‘The first verse came to me as I was going up the stairs of a double-decker bus with a hangover’
![‘I used every chord on the Casio’ – How we made Manchild by Neneh Cherry](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/81a3d3a51c80128ce1005d46f92c7f530b244b02/536_298_1754_1052/master/1754.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdGctZGVmYXVsdC5wbmc&enable=upscale&s=cfe1c03c9b677fbe66464d644852850e)
Neneh Cherry,
Singer and songwriterI 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!”