Talking and Meandering with Neneh Cherry in the Cemetery

'Fuck that, it's my story'

I’m waiting at the grander white entrance to Kensal Green Cemetery – it is one of the Magnificent Seven Victorian graveyards in West London – waiting for Neneh. I’ve been immersed in Nenehland for the last couple of days consuming her memoir Neneh Cherry - A Thousand Threads (Fern Press) which is a lyrical, earthy, spirited (of course) account of the parts of her past that matter to her.

And what’s more. No ghost writers. She wrote it herself. One of the first things she discloses is that she’s thinking about doing a Creative Writing Course but she doesn’t need to. Her writing is full of insights that aren’t cliches. Hurrah. ‘Even at a young age,’ she writes about listening to records as a young girl, ‘I realised that reality wasn’t static. Music provided a means to find myself but also an escape route; a way to disappear and get through things that I found tough.’ And there was a lot of tough about her childhood but also a lot that took her on a flying carpet to rebellious, loving and collaborative ways of being. That sustains her still.

And she admits freely that she was tempted by the easy way, that she suffered from ‘severe doubt syndrome’ but being Neneh, the warrior daughter of her warrior mother and artist Moki*, she did not succumb. She started writing when she was 56 and the book came out this year as she turned 60. It’s been a big chunk of her life and a huge challenge. ‘And I had a great editor who helped me out with structure. That meant I could just write.’

It's a cold damp December morning and we’re meandering round the muddy wilder northern side of the cemetery. The Harrow Road end. Where the 19^th century grave stones are tilting. We stop and take it all in. She says something about the bodies underneath pushing the earth around. That sounds like her memoir, there are a lot of bodies underneath that too.

Her maternal grandparents were from rural Sweden, her father Ahmadu, a musician, from Sierre Leone, her stepfather (but in nitty gritty terms, her dad) legendary jazz trumpeter, Don Cherry from New York, her mother, Moki from Sweden. Neneh was brought up in Sweden but the rest of the world too. Her parents were artists who were always on the move. In search of work and enough money to live on but also bohemians with a vision of communal living for them and society. ‘There was to be no division between the making of art and the making of dinner,’ she writes, ’Don and Moki understood that it was now that mattered. They fought to expand our lives, to make them bigger and richer by bringing people together. The dream was to create a world more beautiful, a life less paranoid, more embracing of other cultures, full of spirit, letting their creativity add to the universe rather than just taking from it. The funds were often limited but the resources and potential endless.’

I remember Neneh when she was about 19 – she came over from Sweden to live in London on her own when she was 15, yeah, that was a big leap, she was pregnant with her first daughter, Naima at 18 with Bruce, her first husband – and I was 30 around Portobello Road. She was in the brilliant and off the wall Rip, Rig and Panic, I was starting to write for the music press. We were both part of the crew who hung around the Warwick Castle. One of my dearest friends, Lizzie Melling, was their manager for a while. It was the 80s… In fact, one of the entertaining parts of her book for me was where she describes how in 1981, she moved in with Bruce Smith, drummer with the Pop Group, who had taken over a room from Mario Tavares who happened to be the father of my son, and my ex. ‘Cheap housing in London was all sublets upon sublets. Every time Bruce had to go to the housing office, he had to pretend to be Mario. In his hip-hop leather coat… with his funny black vinyl Run-DMC hat, he looked like some weird Miami coke-dealer dude whose name was Mario Tavares. We laughed so hard.’

Me too. At the thought of them. Neneh has a huge laugh. Today she’s bare Neneh. No make-up. Open face. In a big white puffa jacket and boots. And always honest in that raw way. We’re having a tangential conversation that spans the years and funerals that we’ve been to at the crematorium here. I ask her if she’s decided whether she’d like to be buried or burnt. ‘Buried,’ she declares, ‘but I don’t know about the rest.’ She has an English husband, producer, Cameron McVey and children (three children, Naima, Tyson and Mabel) and two grandchildren (Naima’s son, Flynn and Tyson has recently had a baby girl). She means she’s thinking about joining her mother in the local graveyard in Tägarp in Southern Sweden where they still have the school house that became her old family home but she’s aware her husband is English and here most of the time.

‘I want to lie with my mother,’ she says explaining that Moki was unconventional in so many ways – her art, her fabrics and her sewing machine went everywhere with her – but she had a traditional streak. And it was that streak that led to her being in the village graveyard. I can see that Neneh with all her urbanity and coolness has that streak running through too.

Moki’s death at 66 in 2009 stirred a personal hell for Neneh. Grief welled up that she couldn’t control although she tried to dampen those intense feelings with alcohol. She had a break down that wasn’t linear. Often when we’re discussing something difficult on this walk, Neneh stops totally still and seems to search for my eyes (and quite often they are cast down to the notebook I’m writing in) and it’s as though there’s a safety somewhere there for this darkness. ‘I lost myself,’ she says simply. She came through it eventually with her fierce courage but there was shame, there was not being able to care for her children in the way she wanted.

Neneh has had and continues to have therapy. However, she thankfully doesn’t talk in therapy speak. There was her childhood and the anxiety and fears around Don dying that his heroin addiction brought. There was rape when she was 16 in London, there was being held up at gun point in NYC later on when she was with Cam. There was the too-soon-death of Ari, lead singer of the Slits (Neneh was a part-time member for a while) and there were the deaths of Don and Moki. Especially Moki. There has been a lot.

‘I find myself with a black male therapist now,’ she says quietly, ‘I wasn’t seeking that but a friend recommended him and it’s really working out well. He asks great questions.’

We look over to the neo-classical colonnade on our right – they are a special bit of the cemetery for me, atmospheric, partly because of the vaults below – and smile because there is a 1980s hostel built over the top. That London higgle piggle of a multi-time architecture.

Despite the hard times, A Thousand Threads is very much about declaring a public thank you to Moki and Don. For their vision. Neneh says she has had the opportunity lately to sit back at the school house in Tägarp – ‘the source, the grass a light green on a warm summer’s evening as the sun was setting amid the stillness and say thank you for the sacrifice that they made in order to fulfil that vision. It made us very adaptable. We were like turtles. We knew where we were, our home was where our parents were.’ Throughout their wanderings – before they had the school house – in the 60s and early 70s, Moki had a cape which they sometimes slept on wherever that was and she also wore. She made it their home.

Home is a constant source of discussion. It turns out that more recently Neneh and Cam have been living in Mabel’s house in Willesden which is three doors from their own. ‘I settled deep into her place for three years,’ says her mother, ‘and now we’re moving back to our house.’ And Tyson – daughter number two – has recently had a baby that they have been helping to look after. While Naima is the keeper of both Moki and Don’s estates and responsible for co-curating Moki’s recent exhibition at the ICA. They all helped Neneh with the book. Family was Moki’s thing and is Neneh’s thing too. Absolutely.

There is no-one around in the cemetery today although various graves have been decorated with baubles. Sudden reds amid the grey. Both Neneh and I have friends who are here. Sean Oliver – who was Andrea Oliver’s brother and a brilliant musician who also played in Rip, Rig and Panic – is here somewhere but neither of us know where. Andrea is Neneh’s best friend and there is a section in the book dedicated to her. I love the way her memoir is structured around the people she loves. Generosity oozes from the pages. We laugh about Andrea – who was in Rip Rip and Panic too and has been around presenting for years – having her heyday now at 60 (she presents The Great British Menu and more) and Neneh having to work hard to actually see her friend. But they did have a big 60th birthday bash together not long ago.

‘I need to stretch my body more,’ Neneh sighs after I’ve taken a sweet photo of her by some of the tumbling head stones and while she is doing an understated bit of a whirl for me. ‘I need to dance more. You know Andrea and I used to get out there and dance hard.’ I do. I know. I remember. We were at the same clubs like Hot Sty in Leicester Square. ‘Hard’ used in that kind of hardcore way – is one of her favourite adjectives.

We talk about getting older. What it means to us. She’s 60 and I’m 71. Her eldest daughter, Naima apparently mentioned feeling ‘old’ when she hit 40. Neneh’s response – ‘Keep on going and give thanks.’ I say that Advantages of Age’s philosophy is about re-imagining the word ‘old’ itself which is often heaped with all sorts of decrepitude. And how important I feel it is to have a tribe that think the same defiant way when we live in such an ageist society. Where everything is about being young. ‘I’m aware of my body changing, my belly growing bigger,’ she says, ‘We all change but we all have these life processes which are gifts. There is a kind of wisdom there.’

‘Yeah, but I do have a thing about older people claiming wisdom as their right,’ I add, ‘I often think that’s an illusion. My son is always adding to my knowledge in terms of perspectives and ways of thinking. I think the most important part of getting older is to remain open, curious and be willing to push those boundaries a bit.’

Like Neneh writing her book herself. Like me doing an MA in Poetry Writing. Keeping those fires burning.

I ask what she would like for her own future as she ages. ‘I would like to be more present,’ she says, ‘I am sensitive, I have lots of feelings and I have a tendency to remove myself, to disappear. I think being here now is more important than a list of places I want to go. Also looking after myself more. Creating some space for that. It’s time to be.’

Now we’re front of the grand Anglican Chapel – completed in 1837 - and it’s the first time I’ve seen it for years without scaffolding all around it. With its cloisters, it looks wonderful. I’m so happy to see it released from that ugliness. We – a group of Over 60s dancers – performed Dance Me To Death at the back of this building in June 2021. We were framed by giant Doric columns. In our burnished orange and deep reds. Such a coming together, such a collaboration, such faith.

Neneh doesn’t know anything about our performance, of course. But collaboration was one of the main tenets of her parents, Don and Moki. They saw collaboration as a vital part of societal evolution. Their school house in Tägarp became a hub for a community of artists who would work together on projects. Moki often created sets and back hangings for Don’s shows too. In the book, she says: ‘I was raised amid all that energy and movement. Sharing space, each of us doing different things, influencing each other with interesting collisions. It was the together part that was inspiring. Moki hung a red wooden swing in the doorframe, where I would rock in time to the music. Sometimes it was Don who was playing; sometimes the music came from the record player… As soon as I could reach, Moki showed me how to lift the arm gently to put the needle on the record and make it play’.

From time to time, we stop to admire a particularly spectacular grave stone. Charles Dickens’ sister is here, Charles Babbage, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the great and the good. Neneh points out an anchor/cross, we observe finely carved angels, and huge status-conscious tombs/vaults down the great avenue.

As we’re about to leave, I ask if she feels more Swedish as she gets older. What I mean is that perhaps it was more difficult for her to be Swedish and black as she grew up there in the 60s as she was very different, very other. And Moki was white so that was also a sometimes, awkward reminder of her difference. ‘Yes, I’m more relaxed about my Swedishness now partly because there are so many more Afro-Swedes and I realise what an important part of me, that is.’

The book has taken a big chunk of her emotional energy. She and Cam are off to the school house soon. She’s been dreaming of shelves with pickles and jams. Ones that she makes herself. Not sure she’s going to get the opportunity to be that damn domestic as Cam is always keen to make more music. But no doubt, she will try.

*Then and Now was an exhibition of Moki’s bold, multi-coloured tapestries and paintings were at the ICA in 2023.

Neneh Cherry - A Thousand Threads is published by Fern Press, an imprint of Penguin, Random House.