‘The first verse came to me as I was going up the stairs of a double-decker bus with a hangover’
Neneh Cherry, singer and songwriter
I was seeing Cameron McVey [producer and now husband] and one day he suddenly asked me: “Why are you not writing songs? You could totally write songs!” I’d been in Rip Rig + Panic, whose songwriter Gareth Sager had such an inventive way of writing about everyday stuff. Manchild was one of the first things I came up with.
The first verse came to me as I was going up the stairs of a doubledecker bus. “Is it the pain of the drinking / Or the Sunday sinking feeling?” I think I had a hangover. When I got home, I started to work out the music on a little Casio keyboard using the “auto chord” setting. I didn’t know what I was doing. When my dad [late jazz trumpeter Don Cherry] heard it, he went: “Wow, that’s kinda jazz. You’ve got seven chords in the verse!”
