Our host Vick Hope is joined by singer-songwriter, rapper and producer, Neneh Cherry.
Neneh first achieved global success in 1988, with ‘Buffalo Stance‘, a groundbreaking mix of music genres. She has released six critically acclaimed studio albums and won two Brit Awards, an MTV Europe Music Award and was nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist. Her most recent album, The Versions, a compilation of reworked songs from her back catalogue, features SIA, Robyn and many others. It was released in 2022. Neneh recently published her beautiful and deeply personal memoir, A Thousand Threads, which tells the story of her journey to becoming the artist and woman she is today.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to see Neneh’s top five most influential books written by women.
“There’s a whole family of women who I feel have brought me up with their word. Toni Morrison, she writes in such a direct but also complex kind of way. And I love that sometimes she’ll just write a sentence that’s a paragraph long. The magic and the power in her words has been such an inspiration with understanding how much you can do with language, how it’s kind of endless.”
“Me and my husband listened to [this book] together during the Covid era. We were in Sweden and it was winter. And the family house I grew up in is an old school house and it has no central heating, just wood burning fires. […] We were kind of obsessed with listening to this book sitting in front of the fire – it was really comforting being taken to London.”
“[This book] is full of amazing, important information – there’s mythological tales, folklore, I mean the research and detail is amazing. The way I’ve used this book is more like a Bible, like I just pick it up and I’ll just choose something and read it. […] I wrote a song called ‘Woman’ once upon a time and most of the second verse comes from this book.”
“I’ve lived a lot of my life in London around West London and this book was talking about my streets, speaking in a language that was so familiar but also highly intelligent. […] It was a very uplifting and important book – uplifting in the sense that I felt a kind of closeness with Zadie, even though I didn’t know her.”
I was just rolled over by how bold [Elif] was to take on this mammoth task of telling this story that spans through centuries. I fell in love because the raindrop came into the tale really early on and I just thought that was so magnificent. I loved the idea of continuing water that went from one time to another.
