Getting Go, the go doc

Neneh Cherry review – spellbinding, demanding, urgent

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Backed by RocketNumberNine’s pulsating beats and crushing synths, this was sweaty, belligerent dance and Cherry was a skipping, spinning force of nature

Fresh, joyful vocals … Neneh Cherry. Photograph: Jordi Vidal/Redferns via Getty Images
“It’s really about the music, the passion, the art, the soul and the beauty,” says Neneh Cherry. She’s describing the magic of the Meltdown festival, but could equally be surmising the motivations behind a career that’s spanned three decades and during which she’s evolved from post-punk renegade to bona fide pop star and, latterly, dogged experimentalist.
Cherry’s latest album, Blank Project, is her first solo release in 18 years and sees the 50-year-old’s ruminations on loss, love, depression and recovery enmeshed in sparse, jazz-influenced electronica spun by Ben and Tom Page, AKA RocketNumberNine. Cherry stands in darkness between the brothers – Tom on drums and Ben on keyboards – as her soft, spoken-word prayer slowly unfurls into a powerful, soulful hymn over the metronome-aping rhythm of Across the Water.
It’s a spellbinding start, but soon surpassed by the primal force and captivating power of the album’s title track, which sees the lights go up and Cherry shaking her head violently to the dense, squirming keyboards. Dressed in an Adidas T-shirt, a necklace that looks like the entire contents of your nan’s button jar and a ragged black skirt, her voice is demanding and urgent, and she commands the stage. One moment, she’s making odd, stilted moves like a marionette with its strings cut, the next she’s skipping and spinning wildly.
The dark, pulsating beats and crushing synths are tailor-made for such fevered activity and a world away from the ponderous, lo-fi wonder of the record. Everything is sweaty, belligerent dance, Out of the Blackends in thunderous techno. Cherry, meanwhile, turns from an undeniably strong but restrained presence into a force of nature, vocally and physically. She raps into one mic and sings into another, dances like a banshee and makes a little rhyme taught to her by her grandmother – and dedicated to her grandson watching – sound like the cutting edge of cool.
She’s also the accessible heart of this defiantly avant-garde sound. Recalling that on her last visit to this “very iconic” venue she watched herjazz trumpeter dad, Don Cherry, playing with saxophonist Ornette Coleman, she reveals that this time she’s been captivated by the sight of a mouse backstage and dedicates a song, Bullshit, to it. It’s for the evergreen pop classic Buffalo Stance, however, that the singer’s most loved, and even though her fresh, joyful vocals are being rendered in RocketNumberNine-induced darkness, female fans dash down the front to dance. When a security guard intervenes, Cherry steps off the stage to set him straight. “Yeah, go on, ladies,” she grins, grooving along with them before receiving a well-earned standing ovation.

Betty Clarke in The Guardian