At the end of the 1980s, Neneh Cherry’s vibrant hip-hop sound was all over MTV and radio, as her song “Buffalo Stance” stormed up the charts (peaking at No. 3 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1989). Since then, though, the feisty musician has kept a relatively low profile, choosing instead to focus on family — now based in Sweden, she raised her three kids in Park Slope for a while — and the occasional under-the-radar collaboration. But on Tuesday, Cherry will relaunch her solo career with the minimalist album “Blank Project.”
“I’ve been in bands since I was a teenager,” she tells The Post. “But now I’m happy to be back at the center of things.” To mark her return, here are five things you didn’t know about Neneh Cherry.
1. She was raised amid jazz royalty.
As a child, Cherry traveled the world with her stepfather, Don Cherry, a legendary trumpet player who often worked with free-jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. She has said that one of her earliest childhood memories is of sitting with Miles Davis at a gig in Paris. “People like Ornette were just family friends,” the 49-year-old tells The Post.
2. he grew up in Long Island City — long before it was cool.
Though she was born in Sweden and spent her early years in England, during the late 1970s, when she was in junior high, Cherry lived with her parents and siblings in an artist-inhabited building in LIC. Among her neighbors? Members of Talking Heads. “[Long Island City] was a no man’s land — nothing like it is now,” she recalls. “There was just a strip joint for the cab drivers and workers at Pepsi-Cola. That was about it!”
3. “Buffalo Stance” was actually a spinoff.
In 1986, the short-lived British pop duo Morgan McVey released a single called “Looking Good Diving.” The B-side, “Looking Good Diving With the Wild Bunch,” featured Cherry rapping the iconic lines she would later use to open “Buffalo Stance”: “Who’s that gigolo on the street/With his hands in his pockets and his crocodile feet?”
“That verse came to me while I was walking to the supermarket,” recalls Cherry. “Even then, we knew we were on to something!” As for the song’s mysterious title: “Buffalo” refers to a fashion collective of designers, stylists and photographers (including Jimmy Morgan and Cameron McVey — Cherry’s future husband) that she palled around with.
4. She stirred up controversy with her baby bump.
As “Buffalo Stance” rose to No. 3 in the UK in 1988, Cherry performed the song on the now-defunct British TV show “Top of the Pops” — with her very pregnant belly sheathed in a skin-tight Lycra skirt. “I got some bad write-ups for that. One newspaper said it was really unhealthy and bad for the baby!” says Cherry. “But it really wasn’t a big political statement or something that was for shock value.”
She adds that the timing of her success, which coincided with the birth of her daughter Tyson, created an unusual challenge: “I was performing in all these great clothes designed by Jean Paul Gaultier and other cool people. I had to squeeze into them and send them back with breast milk stains on them!”
5. She views her new album as her saving grace.
One of the things referenced on the new album is the 2009 death of Cherry’s mother, Moki. “There are things that I can’t work out by chatting to my friends with a couple of bottles of wine,” Cherry says. “I was gonna become a raging lunatic if I didn’t get this s–t off my chest! The album is like therapy for me.”