THERE are few chameleons in pop music who haven't, at one time or another, been either enriched or embarrassed by their various identities. Pop stars who know when to alter their musical approach for each imminent trend-setting phase are also the ones who will fall or stand on how they do it. People who think they have their finger on the pulse often don't know where or how to find it. Other people have their fingers on the pulse so regularly that the residual throb becomes part of their lives, thereby making their creative logic, at the very least, wholly instinctive.
Take 32-year-old Neneh Cherry, for example. For most of her early life, she travelled on tour with her step-father, jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, flitting between New York and Sweden (the homeland of her artist mother, Moki), meeting the likes of premier jazz men Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman. At 15, she went to Sierra Leone, the home of her natural father. She stayed there for six months with him, a time that she once described as both frightening and enlightening. From there to England, where she stayed with nominally arty types in London and Bristol. These were the party days for Neneh, a young girl on the tear - a long and unpredictable adventure that tragically ended with her being raped in a London back street. It's an episode she has talked about quite openly in the past but one which she now prefers not to discuss.
"When I think of Rip, Rig & Panic," she says of the Bristol outfit that obliquely set a precedent for the experimentalism behind that city's invigorating Trip Hop scene, I think of the words energy, freedom, and discovery". While she might not agree that, on a good day, her erstwhile band made Thelonious Monk sound like Phil Coulter, Neneh amiably concurs that they were intense, especially live".
But what of her attitude in playing live now? This interview was conducted prior to her year-long world tour, so how does she approach something that, in lesser hands, could turn into a stultifying exercise in repetition? It's being in a situation where to communicate live and direct to a group of people is important," she says. "That's very much how I started. You miss the live experience. There's the excitement of not knowing how things are going to go. It's quite liberating. I also feel fairly unleashed through playing live."
Unleashed from what?
"There's an incredibly different process to working in the studio to playing live. Over the years, I've had to learn how to project myself in videos, photographs. Playing live is much more natural. The last thing I think about is how my face looks while I'm singing this or that song. I'm more prone to look at other people's faces. It's more instant and therefore more refreshing."
Neneh hasn't been regularly playing live for some quite time. Apart from several one-off summer concerts (including this year's Galway Arts Festival as part of The Big Day Out open air show), she's been busy recording and raising children.
At 18, she and Rip, Rig & Panic's drummer, Bruce Smith, had a daughter, Naima (named after John Coltrane's wife; yet another of the jazz references that litter her life). Since then, she has had two more girls, Tyson and Mabel. Does she take them on tour with her, or into the studio?
"It depends on what day of the week it is," she replies, matter-of-factly and where I am and what's happening. If they're not with me, they're in very good hands - probably better than mine, in fact."
From the beginning of her successful recording career with 1989's Raw Like Sushi, Neneh has been portrayed as the woman with everything: ultra-cool, a strong streetwise image, confident and contemporary. She is also seen to be capable of having a family as well as a career. Did she ever feel that one outweighed the other?
"Because some people think that creativity dries up when kids come along, it actually made me act, quite perversely, in the opposite direction. It gave me a lot of incentive to get up and off and really fight for the things I wanted to do beyond being a mother. Sometimes you feel that you can't be anything except a mother. You become very good at being a juggler. You learn to fit things in when and where you can. I'm quite good at doing three things and singing into a tape machine at the same time. This is something that has become a big driving force but I've always felt it didn't have to be that way. You have to figure things out as you go along. I never really felt that I was prepared to lie down. I knew there were ways and possibilities. Obviously, depending on who you're working with, and how you work, plays a big part. I'm lucky that I've been able to work and grow within a family of people who think along similar lines to myself.
"From a female point of view, a lot of those stereotypes engender a driving force within me. Maybe not to go against all the time but to give you the strength to roll on through the hardships. The thing is, I don't really see myself as a feminist. I'm just a person who happens to be a woman. I write about things that I experience and that I think other people experience. Feminism is great for women to gain security but as a woman I feel it becomes another label. It doesn't necessarily fit with how I think, or how other women think. A cool woman is someone who is just themselves. I've come to the point in my life now where, as a woman I just want to celebrate that fact more."
And surely motherhood, as well? Several years ago, Neneh appeared on Top of The Pops while seven months pregnant. Does she look upon that as being a defining moment in altering the traditional view of women in pop music?
"It became something that meant quite a lot," she says modestly. "It hadn't been done before, as far I'm aware. I wasn't making a statement, though, yet it indirectly became a form of protection against a lot of the loopholes that I was afraid of falling into as a female performer. It was a bit like having a martial art, to be honest with you."
The Neneh File
NENEH CHERRY'S late stepfather was Don Cherry, the acclaimed free jazz instrumentalist who invested in her a love of musical eclecticism and a non-pretentious attitude towards the avantgarde. He gave her, says Neneh, "space for movement and an air of playfulness".
Neaeh's first band, at the height of post-punk rock, was The New Age Steppers. Then came Rip, Rig & Panic, an avant-garde funk outfit (formed from the ashes of Bristol's Pop Group), its name taken from a Roland Kirk song. Even for the times that were in it, they were quite unbearable. She has since applied her sense of musical mischief to a more independently minded and feministically assertive pop/soul/funk output. Neneh reluctantly describes her music as "rock meets dub". Her new single is Kootchie, taken from her recently released album Man (Hut/Virgin). GIG: She plays Dublin on December 10th in the city's newest (and quite possibly hippest) venue, The Red Box, above The POD.