that sells records, a story of genuine hardship and poverty but glorious teenage escape.

There are many familiar names mentioned for those of a certain post-punk age but Neneh’s story somehow just seems to emphasise how unlikely punk and hiphop’s existence was, so many of these famous and infamous and hugely influential people meeting Neneh, yes, at parties and clubs, but also at the point where struggle and luck collide.

The thread running throughout, the main one, is of family. Her Swedish mum, Moki, and her relatives, her Sierra Leonian dad Ahmadu and Black American step-dad, Don and their relatives and the non-blood family of designers, musicians, producers and scenesters who gathered around her, and, of course, her own children and partners/husbands, a mosaic within which Neneh Cherry positioned and still positions herself. It’s not nepotism that is dealt with here but mutual learning and support for creativity, which this book is a part of.

Despite the heartbreak of untimely deaths and hard living the other, significant thread is that of Neneh’s personal momentum, powered by love and a respect for the divine inspiration of the creative moment. This somewhat offsets the sadness whilst, somehow, making the sadness sadder still.

Artists have nearly always been given the shitty end of the stick. The fact that great art still gets made, despite this, particularly when you add in the western world’s acute and long-lasting racism, is nothing short of a miracle.