A review of
A THOUSAND THREADS
by Neneh Cherry
– a review by author and poet, Julia Spry-Leverton
Neneh Cherry has chosen reaching sixty as the moment to write her autobiography. In its closing lines she tells us she is inspired to ‘keep opening my mind and my heart….to feel there is a way to be in this world as a woman, a wife, a mother and an artist…. to make something good, new and beautiful for the benefit of many..’
Clearly, multi-faceted Cherry’s not done yet with the music career that The Guardian’s Sukhev Sandu describes as having burst on our consciousness in the 1980s as an energetic ‘fusion of punk funk, hip hop and UK street soul’ notable because ‘made by a mixed-race woman, one born in Sweden and one who had the nerve – and verve – to perform on Top of the Pops while eight months’ pregnant.’
If you were born in the UK in the mid-60s and a pop fan, it’s unlikely you missed (or have ever forgotten) that TOTP show: 22 December 1988 when, breaking many moulds, Neneh belted out the lyrics of her composition Buffalo Stance, stage-stomping in her white high-tops and black Lycra mini skirt.
Professionally, for Cherry that performance was in many ways an all-time high point. She had arrived on the ‘roof of her life’ as another Scandinavian (Karen Blixen) was to denote a peak experience. Cherry’s story gives us the long build up to it, via a childhood and early youth living the vagabond travelling life - in Sweden, back and forth to the US, and Europe - of her professional musician stepfather, innovative ‘free jazz’ trumpeter Don, and her artist mother, Moki. Always the music is central: age three, Neneh’s at the record player, being instructed how to carefully place the needle on a disc of Ornette Colman’s improvisational jazz.
There were other needles in the shadows though, those Don’s heroin addiction tragically cast over the family. Her family were also exposed to recurrent casual racism which back then, largely went unchallenged. Cherry, ‘always aware of my difference’ is fiercely proud, as well as conscious of the need she shares with other young Blacks to become exceptional, to ‘hold their heads up high.’ Sometimes the account reads like a polemic, she admitting to the down-low drumbeat which is the insistent rhythm of her biography: ‘Always the bass’ she writes, ‘feeling the bass.’
Cherry’s reader is brought face to face with just how fundamental contemporary music’s evolution is to an understanding of social history’s movements. She relates, for example, how in 1960s US, combatting the harsh discrimination that characterised everyday life, her stepfather’s cohort of musicians ‘spread their wings [to] fly high through pain, hope, rage and beauty… [music] an absolute necessity, a lifeline. The way in to a way out.’
In tandem with this political dimension, Cherry’s writing also achieves lyricism. In celebrating those ‘thousand threads’ that interweave her personal cultural heritage, she’s at her most evocative. Tracing her mother’s farming folk’s origins from Sweden’s Norrland, just below the Arctic Circle, she sets these against the Fulani nomad history of her birth father Ahmadu Jah’s people, who walked south from Senegal and arriving at Gbinti, Sierra Leone, ‘sold a few cows to build a hut of mud and grass’, and eventually assumed a tribal chieftainship. Meanwhile she honours Don’s black roots in Ohio and his emergence via the Los Angeles music scene. A professional trumpeter ‘breaking jazz’s rule books’ with Sonny Rollins by the age of 18, meeting Moki in Stockholm where she was studying fashion on his first tour out of the US, he married her at nineteen.
Out of such a free-wheeling childhood, Cherry abandoning formal education early to take off for an independent life had an inevitability to it. Experiencing 80s London, there was music, of course, reggae then the rap born out of hip hop. She glories in the joy and release of these styles, yet recognising them as ‘purposeful and political’, she documents their evolution in conscientiously music historian fashion.
For Cherry herself, dedicated, deeply absorbed, song-writing, dj-ing, performing, all follow on helter-skelter. As does the recording contract, as does the fame. Partnered by now by music producer Cameron McVey – to whom she remains married - suddenly Neneh Cherry has made it big time.
Fame, yes, this is one of the big F words for Cherry who’s become a worldly young woman at this point, along with her other preoccupations Fashion and Food. There’s plenty of dressing-up: punk, Rasta, whatever, and make-up details for fans of Cherry’s eclectic style, plus savoury descriptions of pots stirred on the stove. Then there’s the extending of Family (more babies, eventually three daughters, seven years between each.)
Earthiness is all as Cherry depicts the detail of how she rocked and rolled those days. In these our perhaps more restrictive times, is there an expiry date coming, I did find myself wondering, for the acceptability of memoirs regaling us with that crazed era, re-hashing the excess and permissiveness of the late twentieth century? Or, time passing, will their fascination simply multiply?
In the biography’s later sections Cherry’s perceptions become more acute about how formative the contrasts in her life have been. Not omitting the hurt inflicted by some dire experiences, she writes of light and shade: the pull which bright Sweden ‘this strange, clean place’ exerts against dark London, against hectically exhilarating New York always ingrained in her being. She claims, ‘I pride myself on being able to move between the places that have been my home.’
In southern Sweden, in the idyllic base her parents crafted as an arts centre and country home which she has ultimately inherited, Cherry discovers an enduring solace, a constant testament to her adored mother’s creative spirit, where she can be ‘forever connected to where I am, how I feel’. Here is something of permanence for her, as the scourges of our age do not fail to touch her: friends and family afflicted by and lost to HIV/AIDS, others by cancer, and by the toll taken by drug abuse as Don dies a lingering death.
‘We just got on with it’ is a phrase that recurs even in the biography’s giddiest episodes, reassuring in its matter-of-factness, as Cherry manages the moment. As the furious pace of stardom has slowed the whirligig nevertheless continues to turn for her, albeit at a slower pace. In her Vogue October 24 photoshoot her beauty still shines out. In the same issue, in her interview with Amel Mukhtar, summing up her book as a ‘coming to terms with the fact I’m made up of so many parts’, she signs off with what could be the Cherry manifesto for a successful, self-expressive life. Recounting her father’s remembered words she tells us, ‘Staying with your own rhythm and sound is so important.’
Neneh Cherry: A Thousand Threads
Published by Fern Press (Vintage), October 2024