Born Neneh Mariann Karlsson in Stockholm to Swedish and Sierra Leonean parents in March 1964, Neneh Cherry dropped out of school at 14 and moved to London, where she became involved with the punk movement, joining several bands including Rip Rig + Panic and even a stint in The Slits. By her early 20s, she was regularly being touted as the new Madonna. She’d signed to Virgin as a solo artist and her debut produced one of the great musical crossover albums.
Released in the summer of ’89. Raw Like Sushi cleverly fused punk, pop, hip-hop and R&B with mountains of sass. It was light years ahead of its time and such is its perennial coolness TV shows and films are still nicking tracks from it today.
Since then Cherry has released four more solo albums. The most recent of which, 2018’s incisive Broken Politics, achieved considerable acclaim.
But can I get a rewind? Because thirty-three years ago, in the second and third weeks of January 1989, Sushi’s lead 45 Buffalo Stance peaked No. 3 in the British charts. What did you expect, the song’s a classic, maan.
Neneh Cherry is due a lot of credit. She’s influenced scores of female rappers and singer-songwriters in recent years, whether they know it or not. The prime example might be MIA, but you can also see her influence in everyone from Azealia Banks to Dua Lipa and Nicki Minaj.
And no more obvious example of this is the video to Cherry’s debut solo record, Buffalo Stance. Bold colours, a confrontational attitude, extravagant fashion sense and street nous all attest to this. And then there’s that beautifully snagged raw-silk voice, in an accent that sounds part-American, part European, and wholly universal, rapping, singing, and blinging to within an inch of her life.
It began life as a Stock, Aitken & Waterman B-side, but Buffalo Stance made a once obscure cast-off into a worldwide smash, and set a template for generations of street smart women to come. The one before Manchild, like…
Buffalo Stance actually started out life as Looking Good Diving With The Wild Bunch, which appeared as the flipside to the 1986 SAW-produced single Looking Good Diving. Featuring Neneh on guest vocals, it was a slight slice of Blow Monkeys meets Scritti Politti-ish pop by fledgling dance duo Morgan-McVey, which was made up of songwriter/model Jamie Morgan and Cherry’s future husband, the music producer and songwriter Cameron McVey. It evolved into its identifiable form helmed by a pair of cutting-edge collaborators, Tim Simenon and producer Mark Saunders.
In the wake of the success of Beat Dis by Simenon’s Bomb The Bass outfit, it was Nellee Hooper who first played Simenon the Looking Good obscurity. Jamie Morgan then approached the DJ with a view to him reworking it as a possible single release for Neneh Cherry’s solo career. Says McVey today:
“At that point I’d been producing a Neneh solo album, and that track was something that Tim got really into. He was really good at kind of old-school hip-hop beats mixed with other concepts, so it made sense. It was a bit more focused maybe than what we were doing production-wise. I felt like he would give it a bit more focus and he did.”
“I thought it sounded really raw and really good,” says Simenon. “Jamie Morgan suggested, ‘Why don’t you give it a go?’ I met up with Neneh and I had a good feeling about the whole thing, and I brought in Mark Saunders, and that was the beginning of it really.”
The team used several then cutting-edge tools during the recording process. Saunders’ performed his yearning, hooky Johnny Marr-style guitar part on the Emulator III. The recognisable rising keyboard sound at the end of the choruses came from a Roland Super JX-10
As an aside, Neneh and Cameron’s daughter is warrior queen Mabel, whose High Expectations debut album equalled mum’s career-best of third place — both Buffalo Stance and Raw Like Sushi peaked at three — in 2019.
Mabel’s big sister Tyson (a.k.a. CirKus collectivist Lolita Moon) is the baby in the Buffalo Stance bump: her Inna City Mamma famously performed the track on Top Of The Pops while more than seven months gone. It’s a brilliant moment in pop culture: here was Cherry, sticking her pregnancy on national primetime and decking it in gold, and over two decades before Beyoncé to boot…
Interviewed for The Guardian in 2014, Cherry remembered “feeling charged” by that appearance. Feeling “proud, and very feminine, very woman. I thought, I’m not going to go away.”
While “buffalo” is Caribbean slang for rebel (c.f. Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier), a buffalo stance, incidentally, is a FU pose with both arms wrapped around oneself while looking over to the side. Run DMC and the Beastie Boys used to do this a fair bit back in the day.
A punchy, upbeat meld of raw hip-hop sass with a propulsive groove, filled with great hooks and modernist twists, Buffalo Stance was overseen by Bomb The Bass’s Tim Simenon and co-producer Mark Saunders and made a star of the cheeky and provocative Ms Cherry.
M/A/R/R/S’s epochal 1987 chart-topper Pump Up the Volume opened the door for a kind of cut-and-paste aesthetic that made something new out of old sounds. Taking further cues from Malcolm McLaren’s groundbreaking Buffalo Gals and a sax refrain from Miami’s Chicken Yellow, from its scratched-out “g-g-gigolo” intro through its crisply rapped verses and sung choruses, Buffalo Stance was a tour de force of pop collage.
Lyrically, the song is about a male escort who, in a moment of altruism, thinks he can swagger his way into a woman’s heart. He may be just a gigolo but he ain’t popping this Cherry: “No money man can win my love/ It’s sweetness that I’m thinking of.”
Its genesis is run of the mill ordinary, however. Cherry wrote the line “who’s that gigolo on the street?” walking out of a corner shop near Earl’s Court. Its memorable middle-eight ad-lib — “What’s he loiike? What’s he loiike, anyway?” — is Cherry doing an impression of Fat Tony, the girthy downstairs DJ at London’s eighties clubland Mecca the Wag Club.
“Looking good, hanging with the Wild Bunch” from the song’s breakdown sees Cherry referencing the Bristol collective that spawned trip-hop and morphed into Massive Attack. Ever at the heart of artistic circles, Cherry even brought her West Country friends to the video shoot. If the dayglo flowers and late-’80s aesthetic are a time capsule, they take nothing away from the enduring power and oddball energy of Buffalo Stance. Look closely and you’ll see a very young Mushroom in the clip, doing his refashion of Jean Michael Basquiat’s turn as deckmaster in Blondie’s Rapture.
With tongue-in-cheek interjections that move through various sections in a highly inventive arrangement, Cherry chronicled an edgy street scene of girls “wearing padded bras, dropping down their drawers, where did you get yours?” and spat scorn at a pimp who tried to recruit her.
“There was a playfulness there: it was totally from the heart, and totally from my life,” Cherry told The Guardian, “but it was also from this fearless space.”
Fearless, fierce, formidable: three f-adjectives that sum up Neneh Cherry’s entire existence. She continued…
“There are so many women today doing beautiful things and beautiful work. And what excites me most, to be honest, is women realising that being strong is not about being aggressive for the sake of it. It’s about expressing yourself boldly and with humour, but also showing your vulnerabilities, and asking for help, without overexposing yourself.”
Best not to mention that syrupy thruet with Cher and Chrissie Hynde then.
You know what I mean?
Steve Pafford