Totally Stockholm 1
Politically charged As she releases a new album d
ealing with gun violence and the refugee crisis, Neneh Cherry talks about her three decades as a pop and style icon and being matriarch to a musical dynasty. Words: Jimi Famurewa / Evening Standard / The Interview People Photo: Wolfgang Tillmans Neneh Cherry sweeps into the bustle of a Pinterest-pretty Kensal Rise photography studio with smiles, vigorous handshakes and an impish, contagious energy. Yes, she is looking forward to the day’s shoot. No, she doesn’t mind removing her white headwrap so her shower-damp hair can be prepared by the waiting glam team. And, while she has brought her own breakfast (“Soaked oats, made by my husband,” she says with a proud smile), she’ll take a tea with “any kinda alternative milk” if we have it. Basically, Cherry is the woman you would expect and hope she would be, if you had been following her from her emergence in 1988 with Buffalo Stance, to her mega-selling 90s evolution (did you know 7 Seconds, her 1994 duet with Youssou N’Dour, was number one in France for 16 consecutive weeks?), through her years as an abiding streetwear muse, and right up to her current guise as the creatively active matriarch of an expanding musical dynasty. The 54-year-old is earthy, tough and full of ageless cool. And then she joins me aboard a battered leather sofa and she… well, she starts to move her shoulders very slowly from side to side, like Nosferatu after a rough night on a granite pillow. “My neck is just, like, stiff because I’ve been turning my head too much,” she announces in that distinctively husky Scandi-American drawl. “Looking for the right thing in my life.” She lets out a throaty cackle and explains that the neck ache (and a connected bout of tinnitus) recently took her to an acupuncturist who said something that stayed with her. “This doctor said, ‘Maybe you need to listen. Maybe you’re trying to be told something that you don’t want to hear,’” she explains. “I thought that was interesting.” This idea, of focusing and being receptive to the messages the world is sending you, chimes with what we are ostensibly here to talk about: Kong, her first new solo song in four years and her forthcoming fifth solo record, Broken Politics. Co-written with her husband and creative partner, Cameron McVey, and produced by both Four Tet and Massive Attack’s 3D, the Kong track is a suppressed explosion of dubby bass, trip-hop atmospherics and politically charged, lilting pronouncements that touch on colonialism, the refugee crisis and foreign wars funded by Western governments. Elsewhere on the album she tackles gun violence (Shot Gun Shack) and the societal expectations thrust upon women (Faster Than the Truth). “I feel like the time is now,” she says, draping a small black bomber jacket over the pale green, crown-embossed T-shirt she has paired with roomy black trousers. She has chunky rings on her fingers, an ‘N’ pendant around her neck and pristine white Converse All-Stars on her feet. “I felt the need to [address] where I am as a woman and what I’m feeling happening around me,” she continues. “We refer to ‘migrants’ but we’re talking about people who have left their homes, left people they love and walked into complete and utter hostility. I wanted to reflect lives that are as valid as the ones we live. Because they’re not just coming here to take our shit.’” The song was born from a ‘humbling, overwhelming’ 2016 trip she made to volunteer at the Refugee Community Kitchen in Calais. And she feels that, as a mixed-raced woman partially raised in whiter-than-white rural Sweden, she has a personal stake in the current war against rising intolerance and xenophobia. “In Sweden in the late 60s and early 70s [I remember] not really being accepted,” she says, in a low voice. “My mother left me outside a post office once and when she came back, there was a woman looking in the pram going, ‘Do they eat bananas?’” She shakes her head. “I was lucky because I grew up in a fairly bohemian house. We lived a nomadic life and I always felt aware of the world as a bigger picture.” She’s not kidding about that bohemian upbringing. Born Neneh Mariann Karlsson in 1964, Cherry’s late mother was Swedish artist Moki Karlsson and her birth father is Sierra Leonean percussionist Ahmadu Jah. After her parents separated, her mother married jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and the whole clan - including half-brother Eagle-Eye - ping-ponged between a converted Swedish schoolhouse (that Cherry still owns, alongside 9