fri 27/12/2024

Neneh Cherry, Brighton Festival 2019 review – beloved bohemian | reviews, news & interviews

Neneh Cherry, Brighton Festival 2019 review – beloved bohemian

Neneh Cherry, Brighton Festival 2019 review – beloved bohemian

Buffalo Stance still firm in a present-tense set

Love and devotion: Neneh Cherry reunited with her publicXavier Clark/Brighton Festival

Neneh Cherry’s matchless bohemian life has perversely secured her pop position. The crowd tonight is maybe three-quarters female, and as unconcerned by a setlist almost wholly drawn from new album Broken Politics as Cherry is by the long lacuna in what you could hardly call a career.

From a Swedish commune childhood to an adolescence collaborating with the Slits, from helping start the Nineties with 1989’s Raw Like Sushi to lending Massive Attack a room to make Blue Lines, from taking time to bring children into the world, ease parents out of it and grow a 29-year marriage to co-writer Cameron McVey, Cherry’s immediate, urgent music is part of a much larger life. It arrives organically, when it’s ready. This exemplary independence may be the extra ingredient in this crowd’s fervent love. There’s the easy intimacy of a proper night out, with phone-filming out and dancing in. It’s a rapport Cherry quickly senses, redoubling the loose communality.

Neneh Cherry at Brighton Dome 2019“Fallen Leaves” is an emotionally delicate start, with the sampled folktronica soundscape which Broken Politics’ producer Kieran Hebden created in rustic Woodstock brought to life by a band including a harpist, and Brighton's Rosie Barnes unusually doubling on drums and vibes. Darkness falls between songs, to reveal Cherry in a slow-motion prowl through the implacable groove of “Shotgun Shack”.  

She pauses to consider her album’s title, and “an era of mashup politics”. “So I guess we got to find our own,” she dauntlessly responds. “Right now, right here. Sharing this space together. Let’s make some family vibes.” A technical glitch and mention of Boris Johnson as possible PM later inspires a cheerily excoriating rap. “It’s better to die for a noble cause,” she concludes, “than to live and die a slave.” As she hitches up her dress and limbos down, and rides her instrument-swapping, liquid swirl of a band, Cherry is calmly wild.

For the emotional dub-dance-pop of “Manchild”, she improvises a turban-like headdress, more meaningfully unifying now than it was in 1989. It’s a sigh of a tune, rueful and kind. “Look at the state you’re in,” Cherry the mother and grandmother murmurs.

Neneh Cherry at Brighton Festival 2019Her jazz-minded inheritance from stepdad Don Cherry was clear even before her 2013 comeback album after 18 years with fearsome Swedish trio The Thing, doing her thing in active hostility to career maintenance. It’s clinched when Neneh reverently introduces the sampled sax solo on “Natural Sun” by Cherry Sr’s legendary, late bandleader Ornette Coleman, which yearns and aches heavenwards. Dub thunder follows.

Veteran artists should play more present-tense sets like this, and earn crowds this into it. The encore of hits is all the sweeter, as Cherry replaces Youssou N’Dour to duet with her younger self on “7 Seconds”. “So you’re wearing dancing shoes,” she teases before “Buffalo Stance”, a record which led a fresh sort of pop, turning its back on Eighties harshness for hip-hop pop hybrids, colour and grooves. Neneh Cherry’s values and virtues, her past and her present, find happy, natural unity here.   


Add comment

The future of Arts Journalism

 

You can stop theartsdesk.com closing!

We urgently need financing to survive. Our fundraising drive has thus far raised £33,000 but we need to reach £100,000 or we will be forced to close. Please contribute here: https://gofund.me/c3f6033d

And if you can forward this information to anyone who might assist, we’d be grateful.

Subscribe to theartsdesk.com

Thank you for continuing to read our work on theartsdesk.com. For unlimited access to every article in its entirety, including our archive of more than 15,000 pieces, we're asking for £5 per month or £40 per year. We feel it's a very good deal, and hope you do too.

To take a subscription now simply click here.

And if you're looking for that extra gift for a friend or family member, why not treat them to a theartsdesk.com gift subscription?

newsletter

Get a weekly digest of our critical highlights in your inbox each Thursday!

Simply enter your email address in the box below

View previous newsletters