Neneh Cherry

Stockholm, New York, London

Neneh Cherry was born in Stockholm on 10 March 1964 to Moki Karlsson, a Swedish painter and textile artist, and Ahmadu Jah, a musician from Sierra Leone who studied engineering in Stockholm. She took the surname of her stepfather, the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry. In 1970 her parents bought an old schoolhouse in Skåne, and in the early 1970s the family moved to the United States, where Don Cherry taught at Dartmouth and they lived at the Hotel Chelsea before buying a loft in Long Island City in 1977.

She left school at 14 and moved to London. At 15 she was touring with the Slits and living in a Battersea squat with Ari Up. She worked at Better Badges, helped staple early issues of i-D, and played early rap records on the pirate station Dread Broadcasting Corporation.

Rip Rig + Panic to Buffalo Stance

Before going solo she passed through the Cherries, New Age Steppers, Rip Rig + Panic and Float Up CP. Her first solo single, Stop the War (1982), was a protest against the Falklands War. She danced in Big Audio Dynamite videos and sang Slow Train to Dawn with The The in 1987. In 1986 she met the producer Cameron McVey at Heathrow on the way to Japan. Both modelled for Ray Petri's Buffalo collective, and they married in 1990.

Buffalo Stance began as a B-side for McVey's duo Morgan McVey before Tim Simenon had her record it again. It reached No. 3 in Britain and America, and she sang it on Top of the Pops while pregnant. Raw Like Sushi (1989) went to No. 2 in the UK, and she won two BRIT Awards in 1990 and a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. Around the same time she arranged on Massive Attack's Blue Lines and helped fund the group. Homebrew (1992) followed, with Michael Stipe on Trout and Geoff Barrow on Somedays.

Rip Rig + Panic is where I learned to fly.

Neneh Cherry, The Arts Desk, 2012

7 Seconds and Man

In June 1994 Youssou N'Dour released 7 Seconds, a duet with Cherry, from his album The Guide (Wommat). He had played in her family's home in Sweden when he was 18. It spent 16 weeks at No. 1 in France, a record at the time, and won the MTV Europe award for Best Song. In 1995 she reached No. 1 in Britain for the only time, on Love Can Build a Bridge with Cher, Chrissie Hynde and Eric Clapton.

Work on her third album began the same month as 7 Seconds and ran to April 1996. Don Cherry died in 1995, and Man is dedicated to him. It led with Woman, her answer to James Brown, which reached No. 9 in Britain, and it gave 7 Seconds a home on her own record. A remix album followed in 1997 under the name Neneh Chérie, and her Glastonbury set that summer came out on a BBC promotional CD.

Later work

She sang on Gorillaz' Kids with Guns in 2005, had her own series on BBC Radio 2 and a cookery show for BBC Two with Andi Oliver, and formed CirKus with McVey, her daughter Tyson and Karmil. The Cherry Thing (2012), made with the Scandinavian jazz trio The Thing, won a Swedish Grammis. Four Tet produced Blank Project (2014), cut in Woodstock in five days with RocketNumberNine as her band and Robyn as a guest, and Broken Politics (2018), which won another Grammis.

In 2015 she entered the Swedish Music Hall of Fame. The Versions (2022) had Robyn, Sia, ANOHNI and others rework her songs, an idea she said came out of the Raw Like Sushi reissue. Her memoir A Thousand Threads (2024) was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction. The critic Jayna Brown has written about an industry that kept her fixed in 1989, while Cherry told the New York Times she had always known which compromises she would not make. Her daughter Mabel is also a singer.