Neneh Cherry’s NYC Punk Coming-Of-Age: Read An Exclusive Excerpt From Her New Memoir

In 2022, we got a taste of Neneh Cherry’s eventful life in our career-spanning interview with the Swedish musician. She’s best known for her eclectic 1989 debut Raw Like Sushi, which earned her a Grammy nomination, but she also clocked time in the iconic punk group the Slits and gave an iconic performance on the UK’s Top Of The Pops while pregnant.

Cherry has a lot to share, so she wrote a memoir titled A Thousand Threads. Born in Stockholm, Cherry spent some of her teens living in NYC before moving to London. Cherry didn’t hesitate to explore the punk scene that erupted in the ’70s in the Big Apple; below, read an excerpt of the excitement.

Below excerpted from A THOUSAND THREADS by Neneh Cherry. Copyright © 2024 by Neneh Karlsson and Cameron McVey. Reprinted by permission of Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC.

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At fourteen I ended my formal education.

My parents valued curiosity and learning above almost anything else. Evidently, though, they were not traditionalists in matters of schooling. Eagle-Eye had to go to school — he was still only nine. But there in Long Island City, I begged Moki and Don for some time out before starting a new school. No doubt they didn’t take the decision lightly, but in the end they allowed me to take a short break. And well, as it turned out, I’m still on it . . .

Moki fed me a constant stream of books: the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer and James Baldwin, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Crime and Punishment. I read them all. And I started to feel like myself again. The words in those books made worlds where everything was possible, opening up little spaces in my teenage brain that wanted to think it had all the answers.

•In the loft, Don played trumpet, the donso ngoni, and the piano. The dominant sounds, however, came from the rest of the inhabit — ants in the building playing new wave. When Talking Heads were rehearsing — Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth lived downstairs — the place shook.

I have always had a love affair with bass, although I wasn’t particularly musical as a kid. Eagle-Eye was given a grey drum kit when he was just three years old. He loved it, even though he was so small that his feet didn’t touch the floor when he sat down to play. One day, he lost his balance and fell off, knocking out a milk tooth on the side of the snare drum. He also played the piano. I mostly just got frustrated when Don tried to teach me. I would lose my shit when I hit a wrong key. But Tina made me want to play an instrument for myself. She gave me my first bass, a red Fender Mustang. I started a band with my friend Natasha, who had moved into a loft at the other end of our building. Her stepdad, Jerry Harrison, had been in the Modern Lovers and was now guitarist for Talking Heads. Jerry had a rehearsal room below their loft, where Natasha and I practised our tentative bass and drum creations.

New York had its own music scene, of course, but fresh from my London awakening, I still thought that the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and Public Image Ltd were everything. We bought all our clothes from thrift shops. I wore my hair out, big, in that Crazy Color red, and I had a camouflage coat that I still have today. I found a pair of German combat boots that were very narrow at the toe and too small, but I squeezed my feet into them and suffered, walking like Frankenstein’s monster to break them in. Those boots were just so perfect I had to own them — blisters and all.

Dressing became experimental. I wasn’t doing it to fit in; I was doing it to feel free. We were doing our thing and doing it our way. I blossomed: proud, young, Black, Swedish, wishing I was English. I was immediately cut loose and a little louder. Fire-red hair, the colour of African soil. My attitude solid. I wanted to be seen.

I started going out to clubs with Natasha. She was only twelve — two years younger than I was. Babies in a big city. Moki and I had an understanding. She trusted me to make sensible decisions — and I tried, mostly. There were rules, for sure, lines I could not cross, but I knew that if I toed them correctly, more freedom was to be had. When I went out at night, for example, I had to keep a dime in my pocket for the phone booth, so I could call Moki at a certain time. This I always did, right on the money. She would also give me cash for a cab home — 15 bucks — and the rule was no train rides back alone. But many nights I spent that money and took the subway, travelling on those dawn-of-the-dead trains carrying exhausted workers who’d just clocked off at last from a late shift, bodies that had no beds, or just packs of kids like us, needing to get indoors before daylight.

We’d head down to the Mudd Club or Danceteria, first at 252 West 37th Street, then in its later incarnation as a four-floor venue at 30 West 21st Street (where the young Madonna worked as an elevator operator), whining at the doormen until they allowed us in. Natasha would shout, “My dad is in Talking Heads. Let us in!” We had no shame. Standing outside in the cold, feeling the smoky, warm, sweaty air leaking out with the beats as other people were let in, we leaned on the ropes, possessed by the promise held inside. No way were we going to give up.

Some of the doormen did want us to come in, I guess because we brought something that they wanted in the house. Tier 3 — a small but very cool, friendly post-punk venue run by Hilary Jaeger at 225 West Broadway — became our home away from home.

Compared to the super-hip New York club scene, Tier 3 had a more underground vibe. It was spread over three floors and had once been a bar and grill. Natasha and I mostly hung out downstairs, in what would once have been the dining room, where there was a bar, a low stage (due to the low ceilings), a dance floor, and the DJ booth, on which Jean-Michel Basquiat had painted a mural. On the second floor, they screened films and held art and photography shows. The third storey had a dance floor with a disco ball. Hilary booked an eclectic mix of bands — hard punk rock, free jazz, new wave, ska, and reggae — among them 8 Eyed Spy, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Bush Tetras, and the Lounge Lizards. The Bad Brains, the legendary Black group from DC pioneering hardcore punk with a reggae twist, also used to play there. In 1979 and 1980, this was where it was at — punk had started to cross over with other genres, and reggae was a big part of that evolution.

Soon after the red, I bleached my hair peroxide blond. I didn’t really care whether anyone liked how I looked or not. What mattered was that it felt good. In fact, I felt badass. I made friends within the walls of Tier 3. A few of us lived across the bridge in Long Island City; others lived elsewhere in Queens. We all had each other’s backs on those ghost trains home, but not before we’d been to Dave’s 24-hour diner on Canal Street. We would all squeeze into a booth and order two plates of French fries to soak up the night. I’d slip any leftover packets of Heinz ketchup into my pocket. I loved it and liked to carry spares.

Soon an Irish bar on the Bowery became our meeting spot. It had once been a dance hall, no doubt quite grand, but now they’d serve just about anybody or anything and the drinks were cheap. It had the crumbling feel of somewhere that had once upon a time been full of promise, but where everyone had stayed too long, never gone home, and been trying to drink the place dry for a century.

One night, I was dancing hard in someone’s storefront home (a lot of people lived in low-rent, former commercial properties in those days) when a song came on, two girls singing a reggae tune called “Uptown Top Ranking.” I begged the young woman in charge of the record player to please, please play it again. It’s a sweet tune, but I heard in it something lovingly militant: because they were women singing, and because I was looking for guidance. The imprint that song made on me that night stuck in the collection of things that gave me my voice.

We saw Madness at Hurrah. We went to CBGB before it was known as the legendary New York venue, when it was just another scruffy joint. It had quite an open music policy; it wasn’t geared just to punk. There was experimental rock music, B bands who were passing through town — even some arena acts playing unadvertised sets, just for the cred. I saw the rock-chick California band the Runaways there; John Cale, too. The house was full, but it doesn’t stick in my memory as a particularly great night out, except that at one point Cale left the stage and disappeared off to the bathroom. He was gone for a while and someone shouted, “He’s downstairs somewhere, probably OD-ing on his ego.”

On a hot sticky evening during the transit strike in 1980, Natasha and I walked from Long Island City across the 59th Street Bridge to the Lone Star Cafe to see James Brown. At some point after we’d reached Manhattan, we bought over-the-counter asthma meds to speed up the process a little. James Brown was red-hot that night. He’d brought two tour buses full of musicians from the deep south, far too many for the little stage. Some of them were nearly falling off the edges. But with his best man standing in the wings, ready to wrap him in the legendary cape, Mr. Brown found the space to wipe the floor clean with his moves.

Underground clubs had started popping up on the Lower East Side. These were expressive free havens where there was room for different music and sexualities. Of course, people were doing a lot of drugs. Natasha and I couldn’t afford any. We were so skint we’d be begging someone to buy us a screwdriver, but almost everyone else on the dance floor had these little glass vials around their necks and the toilets were full of people snorting cocaine. And yet there was something oddly innocent about the culture. People started bands without being able to play instruments properly, but they had a lot to say. It was fun and spontaneous. Others launched small record labels and fanzines. Anybody who wanted to do something could. A lot of music was born out of this world.

It was only when I started listening to punk, and to the singer Poly Styrene in particular, that I began to sing. At home a day didn’t go by without music, and often Eagle-Eye and I would be onstage with our parents during performances, singing and dancing alongside them. But other than my bass meanderings at the loft with Natasha, I was a listener.

I loved listening to singers like Roberta Flack, Rose Norwalt of Rose Royce, and Syreeta Wright, and I’ve always loved Minnie Riperton. These women made me feel and think, but theirs were not the voices that initially led me to find mine. Of course, I sang along with their records, but they were queens, way out of my league. With punk, other things felt possible. Singing along with Poly Styrene, I felt I could. There were so few Black people on the punk scene. She was a woman, so I felt a natural connection. Her spirit was inspiring. I was proud of her and she made me proud of myself. I took refuge in our likeness, making our way in a world that offered so few paths for us. For forging that road, chanting your verse, making my heartbeat stronger, I thank you, Poly, my brown sister.

It was Don who gave me the prompt to sing. After I had blasted out “The Day the World Turned Day Glo” yet another time in Tågarp, he said, “Try this.” He liked to buy sheet music for old standards and play them on the piano. This time, for some reason, he chose “Put Another Nickel in the Nickelodeon” — I’m sure he had an instinct. He played the piano, and I sang. In fact, I kind of belted it. It was as if I’d been released. That’s when I first dared to stretch out. That’s what you have to do when you sing. Singing is a practice that requires freedom and discipline. It’s both internal and expansive. I listen to the music, go in, feel the truth of the words, trust — and let go.