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Front Row: Neneh Cherry interviewed; the Transit of Venus in art

Neneh Cherry interviewed; the Transit of Venus in art

01/06/2012

BBC Radio 4 - Front Row, Neneh Cherry interviewed; the Transit of Venus in art

Neneh Cherry; the transit of Venus in art; when a dark future becomes the dull present.

Neneh Cherry on jazz and her dad; the transit of Venus in art; science fiction prophesies when a dark future becomes the dull present; a comic novel about loathing life in Seattle.

Neneh Cherry first made her name performing her hit Buffalo Stance on Top of the Pops while seven months pregnant. She later went on to collaborate with other artists including Youssou N'Dour and Michael Stipe. Her new album The Cherry Thing is another collaboration, this time with Swedish jazz trio The Thing, and includes covers of artists like The Stooges and Neneh's father Don Cherry. She explains how her upbringing informed her sound and why jazz is more than a musical genre.

Kirsty Lang talks to Maria Semple, formerly a writer on US TV shows including Ellen and Arrested Development. Her novel Where'd You Go, Bernadette is an epistolary comedy about paranoid parenting, loathing Seattle and a loving daughter's journey to Antarctica to find her troubled mum.

As the Transit Of Venus makes a rare appearance on June 5th and 6th, Front Row considers the various ways that it's inspired art, literature and music over the centuries.

Death Watch predicted reality television a good ten years before it became a reality itself. But as so often with science fiction, a dark future has transformed into the dull present, as Professor Roger Luckhurst explains.

Producer Stephen Hughes

Neneh Cherry photo: copyright Jamie Morgan.

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