Neneh Cherry - ‘My mother’s death undid me.’

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0:36Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that believes learning how to fail actually means learning how to succeed better. Before we get to our guest today, I just wanted to mention our special subscriber bonus podcast, Failing with Friends. This is where my guest stays in the studio after our chat and answers your questions and offers advice on your failures too. Here's a bit of Nenna Cherry to give you an idea. Amen to that. I feel like she summed it all up. Do join in by following the link in the podcast notes and you can send me an email or look out for my Instagram call outs once a month to ask your quickfire questions.

1:19Thank you so much.

1:24If you came of age in the 80s or 90s, you'll know Nenna Cherry. You'll know her music, the unique, unforgettable sounds of singles such as Man Child and Buffalo Stance, and the groundbreaking hip-hop pop crossover debut album Raw Like Sushi. You might know the work of her brother and fellow musician Eagle Eye Cherry. You'll probably have heard her chart-topping daughter Mabel on the radio. And you'll undoubtedly have come across another band who was shaped both by Cherry's musical influence and financial backing. Massive Attack's seminal trip-hop album Blue Lines was produced in the back bedroom Cherry shared with her husband Cameron McVeigh, their producer.

2:08Her creativity has spanned the decades and continued a family legacy. The daughter of a Swedish artist mother and a Sierra Leonean musician father, her parents separated shortly after Cherry was born and she was raised by her stepfather, the legendary American jazz musician Don Cherry. It was an itinerant childhood with stints in Sweden, France, New York, Turkey and London. But the one constant was the importance placed on artistic expression. When Cherry told her parents she wanted a break from school at the age of 14, they agreed. As she jokes in her forthcoming memoir, A Thousand Threads, she's still on that break.

2:52Her autobiography makes for fascinating and often moving reading. Cherry has weathered personal and professional storms, toured with bands including The Slips and Rip, Rig and Panic, appeared on Top of the Pops while seven months pregnant, and met everyone from James Baldwin to Miles Davis and Chuck D. Now 60, she writes, the beauty of becoming an older woman is that you finally feel that you're enough. You recognise that the failures and the fights are part of life. Nena Cherry, welcome to How to Fail. Hello. I'm so happy to meet you. I'm so happy to meet you. I want to thank you for your music that got me through really difficult times at school.

3:40And I want to thank you for the book, which is so beautifully written. And one of the things that you say in A Thousand Threads is that you've always been a rebel. What is a rebel for you? I think when you're a rebel, you ask questions. And I think you are just kind of like naturally going against the grain. and I think being a rebel doesn't mean that you have to be out like running around with placards it means that you're in your daily life trying to change things and I think ask questions and for me I think also it's been a thing of like having a kind of an allergy towards things that are stereotypical.

4:25Do you think that explains where your sound and your lyrics come from it's just that you felt that there weren't rules that you needed to play by I guess I have a sound but I'm I'm also kind of going against my own grain constantly when it's time to kind of write I guess that's why I find it quite terrifying like when it's time to start a new album or when it's time to work on something new if we look at like Raw Like Sushi the album which was like obviously an amazing gift and I never expected anything as kind of as big as that I think when I got to the end of that project I was also like conscious of the fact that it's very easy that you just you become caught up in the kind of um the essence of pleasing fascinating do you know what I mean and that you start thinking of like of rather than just making you're thinking about where it's going to end up in fact when massive attack then kind of came into our world and started making their album in our house it was actually like a godsend and like very medicinal because hearing their process that kind of carried me through to my next place and then I made an album called homebrew and I think it's just like constantly needing to evolve.

5:49Well, thank you for the Massive Attack album too, because that was seminal for me when I was a student. Well, I thank you to Massive Attack for the Massive Attack album. That idea of pleasing is so interesting to me because as women, we are raised, if we are a certain age, to be pliable and to think of others and to place their needs first. And I can imagine that as a woman of colour, there's an additional layer, especially because, as I said in the introduction, you had an itinerant childhood, but your experiences in Sweden as a child were not always positive. You stood out. We stood, I mean, I stood out everywhere I went, you know, and I stood out for different reasons.

6:37I stood out because of my heritage. I stood out because my family were different. We moved to a really small community, which had like really great aspects to it. Like not all of it was terrible. But I think that being constantly aware that everyone is aware of you, the kind of shields and the multiple layers of self-protection to survive. I know that I committed as a very young girl to being kind of indestructible, like nobody was going to eyeball me down, you know, but I felt those eyes because of, you know, obviously, or I wouldn't have responded. It's a lot to be with in your life all the time.

7:24And actually during COVID, when George Floyd died, I realized how much stuff had just happened on a daily basis throughout my life that you just brush it aside. And I had to go out on the canal some days and just cry. But it kind of forced me to release some of the things that had just been sitting there. but sometimes like you just have to get mad about things and I know that there were times when you know I was juggling a lot that I didn't always sit with how I actually felt it was just like I've got to make this work and I think as women there's something very powerful in that but also it can very much be you know we can take ourselves for granted and it is taken for granted Mm hmm.

8:21Well, it leads us on to talking about mothering, which is something I want to ask you about, because I'm going to talk about your fathers as part of your failures, not that they were, but they weave in to the themes. But one of the very important parts of your book is your relationship with your own mother and how you show up as a mother, not just your children, but to sort of wider friendship group that that idea of nurture is very important. and you're very honest in the book and there's one particularly moving passage where you talk about your mother dying and how that almost undid you for a while.

8:55I mean it did undo me for a while it absolutely catapulted me out into a place it wasn't just even a thing of crawling back like I had to get help to come back I mean it was of course hard probably for everyone around to see But then also, like my kids, you know, everyone also had their own pain. But I think it was really hard for my youngest daughter, Mabel, because she was the only one still living at home. She was 13 or 14. And, you know, I wasn't available. There are things about it that makes me feel really ashamed. But I also have to own that part of my failure rather than just being like, oh, my God, I'm such a terrible person.

9:43I went through all those emotions. But I think healing is also a thing of trying to understand it better and to let it make me a better person rather than a worse human being. And I think your honesty is very powerful in that respect as well, because the only way you can allow that to happen is if you're brutally honest with yourself. And then to bring that to the page as a real gift for the reader. There's one moment where you say you were going for dinner, and a family dinner and Mabel. It was Mabel's birthday. Okay, it was Mabel's birthday. And she saw you. I was outside, like someone had a bottle of red wine and I was like drinking out of a bottle of red wine.

10:23I mean, I drank. It was like I had no bottom. Like after my mother died, my anxiety went so high. When she first died, we were all drinking, like all the adults, you know, because she was 66, my mother, and she was such a life force. So she was six years older than I am today. You know what I mean? You know, her parents got really old. I just assumed she's going to get really old. It's like, what are we going to do with her when she's like 90? But I didn't stop drinking. Like everyone else kind of chilled out after the initial shock and wore off. And, you know, once the funeral happened and stuff like that.

11:04I was like thinking that it was sort of calming me down. it kind of did for a short period of time and then it comes back so it was like dreadful really yeah Mabel just said I can't I can't do this we have some really great friends in Sweden and one of her school friends and basically her mother Ulrika just said I she can come and live with us and Mabel was there for a while and she you know loved her like one of her own thank god for that i always say this like several times a day you know it takes a village it's kind of important that you put the right people inside your village but you know yes even the worst shit in life brings some kind of weird gifts you know you can't see it when you're going through it but it's also allowed us to be very close that's exactly you know what i mean i think i know exactly what you mean yeah you might not understand the meaning when you're in it but in the fullness of time yeah any failure any disaster will potentially teach you something meaningful and it might just teach you that you survived it but that's enough yeah of course it it matters it depends on how you go with it I mean I know that I had to kind of surrender to my own madness and just be like okay like I need to sort this shit out well that's not the last you'll hear of Mabel in this interview because she has been on how to fail i'm gradually and she loves you i love her she came to my house she met my cat oh wow and your um sister by another mr andy oliver who is a dear mutual friend my beautiful i mean such a beautiful person and threaded through your memoir in in the most generous way so you'll hear more about them but let's get on to your failures so your first failure is that you say you're not a disciplined person, which means that you failed your creativity at times.

13:06Yeah. Tell me more about that. How does the lack of discipline manifest itself? Creativity and the magic of creativity. I've always felt that you don't own it. You open yourself up to it. Sometimes, of course, it just comes at you kind of coincidentally. But I think that you can't be like, okay, if I have two glasses of wine and I relax and then I get up and jump around on the stage, I'm going to catch the Holy Ghost. I think it's like you have to earn it. The more you practice, the more maybe open you can be. I won't say that I haven't put in time, but I think also, and you can even go back to what we were just talking about, having a lot of things in life going on all at the same time and being a woman and a mother that actually at the end of the day, finding the space to go into, you know, my space to just kind of sit there has not happened because of lots of other things going on.

14:12But I think sometimes because of my sort of insecurity that I have with my own ability, I have also avoided going into that space because it's hard. Right, right. You know? Yeah, you'd rather not take the risk that you're not enough. Yeah, so sometimes I've just gone to my pots, you know, and cooked something instead. I think sometimes I'm quite good at like taking care of people, feeding people. on Andy and I, my dear beloved Andy Oliver. We've done that so much, taken a lot of strength and built a lot of our own personal confidence in that world. Sometimes I understood that better. There is a process of work and unpeeling and concentration and focus, and sometimes I've just felt like, okay, well, I'm just going to go around the corner and go to the shops instead of having to go through all of that.

15:24You mentioned that sometimes you just want to go to the shops rather than sitting down and creating. But one of your most famous songs came about from a visit to the shops, didn't it? Actually, Buffalo Stands. When we were living in Edith Road, I was walking to the supermarket something in the tread and the crunch of the leaves under my shoe I just started who's that gigolo on the street with a chink crack crack and then I just went into the store and actually man child the first verse happened on a bus so sometimes I think as much as now to kind of contradict what I'm saying about going into a room and writing or something I think that also I'm also the kind of person that like sometimes when I think too hard on something it can't happen so when I'm doing when I'm in action in the shower just like putting some conditioner in my hair sometimes a lost word or something that I haven't been able to kind of put my hand on will just come and I think that if I think about all the times I've sat in the kitchen you know doing other stuff and then just working or having my cassette player that going at the same time do you have a cassette player I did not anymore now I have a telephone one time Bono walked past me sorry this weird just a moment of applause for the start of that sentence so one time Bono walked past yeah he was doing a kind of warm-up U2 gig we were in this club in Paris.

17:02And he said, I can feel the songs around your head. And I nearly cried. It kind of summed it all up. What I've been guilty of doing is that I go into intense periods of making an album. And of course, I've done so much of that work together with Cameron, my husband. And then when an album's done and the promo's done, then I just sort of dither off. and I don't necessarily sit and write and I'm just it's a bit more like I'm just out in life collecting songs that's what I mean that's what I would that's what I would think is that you produce this gorgeous harvest of creativity and then the field needs to recover it needs to lay fallow for a bit and you need to do your cooking and your being and your community otherwise there's nothing to there's no well to draw from yeah there's nothing to to talk about and I I agree with that like even today after I've been here I'm going to do a rehearsal with Ezra Collective and I'm terrified you know I mean I'm terrified that I'm going to get on the mic and it's going to sound terrible you know and I think I've struggled with that a lot I wonder if that's because the creativity is so muse-like that you worry one day it might just not be there.

18:29Like you're not in control of it. But I want you to know that it's such a trite thing to say, but you are enough. Like you are brilliant just being you. That you on what you consider to be a bad day is better than 98 % of other people. Because you bring you to it. That's what the key is. do isn't it yes you can only bring you to it and I think that is maybe where my personal rebellion just to keep going around in this conversation has been this kind of responsibility to know that it's not going to work unless you're you yes yes nothing is going to work you know you have to rebel against your own insecurity.

19:14Yeah. Yes. And how much of that do you think is related to addiction and fear of addiction? Because you saw your stepfather, Don, live with heroin addiction for a long time. And there's a thread there, I feel, about sort of chaos and creativity and maybe the moulding of the two. Is there an associated fear in your head? that if you go too far into creativity, it could undo you? I don't think so because I think that maybe I'm fundamentally a bit lazy, to be perfectly honest. You know what I mean? It's not quite as profound. It's not as profound, but I think that it's like once I'm in, I would not let it go, whatever it is I'm doing, until I've expressed myself so much better than I'll ever be able to do with words.

20:09I think also like my voice, do you know what I mean? Like if I'd put the time in, speaking of going back to the failure of like really working on my voice much more. Because I think I'm a natural singer, but I'm not like a particularly amazing singer. Like I sing, I think, with my heart. And, you know, I know that if I worked in my voice a lot more that it would make a huge difference. What's it like then seeing your daughter, Mabel, be in this industry of music and creativity? You must have been scared for her to begin with, I imagine. It's like a mixture. Like, I'm obviously incredibly proud.

20:59What scares me is the kind of lion's den, the so-called industry, and just how kind of throw away. it makes us all sort of replaceable. And this goes for all, because all of my kids make music, you know. I mean, Mabel is genius and I adore her, but Tyson also sings, Maima makes music. But, you know, if we're talking about Mabel in particular being in that part of the, you know, the sort of pop world, that, you know, it's going to break her beauty because she is so incredibly gifted. and when I look at her like I love everything that she does but I can also feel like she's only just starting and then in the eyes of some places in the industry they would say oh she's having a comeback and I'm like coming back from fucking what I hate that expression and I feel like now she's just on a journey of discovery but I mean it's like even if you're ultra famous you've got to be allowed to grow and I think that pressure of like having to get that everything has to be so fucking choreographed, choreographed.

22:11It's terrifying. You know, it sort of takes away the grains in something that make it... Real and flawed and peaceful because of the flaws. Yeah, and will give you hairs on, you know, make your hairs on your arms stand up. It's like, it's a hard game.

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23:38So your next failure is about Ian Dury. Tell us this story. I was possibly one of the worst, funniest things that I've ever served, together with Andrea. So we'd been to Scotland with a friend. and this friend, this really great friend of us, Jock, McDonald, Jock, Scottish Jock, took us to visit a friend of his and he made this pizza for us that was like amazing. So now he baked the bottom, then he seemed to have like, he put the sauce on it at the end as well. It was just like this really kind of creative, inventive, really great pizza. Andy and I were going to visit Ian, Jury I knew him because my dad, Don Played with him over a period of time And toured with him And they had a huge bromance They loved each other so much We'd seen Ian at a party, I think Anyway, he said come over He lived down on the river side In these beautiful mansion houses You know, by Hammersmith Just by that beautiful bridge so we went over there to make this pizza and it was like never ending the dough never rose we just kind of gave up on it in the end put it in the oven I guess we put the sauce and basically made it into a pizza and baked it but it was like basically like this tabletop I mean you couldn't cut it with a knife it was like brick hard and Ian I mean bless him he had a really amazing sense of humor so he was just like kind of laughing his head off but Ian just like never let us forget and would always bring it up you know all that night with the bloody pizza normally I ask people what they think their failures have taught them I'm assuming this one has it taught you to be able to make pizza or I think that it taught me to kind of sit back and have some respect for the art of making pizza and the science of dough.

25:54Like I baked before, so I don't quite know. We both had. Also just, I think it's also taught me something about being better at accepting that some things fail and that it's like, okay, we felt quite cut up that we were like putting something on the table. for Ian Jury that was basically inedible. And it was quite cringy and terrible. But we did laugh a lot about it. It was really funny. We got the anecdote. Here we are talking about this crazy event. And I think the other thing that that anecdote brings home to me, again, is how many incredible people you've met. Please tell us about James Baldwin.

26:38I was very young when I met him, right? I was like four and a half, coming up to five. We might have seen him a few other times in New York when I was growing up, but I remember him. And I don't remember him just because, oh, that was the time when you met James Baldwin. Wow. I remember him because of his spirit and his eyes and because he was obviously an amazing man and human being. And I just, basically we had traveled from Stockholm to Turkey. um my Don was on a kind of journey of kind of there were quite a few Turkish musicians living in Stockholm and he had started learning and studying the music and the kind of rhythm sequences and and I think there was a concert in Ankara and one of the musicians that he'd been working with in Stockholm took us, drove with us.

27:50And it was quite a crazy journey. To me, it seemed like it took forever, but I think it was only like maybe five days or something. And then we went to Istanbul and there, I think that my parents just kind of ran into James Baldwin on the street. Like he was there, he was living there working on a play. And he would have been like, if so often was like hey Don hey oh Moki um and we sat I just really remember sitting in a it was kind of a gray day and it was like not a hot day because I think we went there in like the winter months and yeah just sitting at this table they were talking and I just remember his eyes actually more than anything.

28:45And then Don ended up doing music for the play. And it's one of those things where I think that a recording has turned up quite recently. He might have played for one of the shows, but then I think the music was just used. But I also feel like I can remember being inside the theater where the rehearsals were going on. But then the memory is so funny. But, yeah, it's like I think as a child, you know, you meet certain people that actually you remember them because they really talk to you rather than them speaking, you know, through your parents or just going through the motions. You know, I feel like I remember it because it was a very direct communication.

29:41And you say in the book that you remember his kindness. Yeah, that's what I think I mean when I say that I remember his eyes because his eyes were like a whole universe, you know. He was such a smart guy. I'm sitting here and you're writing songs. If Bono was right, your turn of phrase is so exquisite. Oh, I feel so stupid. Sorry to make you feel embarrassed. No, I'll take it. Okay. We've spoken about Don. We haven't yet spoken about your biological father. Amadou. Who was also a musician. Amadou, yeah. Yes. And I think another thing that comes out loud and clear from the memoir is how much love you have for both.

30:24There's no bitterness there. I don't know how hard you had to work on that. but it's quite clear that you feel very at peace with the fact that these two men shaped you they were two very different men and Don for sure was my dad like he was there unconditionally every day and I was a bit older when I found out that I had a different father to eagle eye so I I was like seven, six, seven. And you found out. When my mother told me. You were looking at a photo album and she said. She was just, no, I think it was just loose black and white pictures. And then there was this photograph of four people.

31:08And I think the other three people were white people. And then there was this guy, man, in a stripy, I think it was like a, I feel like it was a blue and white striped. top anyway and I was like who's that I didn't recognize him so I was like who is he and I was sitting on my mother's lap and she just like oh she's someone I know and then we kept going and then she went back and then she was like I have to tell you something and then she told me actually that man is your father yeah it was like a very surreal thing to have happen actually because the foundations totally shifted and I mean I was only six and a half years old or something there was also a part of me that grappled with what it really meant then I didn't meet him for a few years and we weren't like instantly close but we were also obviously of each other so there was this kind of like intense kind of intimacy which I think I found quite difficult at first like just not really knowing how to handle it you know because I felt it and I also felt like his immense love but he was so you know incredibly kind but he was also quite remorseful I think of like that he'd let all that time go and that we hadn't known each other and so I started visiting got to know became really close with my sister to Tio and and my brother Cherno and then And when I was 15, he took us to Sierra Leone for the first time.

33:10And that was incredible. I also felt like with Amadou that we had something special. And I think I felt very conscious of that from quite early on, which I think was really helpful because I was his first born. So there was something in that in the row of siblings that I had. because I think we're nine now. So I just found out about another brother. Just my father died like six years ago or something. I think it was 2017. So I met one of my brothers in Sierra Leone for the first time. So your family is ever expanding, which actually, given what we've been talking about, is somewhat beautiful, that expansiveness of this community and this love, this constant evolution.

33:59Yeah. But I like quite early on said to my father when one of my really good friends was working in a nursery in Stockholm and a woman came in to pick up one of the kids and mentioned the name of the father. And it was my father. Like, oh, this is something about Amadija. So she told me, she was like, I think I'm looking after one of your siblings at my nursery. so I was like to my father like yo like listen I would like to know who my siblings are also there's a kind of risk factor that like what if one of my kids goes out and falls in love with like someone who's her uncle actually at the end of the day like it's where do things have happened you know but more than anything it was like look we exist like we need to know each other I mean, Don, going back to your question, Don brought me up, but he was always very respectful of my father.

34:57So I think that was so important because it also meant that I could, the sort of more complicated emotional aspect that was probably going on inside of me, it allowed it to kind of find its way. Yes. And then, of course, you know, the trips that we took to Sierra Leone and meeting our family and that incredible importance of knowing like that part of who we are. It changed my life.

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