JUDGE NENEH CHERRY

MUSICIAN

You can argue that Neneh Cherry put an end to the 1980s. Her 1989 debut album Raw Like Sushi, a delirious mix of hip-hop-inflected pop, was both a full stop and a key musical marker for the decade ahead. Her new album, Broken Politics, a collaboration with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, is more reflective but just as timely. ‘It’s a fight against the extinction of free thought and spirit,’ she says. Cherry was born in Sweden in 1964 to a Swedish artist mother and a Sierra Leonean musician father, and her stepfather was the world fusion music pioneer Don Cherry. She arrived in London at 14, throwing herself into the punk scene and, by the late 1980s, was a key member of the Buffalo collective, who all but defined London’s street style of the time. She picked out Rick Owens for Best Women’s Fashion Collection and we felt there was no one better to personify Owens’ take on thoroughly contemporary power dressing.