Male pop critics who came of age in the 1970s have written reams — an entire book, in Dylan Jones’s case — about how their social and cultural horizons were expanded by David Bowie’s 1972 appearance singing “Starman” on the BBC’s Top of the Pops.
Less has been written about how Neneh Cherry changed the game for girls watching the same show in 1988. But we could hear the sound of future glass ceilings shattering as the camera swooped towards the 24-year-old Afro-Swedish artist in her high-top trainers and black micro-skirt, huge gold medallion swinging over an eight-month baby bump as she rapped, sang and laughed through “Buffalo Stance”.
Mixing dance-pop and hip-hop with a raw, punk spirit, Cherry chronicled an edgy street scene of girls “wearing padded bras, dropping down their drawers, where did you get yours?” and spat scorn at a pimp who tried to recruit her.
Like Bowie’s metrosexual demeanour, Cherry’s emancipated attitude was all part of the London zeitgeist. But it came as a jolt to suburban sitting rooms. Here was Cherry, sticking her pregnancy on national primetime and decking it in gold.
The daughter of a Sierra Leonean musician and a Swedish artist (who met her stepfather, American jazz trumpeter Don Cherry, while pregnant with Neneh), Cherry was raised in Stockholm and New York. She moved to London at 14 and by 16 had joined all-female punk band The Slits before becoming lead singer of the skronking post-punk collective Rip Rig + Panic.
“Buffalo Stance” grew out of a 1987 Stock Aitken & Waterman B-side “Looking Good Diving”, written and recorded by her then boyfriend (now husband) Cameron McVey and photographer Jamie Morgan. They were all part of a music/art/fashion scene centred on the “buffalo” style originated by Scottish stylist Ray Petri, who died of complications from Aids in 1989. Borrowing the Caribbean slang “buffalo”, meaning rebel, Petri’s bold, disruptive style mixed high fashion with hip street gear.
Talking to Sound on Sound last year, McVey said he thought: “Wouldn’t it be interesting to do a rap tune that had a sung chorus?” and wrote the song very quickly. Two years later, when Cherry and McVey were working on Cherry’s first solo album, Tim Simenon (AKA Bomb the Bass) was called in to give the track a fresh dancefloor edge. He built up “Buffalo Stance” from two main samples: Miami’s “Chicken Yellow” (that’s the sax) and Malcolm McLaren’s “Buffalo Gals”. Studio engineer Mark Saunders programmed some basic percussion to use as a template and Simenon urged him to keep the raw sound. The next day Cherry came in and belted out the vocal in three takes, spiking her New York accent with cockney phrases: “Wass he loike?”
The song peaked at number three on the UK and Billboard Hot 100 charts, despite an initial struggle for airplay in a musically segregated America. Madonna is rumoured to have been inspired to write “Express Yourself” after hearing Cherry and the success of Cherry’s album, Raw Like Sushi, helped fund McVey’s next production project: Massive Attack’s trip-hop classic Blue Lines. Cherry gave birth in the same terraced house where the Bristol band were recording the album.
Strongly identified with Cherry (whose latest album, Broken Politics, was released last week), the song hasn’t been widely covered. There were a couple of forgettable Europop versions (by Portugal’s Buraka Som Sistema and Sweden’s Alice in Videoland) in 2010 and Cher Lloyd offered a weak reinterpretation on 2011’s “Playa Boi”. The original version has appeared on the soundtrack to the computer game Grand Theft Auto and lends spice to the opening credits of Jamie Oliver’s TV cookery series Jamie’s 15 Minute Meals (perhaps a reflection of Oliver’s fondness for buffalo mozzarella).
Interviewed for The Guardian in 2014, Cherry remembered “feeling charged” by that Top of the Pops appearance. Feeling “proud, and very feminine, very woman. I thought, I’m not going to go away.”
These days every female pop artist has a choice about whether to perform pregnant. Beyoncé stunned in skintight gold, while pregnant with twins, at the 2017 Grammy Awards. Nobody asked her, as Cherry was asked, if it was “safe” for her to take to the stage in that condition.
Do you have any personal memories of ‘Buffalo Stance’? Were you inspired — or surprised — by Neneh Cherry’s 1988 TV appearance? Let us know in the comments below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s
Music credits: Virgin UK; Parlophone UK; Syco Music Ltd
Picture credit: Michel Linssen/Redferns