Photo: Wolfgang Tilmanns
What happens when your stepfather is named Don, your half-brother is Eagle-Eye, and your last name is Cherry? You have a problem. Because then everyone wants something special from you, and in most cases that something isn’t what you’ve imagined for your own life. Neneh Cherry, however, couldn’t have handled the inevitable onslaught of expectations more smoothly. First she became a punk singer, and was active as such in The Slits, among others; later she released freestyle house, helped out Massive Attack in the studio, and finally she found common denominators with the Brutalo jazzers of The Thing and later with dance producers like Four Tet or Loco Dice and the hybrid project RocketNumberNine. Neneh isn’t interested in meeting expectations—she prefers to surpass them. That much is obvious, and has been for almost four decades now.
Neneh Cherry on Facebook