If Steps are pop royalty, and Earth, Wind & Fire are definitely pop royalty, what does that make Neneh Mariann Karlsson, better known to us YouTube Music gimps as Neneh Cherry?
Introduction
Everyone can remember the first time that they heard “Buffalo Stance”, just like they can remember where they were when they heard JFK had been shot or Girls Aloud had split up. In November 1988 you’d find me in a semi-detached fixer-upper in Bolsover, making a hash of both the fixing and the upping. I was working as a joiner’s mate in Chesterfield when (I met you-ooo) it came on Radio 1 and I remember standing there, breathing in the artex fumes because health and safety hadn’t been invented yet, thinking that it was unlike anything else I’d heard before and wondering just who this person was. Turns out that if you were into music at that time, you’d probably come across this person before because at 24, Neneh Cherry was already a veteran.
The early standout on her LinkedIn page is her time with not-at-all provocatively named all-female punk band The Slits, famous for their cover version of “I Heard It Through the grapevine”, for being muses of bona fide rock god polaroid taker Anton Corbijn, but most notably for living and breathing girl power whilst the Spice Girls were still shitting their nappies. Here’s a 17 year old Neneh “chucking” out some “shapes” live onstage with The Slits:
/s
This song is “Man Next Door”, released by The Slits as a single in 1980. It’s a cover version of a song by reggae legend John Holt. On their album “Mezzanine”, Massive Attack – former members of Bristolian sound system The Wild Bunch – also covered “Man Next Door”. If you check the sleeve notes for track 9 of Massive Attack’s “Blue Lines”, you’ll see that Neneh Cherry has both songwriting and programming credits, whilst a certain Booga Bear is the executive producer for the album. Booga Bear is of course Cameron McVey, also known as Mr Neneh Cherry. As part of the duo “Morgan-McVey” alongside photographer, film maker and not very convincing Lou Reed cover version singer Jamie J Morgan, he was partly responsible for a Stock, Aitken and Waterman monstrosity called “Looking Good Diving”. B-side to said travesty is called “Looking Good Diving with the Wild Bunch”:
Zip forward in time about 20 months, and “Looking Good Diving with the Wild Bunch” has bumped into Bomb The Bass’ Tim Simenon in a nightclub toilet and taken on a new form:
The circle of life is complete.
Cherry was predictably panned for going out in public whilst seven months pregnant, to say nothing of performing on Top of the Pops in mini skirt, bra and trainers at a time when society still thought of pregnant mothers as semen microwaves rather than independent sentients beings in their own right. Throughout the promotion of “Raw Like Sushi” she was a proponent of the underwear as outerwear trend, long before Instagram made it A Thing again, although in fairness it was still quite a long time after Henry VIII had been making serving wenches faint at the sight of his enormous codpiece.
Preamble
The last song we looked at was Earth, WInd & Fire’s “Magnetic” and let’s never talk of it again. According to The Rules [that were in place at the time when I hallucinated up this zany idea], that meant that the next song has to begin with “P” (because Earth, Wind and Fire has 16 characters and P is the 16th letter of the alphabet) whilst the song has to begin with H (because “Magnetic”).
Reader, I fucked up.
I looked all over for a suitable song, even going so far as to compile my own database of artists to search rather than use the Internet because who doesn’t like compiling 17,000 row spreadsheets with advanced search functions on a Sunday morning in a heatwave. I couldn’t find one I was really into and was very close to doing Pet Shop Boys’ “Heart” when I realised that “Earth, WInd and Fire” actually has 14 characters because “Earth, Wind & Fire” spell it “Earth, Wind & Fire” and not “Earth, Wind and Fire”, this merely being the URL for their website, meaning that I should have been looking for an artist beginning with N. What can we learn from this?
That’s right. Proofreading is fundamental, hunty.
As soon as I started looking through the Ns Neneh Cherry jumped out, and as soon as I saw “Heart” my mind was made up. Everyone knows the the other four singles from “Raw Like Sushi” but this one for some reason was only released in Australia (where it reached #91) and the US (where it peaked at #73). What really caught my eye was the fact that it was directed by “Fight Club”, “Se7en” and “Alien3” director David Fincher. Nothing unusual there – Fincher has a long history of pop videos, including George Michael’s “Freedom ‘90”, Billy Idol’s “Cradle of Love” and Madonna’s “Vogue”. But having studied Fincher for my dissertation at uni I was surprised that I didn’t know either this single or video.
So here’s the deal. I play the record and I write down what comes to mind as it unfolds, like the great MBMs and OBOs in the Guardian. This is how I choose to review music; because this is my newsletter, and not yours. Shall we?
Video
Review
00:00 Nine seconds over the medically and ecclesiastically provisioned three-minutes-and-thirty-seconds that pop songs are supposed to be. I can deal.
00:07 Actually the first seven seconds are just, well, acting? According to the “plot” someone called Claude is being invited to stay, where we know not, to watch the next act, although we don’t know who that is. Funnily enough “Seven Seconds” is the title of La Cherry’s biggest hit. The circle of life- wait, we’ve done that bit.
The music starts and it’s more “Kisses on the wind” than “Manchild”.
00:16 Someone who can only be described as swarthy is explaining to someone on the other end of the phone called “Daphne” that he’s going to be late home (“darling”) whilst being enthusiastically felt up by someone non-Daphne. I’ve read the lyrics and neither a Claude nor a Daphne feature in them. Fincher, ever the auteur, is taking a lot of liberties so far.
00:23 Oh my word. The young lady feeling up the chap on the phone, we discover, is called “Celeste”. We have a pop music video featuring Daphne & Celeste. Finch is both an auteur and a visionary.
00:36 Finally we get a proper view of Cherry as she is introduced by a talking mime artist and the vocals kick in. She explodes through a curtain from backstage – now we can deduce that she is the act that Claude was invited to stay and behold – and strides to the front of the stage looking highly insta-ready in bustier, cycling shorts and trainers. This is a look she doesn’t so much as own, but has full copyright on with the patent pending.
00:54 After a rather unsubtle metaphor for the male gaze, Cherry grabs a light bulb on a mic stand and sings into it. We’ve all mimed into a hairbrush, screwdriver or vibrator in our time so far be it from me to call her out for this unconvincing choice of prop. And seconds ago she was singing without a mic so I’m not sure what to make of this new turn of events.
01:03 “Heart, heart, you can’t break my heart / heart, heart, you think you’re so hard”. The songwriters – Jack Conrad and Pamela Phillips – didn’t really push the rhyming envelope too hard there, did they? I’d never come across them before so I took the liberty of Googling their back catalogue for you, listeners. It includes such hits as:
- “Heart”, by Eddie Fisher, featuring the lyrics: “You’ve gotta have heart / All you really need is heart / When the odds are sayin / You’ll never win / That’s when the grind should start”
- “Heart”, by Reba McEntire: “Heart, where are you taking me / What will you make of me / Is this the real thing / And heart, could he be paradise / Cause in his eyes / Do I see love looking at me”
Right up there with “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star”, isn’t it. Did you know “Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star” had five verses? No-one knows anything after the first verse, just like “God Save The Queen” except without the colonialist history of invasion, occupation and racism.
01:22 A ventriloquist is seen beating the face of his dummy. Beating in a RuPaul’s Drag Race sense, as in, making up to be sickeningly good, sickeningly used in the sense here of… I’m sure you get it. Anyway he’s applying Benefit Hoola Glow to his dummy.
When they hear Cherry sing they both turn their heads… even though no one is operating the dummy. In another visionary move, Fincher has given us the character of Sid from S1 E9 of Buffy.
01:47 Whatever else he’s doing, Fincher isn’t exactly lathering us with plot exposition. Cut to Generic 80s Woman sat at a table in the bar presumably watching Cherry. For reasons unbeknownst to us she has an old fashioned rotary phone at her table although I suppose in 1988 it wouldn’t have been old fashioned. The onscreen text says “[ Ring ]”. Cherry starts her trademark middle-eight rap, the caption [Ring]s again and Generic 80s Shoulderpads Woman answers it. She has noticeably excellent brows.
01:56 It’s just her stalker. He says — I noticed you were alone. because in the Fincherverse there are no speech marks.
02:00 *Adopts spooky Hannibal Lector voice* “… and done things with the light/mic stand.” Cherry and backing dancers are subjecting the light/mic stand to lewd and lascivious behaviour.
02:05 — But I’m in a crowded nightclub. — You’re still alone. The dialogue, whilst not quite at George Lucas levels, isn’t much better.
02:09 Google the lyrics at this point. I’m pretty sure that Cherry is not singing, “Chocolates, bananas, doughnuts and salami / Ain’t gonna fit cause you’re full of bologna” because in no universe does ‘salami’ and ‘bologna’ rhyme. It’s a load of baloney.
02:16 Generic 80s Powerdressing Shoulderpads Woman puts the phone down on her heavy breather but doesn’t hang up – just gently lays the receiver down by the phone. Probably because her arm is aching. However did we hold such things up to our heads for extended periods?
02:38 “I thought you were my friend / God, you’re so digital girl / You’re like one of those cabbage patch creatures”. which in terms of bad reads is right up there with “I know you’re talented at, you know, buying shoes, but are you talented at, you know, drag?”
02:39 A young woman breastfeeding a baby. I have no idea what’s going on here. The shots of her are interspersed with shots of Generic 80s Red Lip Powerdressing Shoulderpads Woman’s stalker, so possibly he is related to her and the baby in some way? Is that what we’re supposed to infer?
02:52 And now we’re back to shots on the guy being plagued by Celeste. He says, “Please Celeste, Stop it!” because apparently back in them days proofreading was not fundamental, at least for video captions. Meanwhile Cherry does her second pop rap of the song and we get the immortal lines, “Everybody knows you’re a phoney / You just want his alimony”. This last is a word that gives away the US songwriting credits, although it’s possible that Jack ‘n’ Pam just struggled for a word that rhymed with maintenance (shame they didn’t have Wordhippo back in the day, maybe they could have found more than two words to rhyme with ‘heart’).
At this point Cherry also sings, “You took my man and took his body / Strapped him to your bed just to have his baby”. Questions of consent and male rape aside, maybe the swarthy stalker guy is Cherry’s ex and the wholesome mother bottlefeeding the baby is the one who stole Cherry’s guy and trapped him in a loveless union that he tries to escape by initiating shenanigans with Generic 80s Blusher Red Lip Powerdressing Shoulderpads Woman. I am, it’s fair to say, and I presume at this point so are you, not really sure what’s happening.
03:17 Sid and his handler look on from the side as Cherry finishes her performance. I assume they’re on next, unless Sid thinks that Cherry is one of the Brotherhood of Seven and intends to kill her as he strives to break the curse and release himself from being trapped in the dummy’s body. All things seem possible in this video, except for coherence.
03:33 Curtains close, song ends. The applause is people thanking God that the video is over. There’s no post-credits coda so we’re left completely in the dark about, well, everything.
What’s the verdict?
I was a huge fan of Neneh Cherry. I was one of the suckers who bought all 23 different 12” versions of “Buffalo Stance”, I know all the words to both raps in “Manchild”, and I still think she’s making great music now:
This song, as an album filler on “Raw Like Sushi”, works perfectly well. However, it doesn’t work as a standalone single. The recycled country & western lyrics are repetitive and banal beyond belief and this video, which I’m assuming didn’t come cheap considering the director and the number of actors involved, tries to be a clever mini-drama and falls far, far short.
As confusing as “Magnetic” was, the video was kind of amusing. It was a gloriously bad high-concept failure but at least it had structure and a narrative. They didn’t make for the poor song but at least it was something. “Heart” simply lacks heart.
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