'Nana' Recalls The Good Old Punk Days Of Yesteryear

After shaking off the embarrassment that this artist’s name is actually pronounced ‘Neh-neh’ not ‘Nina’, this scribe confirms Neneh Cherry has been a nanna “for about ten years now”.

“It’s kind of funny actually because my mother was 40 when she became a grandmother and I was, I think, just turning 40 when my daughter Naima had Flynn... I think some people maybe react like, ‘Oh no, I’m not ready to be a grandmother yet, I’m not old enough’. To me I just felt incredibly proud,” she laughs huskily.

“When I think back, my own love and respect for my mother deepened probably straight away” Cherry recalls of motherhood. “And when my mother died five years ago it was also, like, really profound: the passing of her, and her not being there for me anymore, was very weird and it moved my position, of course, in the family. And I was the next one, ‘cause I was the oldest and the next woman in the family.”

Cherry first became a mum at the age of 18: “My reason for doing things changed so early because [I was] responsible for someone else, and I wanted to be.” Having first experienced London when she was 14, Cherry shares, “By about the time I was 17 I had more or less moved here and made my own life”.

"I think in America – it was a very segregated place still when I was growing up."

Currently based in Ladbroke Grove, Cherry initially lived in Battersea and reminisces, “I was into punk when I came to London, but I really discovered reggae music here. I used to go to the shebeen, which is like a kind of illegal club, nearly every night, actually.”

Cherry didn’t require a fake ID, instead preferring to talk her way in. “That’s what we always used to do,” she laughs.

On what initially drew her to London, Cherry offers, “I just felt compelled by something here, culturally, that I hadn’t really experienced before… I think in America – it was a very segregated place still when I was growing up. It was very divided by colour and, you know, racial divisions; it’s changing, of course there’s still, like, a lot of huge problems. But in England – I won’t say that none of this exists, but it’s more [that] people were kind of forced to live with each other.” 

Throughout Cherry’s latest, Four-Tet-produced album Blank Project, there are many maternal references within lyrical content. “Blank Project was really personal because of the way that we made it,” Cherry opines. “The record was recorded “over a five-day period” at Kieran Hebden (aka Four Tet)’s live-in studio in Woodstock, with Hebden the only individual working on the album who would go home each evening. “Maybe in another kind of environment, or in the way that I’ve made other records in the past, [some elements] would’ve been taken out or produced more. But I think this record is just quite a stark record.”