Growing up, every girl has a pop star they idolise – for me it was Neneh Cherry
If you read all of these columns, you may have spotted a recurring theme: “watching old movies my mum got me in to because I’m scared she’s going to die”. To this, I would add another habit: “sharing music videos from my youth to get through the weekend alone with my primary school-age child”.
Both ideas feed into the plot of Petite Maman, Céline Sciamma’s beloved film in which a little girl befriends another girl of the same age in the woods behind her recently deceased grandma’s house, before discovering her playmate is actually her mother as a child.
Sciamma’s film was very much on my mind one Sunday evening while watching some old music videos with my daughter, CJ. During one, we come to an artist who stops CJ in her tracks. “Her!” she says. “I loveher”.
She is half delirious, as I was too, the first time I saw Neneh Cherry on TV when I was around CJ’s age. So my daughter and I meet in the “woods”, which in this case, is the surrealist beach of her video for Manchild, its shoreline strung with laundry drying on a line and other things she recognises from our daily life. But instead of Neneh’s wet hair still wrapped in a turban as I go into the world, it’s mine; and instead of handing the baby to a trusted friend before bursting into her rap verse, I am sending her on a playdate when I’m trying to meet a deadline. In the video, Neneh is maternal and caring but needs, momentarily, to let go when it’s time for her most demanding vocals.
Styled by the punk iconoclast, Judy Blame, I could write a thesison the impact of Neneh’s style. The heavy gold earrings. The Lycra cycling shorts, the high top sneakers. An Earth Mother who could feel the ground beneath her and a Goddess who would take you higher. At a pivotal age, she became my template of how to be a grown woman in domestic life.
My daughter replays the moment when the baby is handed to the friend (in the video it’s the artist Barry Kamen, who features alongside Neneh’s real best friend, chef Andi Oliver) several times. It thrills her to think the baby might be the pop star Mabel, who is Neneh’s youngest daughter in real life – though it’s not true. The baby is actually her middle daughter Tyson. Her eldest, Naima, is on a swing in the right corner of the screen. But CJ likes her version, and sticks with it.
Neneh Cherry was born in Stockholm but her parents moved to New York (living in the same loft building as Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth of Talking Heads). Her stepfather, the jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, took her along when he toured with the Slits. Punk and new wave shaped her as much as hip-hop (and it may be that mashing of genres that meant she was never em