Neneh Cherry

Broken Politics, her second album to be produced by Four Tet, was released on 19 October 2018, and has been called "quieter and more reflective" than Blank Project by Cherry. The lead single, "Kong", was released earlier in August. Writing in The Guardian, Laura Snapes labeled the album "revelatory" and gave it a 5-star review.

To support the album, Cherry toured across North America, Australia and Europe in late 2018 and early 2019.

To promote the album, she toured Europe in February and March 2014. In January 2015, Cherry performed as a solo artist in New York City. Cherry is very connected to New York, as she has visited or lived there off and on since 1966.

In 2013, Cherry collaborated with London duo RocketNumberNine (named after a Sun Ra track), aka the Page Brothers – Ben and Tom Page – to record an album called MeYouWeYou. She also joined them to perform the entire album live at the Manchester International Festival in July 2013. The record is an album of 10 tracks that Cherry wrote with McVey, which they took with only vocals to RocketNumberNine, who then did their musical interpretation to all the tracks. They recorded the album live in Woodstock, New York, with Vortex. The 10 tracks were recorded in five days. Cherry calls it fearless and hardcore.

During a 1 June 2012 interview with Kirsty Lang, broadcast as part of the BBC Radio 4's Front Row daily podcast, Cherry discussed the jazz-inspired album, saying that The Thing were inspired by Cherry's stepfather's work, but that the band makes this inspiration their own. "I think that we're taking it on, to another place. I think that's really important," Cherry said. One of the songs from the album, "Golden Heart", was written by Don Cherry; Christer Bothén, a musician who played with Don Cherry, was invited to play on the album, and brought the song to their attention.

In March 2011, Cherry collaborated with the experimental jazz group The Thing, to release the record The Cherry Thing. The Thing is a Norwegian/Swedish jazz trio, consisting of Mats Gustafsson (saxophones), Ingebrigt Håker Flaten (double bass), and Paal Nilssen-Love (drums). The Thing took their name from the third track on stepfather Don Cherry's album Where Is Brooklyn?. The album The Cherry Thing was released in June 2012 and was recorded at Harder Sound Studios in London, England and Atlantis Studios in Stockholm, Sweden.

The family has a country house near Birmingham and Wolverhampton, apartments in London and Stockholm, plus the family home in the old schoolhouse in Skåne County that she and her half-brother inherited when their mother died in 2009. As of 2014, Cherry says she commutes between London and Stockholm.

In addition to releasing these studio albums, she formed the band cirKus in 2006 and has collaborated with The Thing, releasing an album entitled The Cherry Thing in 2012.

In 2006, Cherry formed a new band, cirKus, with Cameron McVey, Lolita Moon (Neneh and Cameron's daughter Tyson) plus Karmil. CirKus toured Europe, with a single North American performance at the Montreal Jazz Festival in July 2006 plus a few dates in Brazil in 2008. The band's first album, Laylow, was released in France in 2006. A remixed/recorded version was released in 2007. A second CirKus album, Medicine, was released in France in March 2009.

In 2005, she collaborated with Gorillaz on the track "Kids with Guns" from the album Demon Days.

1996's Man is a solo record produced by McVey, Jonny Dollar and Christian Falk. The lead track is "Woman", her take on James Brown's 1966 track "It's a Man's Man's Man's World." It featured the worldwide hit single, "7 Seconds", featuring Youssou N'Dour; and "Trouble Man" a cover of a Marvin Gaye track. Another track, "Together Now", featured Tricky.

In France, "7 Seconds" made number one for a record 16 weeks in 1994. The song earned Cherry her second Grammy nomination and an MTV Europe Music Award for Best Song title. Remixes, a French remix album of Man songs, was released in 1997.

The music video for "Buddy X" earned Neneh Cherry an MTV VMA nomination at the ceremony in 1993 for the Best Female Video category, alongside Janet Jackson, Annie Lennox, and k.d. lang, with lang winning the moonman.

Additional recognition was attributed to remixes of track "Buddy X". First was the 1993 remix by The Notorious BIG, which is considered by some to be "one of the great Biggie rarities in the world." Cherry stated that she and McVey picked up Biggie for the studio where they remained for the session. The song was completed in one take. "Buddy X" found success yet again in the 1999 UK garage remix by Dreem Teem.

The Cherry-McVeys have lived throughout Europe. In 1993, they moved near Málaga, Spain, and lived there until 1999. In 1995, they briefly lived in New York City. They bought a home in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York. Soon after moving in, the couple was held up at gunpoint and robbed by a teenage hoodlum. The entire family packed up again and headed back to Berkley Grove in London's Primrose Hill.

Cherry's second album was 1992's Homebrew. Homebrew was not as commercially successful as its predecessor. The album had some success on various Billboard charts with songs "Buddy X" and "Trout".

To date, Cherry has released five studio albums under her own name. Her first, Raw Like Sushi, was released 1989 and peaked at number three on the UK Album Chart, thanks in large part to the worldwide hit single "Buffalo Stance". Her second studio album was 1992's Homebrew. Four years later she released Man, with her next studio album, Blank Project, coming in 2014. Her most recent album, Broken Politics, was released in 2018.

The single "Buffalo Stance" eventually peaked at number 3 in the UK Singles Chart and the US Billboard Hot 100, and number 1 on the US Dance chart. More singles released between 1988 and 1990 included "Manchild", "Kisses on the Wind", "Heart", and "Inna City Mama". She also found success with "I've Got You Under My Skin", a reworking of the Cole Porter song, which appeared on the Red Hot + Blue AIDS fundraising album. The single reached number 25 in the UK. Cherry was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1990 in the Best New Artist Category; she lost out to Milli Vanilli, who later had their Grammy revoked when it was discovered that they had not performed on their recording. She won a Brit Award in 1990 for Raw Like Sushi.

In 1986, Cherry met producer Cameron "Booga Bear" McVey at Heathrow Airport. Cherry and McVey were en route to Japan as fashion models as part of London designer Ray Petri's Buffalo Posse. Cherry proposed, and the couple married in 1990. Cherry and McVey have two daughters: Tyson, born in 1989, and singer Mabel, born in 1996. Cherry and McVey have a collaborative work relationship: McVey produced and co-wrote Raw Like Sushi. Together they have supported a variety of British acts and they were in the group cirKus together. Cherry has a stepson, Marlon Roudette (former frontman of Mattafix), via McVey's prior relationship with Vonnie Roudette.

In 1983, Cherry married drummer Bruce Smith and had a daughter, Naima. They divorced in 1984. Naima is a London-based photographer, who had a son named Louis Clyde Flynn Love (who goes by Flynn) in 2004.

Cherry began a solo career in 1982 with "Stop the War", a protest song about the Falklands War. She worked with Jonny Dollar, The The and Cameron McVey (aka Booga Bear), who co-wrote most of her 1989 debut album Raw Like Sushi, and whom she later married. She was intimately involved in the Bristol Urban Culture scene, working as an arranger on Massive Attack's Blue Lines album, through which she met Dollar. Both Robert Del Naja and Andrew Vowles of Massive Attack contributed to Raw Like Sushi.

Since the late 1980s, Cherry has frequently worked with the stylist and jewelry designer Judy Blame.

Cherry's parents, Moki and Don Cherry, bought and converted an old schoolhouse in the countryside outside the small town of Hässleholm in Sweden in 1970. In the early 1970s, the family moved to the United States, when Don Cherry taught at Dartmouth College. Cherry dropped out of school at 14 and moved to London.

Neneh Mariann Karlsson (born 10 March 1964), better known as Neneh Cherry, is a Swedish singer-songwriter, rapper, occasional DJ and broadcaster. Her musical career started in London in the early 1980s, where she performed in a number of punk and post-punk bands in her youth, including The Slits and Rip Rig + Panic.

Cherry was born as Neneh Mariann Karlsson in Stockholm, Sweden, the daughter of Monika "Moki" Karlsson (1943–2009), a Swedish painter and textile artist, and the musician Ahmadu Jah (1936–2018). Jah was born in Sierra Leone, West Africa, the son of a tribal chief, and went to Stockholm to study engineering at university.