I got very excited when I heard that Neneh Cherry had written an autobiography. I played nothing apart from my tape of Raw Like Sushi for what must have been at least a year after I bought it, and I’m pretty sure I can still recite all the lyrics. It wasn’t just the music: it was the pictures of her on the front and the pictures on the inlay. I wanted to be like her: beautiful and stylish – but also, unlike so many other images of women I saw at the time, completely present and looking right into the camera as if challenging it. I lost touch with her music for a long time after that, until I heard she was releasing an autobiography – and reading from it near me.
This book was always going to be interesting. Cherry has had a fascinating life – she was brought up by a jazz musician and an artist, has lived in different countries and experienced both real hardship and enduring success. She could just have listed it all and that would have been enough to sell plenty of copies, but she has taken the opportunity to produce something that’s beautifully written – it’s thoughtful, considered and deliberate. She talks about many incredibly tough experiences (a parent with a drug addiction, rape, alcoholism and the grief that led to it, and more), and what’s striking is her tone. She often seems brutally honest, but without ever becoming lurid or undignified. She avoids harsh judgements – even where they’d be pretty understandable – instead acknowledging and describing pain with grace and tenderness, in a way that makes it real and tangible.
There’s joy too. It was delightful to hear her read from the first chapter, which has the sparkle of a fairytale. When I started reading my own copy, I loved finding out about all her different influences and all the exciting and innovative music she has participated in – punk, rap, jazz, dance, experimental. She toured with the ‘monumental’ Slits, who had far more musical depth than they’re often given credit for, and was part of Rip Rig + Panic.
Throughout the book she explores – as she has in her life – what it means to combine an artistic path and motherhood, rather than choose between them, and how she saw this play out in her parents’ marriage. Her father could immerse himself in his art in a way her mother never could, because she had so many responsibilities to consider first. ‘They say that behind every great man is a woman. Why not beside, or with, or in front?’ she asks. People are complex and so is love, particularly in families, and she evokes that in a way that makes her book a great read in its own right, as well as an interesting accompaniment to her music.
A Thousand Threads is out now via Penguin – order in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook here
Neneh Cherry: Facebook / Instagram / Bandcamp
Review by Hannah Boothby
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