“I used every chord in Casio” – How We Made a Manchild by Neneh Cherry | nina cherry

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Nina Sherry, singer-songwriter I’ve Seen Cameron McPhee [producer and now husband] And one day he suddenly asked me: Why don’t you write songs? You can totally write songs! I’ve been to Rip Rig + Panic, and its songwriter Gareth Sager had such a creative way of writing about everyday things. Manshield was one of the first things I came up with.

The first verse came to me when I was walking up the stairs of a double-decker bus. “Is it the pain of drinking/or the feeling of Sunday drowning?” I think I had a hangover. When I got home, I started practicing music on a Casio mini keyboard using the “auto chord” setting. I didn’t know what I was doing. when dad [late jazz trumpeter Don Cherry] Hearing him, he said, “Wow, that’s kind of jazz. You have seven strings in verse!”

The person in the song is there, but it’s not about him that way. “The car never runs / When your girlfriend’s date is late.” I just imagined a guy who works nine to five in a garage or something, but has dreams and feelings, and a cheating girlfriend. I’ve been exploring the weaker aspects of masculinity from a woman’s perspective, and the way some men approach sensitivity while others put three layers up front.

Manchild was a very important song to me: I found my style in it. I loved the simplicity of hip-hop’s raw rhythm with orchestras. When we finished recording it at Eastcote Studios, Tim Simenon from Bomb the Bass scratched and created a really cool electronic hook.

The way we worked was very homely: lots of work at home, kids in the studio, and a baby under my arms. We went to radio stations like that. Before we talk about ideas for the video, director Jean-Baptiste Mondino sat outside our house in our mini Fiat Panda listening to Manchild while watching my gorgeous Jamaican neighbor sweep the front of the house wearing gold chains. My other neighbor was unloading the laundry. Then I answered the door with a towel over my head and a baby under my arms. And Jean-Baptiste was like: “That’s it! This is the video.”

Cameron ‘Booga Bear’ McVey, Producer, I was talking about a villain but ended up working with Stock, Aitken and Waterman at the PWL label. We’ve been playing Trivial Pursuit with Kylie and people like that. All of the PWL artists were cute, but none of them were really musical – unlike Stock, Aitken, and Waterman, who really knew their bullshit. The music press saw them as enemies but they were more of a prostitute than a villain.

My colleague Jimmy Morgan and I have performed as embarrassing as Morgan McVey, Looking Good Diving. I just met Neneh, so the B-side was an early version of Buffalo Stance, with a different title and Neneh Rap. A year later, the proper version became her first single. It was a really creative track. It was easy to do five more buffalo poses but that was bad, so Ninh did something completely different with Manchild. That’s why her career really took off.

We met all those corporate shooters who were heavy with us

I remember copying her strings from Casio. It turns out that she used every chord available on the device. Producer Nellee Hooper just taught me how to sample, so I added an ambush drum. Nellie then got a 3D from Massive Attack to write the rap part for Manchild. Will Malone did all the strings on Fairlight but we left Casio out for the final taping. It looked like he cut off your leg, but it was really good in the background.

Everyone loved Manchild – except for the American company Neneh, who refused to release it. They wanted another buffalo stand, which reached number three in the US. They said Manschild wasn’t white enough to be white, or black enough to be black, and it didn’t leave enough room to leave room. We’ve met all those corporate bombers who have been heavy with us, because if you have sex in America, they are declaring war on you. When I was on the plane for the first meeting, something went wrong with the plane over Greenland and we had to turn around. I took this as a sign. Manshield was a hit everywhere except in America.

Like Attempting to Catch Lightning in a Bottle, 40 Years of Music Making at Eastcote Studios by Martin Terefe is published by Thames & Hudson. A limited edition of 550 signed copies are available from eastcotestudios.com

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