Neneh Cherry's street style hits: "I looked like the female Muhammad Ali" Neneh Cherry walks into our interview dressed exactly how you would imagine: hair piled up, bomber jacket, Adidas high tops and gold hooped earrings. The singer, 50 this year, has spent almost 30 years perfecting this look, and it's now what you might call a street classic. "If it ain't broke, right?" she says, with a shrug and one of her, quite frankly, gorgeous smiles. Cherry is back with her first solo record for 17 years and a single, Spit Three Times, which is out this week. It's a welcome return - in style as well as sound; ever since the early 80s, she has embraced the connections between the two. Her debut album, Raw Like Sushi, defined late 80s London. The cover features a 25-year-old Cherry wearing a defiant expression, dollar-sign earrings, stacks of gold bracelets, and on her hands the tape more usually used by boxers. It was cool, tough and, as the record title suggests, stripped-back. "I can't say that it was a concept," she says now. "It wasn't like "We want to focus on this tough chick." It was just what were doing - making something that mixes the street in. Despite no grand plan, this image - and others including her now-infamous pregnant appearance on Top of the Pops in 1988 - has become a touchstone for younger female artists negotiating the pressures of looking a certain way in the pop sphere. The spontaneity of its conception must appeal to a generation who have stylists" moodboards planning their outfits years in advance. "It sort of amazes me," she says, of her new status as style inspiration. I have always felt like a bit of a ditz. A pregnant Neneh Cherry on Top of the Pops, 1988. In fact, Cherry's cool credentials are the stuff of legend. The stepdaughter of jazz musician Don Cherry, she lived between rural Sweden and New York as a child, hanging out with Allen Ginsberg in the Chelsea Hotel and sharing a loft building with Talking Heads. Her first job in London was stapling together issues of i-D magazine "with a girl called Scrubber," and she hung out with Ari Up from The Slits on the punk scene, dying her hair red as a teenager. It was meeting stylists Judy Blame and Ray Petri in the mid-80s that crystallised the look for her burgeoning solo career. Cherry has worked with Blame for her entire working life, and credits the stylist and jewellery designer with her ability to "create fashion that's anti-fashion. Putting a Gaultier thing next to cycling shorts from some shop in 14th Street. Petri, who died from complications due to Aids in 1989, was responsible for the Buffalo look in the pages of The Face: tough boys and girls from multicultural London wearing crisp graphic tailoring and street staples such as pork-pie hats photographed in still, almost classical portraits. Cherry embraced it, as the title of her biggest hit attests. "Ray was a true artist," she says. He had the insight and compulsion to draw out something that hadn't been seen in fashion - the streets, who we are, all of our colours, all of our mixtures. This appealed to a young Cherry, growing up as a mixed-race child in Sweden. "I was incredibly conscious of being different, looking different," she says. That no one else had hair like me, or my skin colour. This experience contrasted with the family's regular trips to New York. "The States became somewhere I could spread my wings and really start to appreciate and absorb black culture," she says, her voice a mishmash of Scandinavian, cockney and American. Fashion was part of that: "People would step out flexing their own style, taking whatever it is that they got and really making the most of it. I remember seeing this girl in a blue suit, with her hair all defined like it was an amazing cake. Fashion as a means of self-expression remains deep in Cherry's bones. She says clothes, wherever they're from, still need an edge of cool to appeal to her: "If it's from the street or goes to the street, it always has to look cool." Along with those bomber jackets and trademark high-tops, she regularly wears young London designer Christopher Shannon - "He's my darling," she says - Stella McCartney and Swedish avant garde label Ann-Sofie Back, and, as always, looks every inch herself. The formula certainly ain't broke yet. Here are seven ways that show Cherry's style in full effect. Ready to rebel: in a squat at Ladbroke Grove, London. Photograph: David Corio/Redferns This was when I first moved to London. I used to wear head ties at lot. I first visited when I was 14 and stayed with some punk friends of my mother's. I remember being completely fascinated by what was happening here. I was ready to rebel. The New York vibe. Photograph: Ray Stevenson/REX/Ray Stevenson/REX When I came to England and I was spending a lot of time going to sound systems, the crown or the hat was the strong piece. Those bracelets are like the ones from New York, that kind of vibe. "The female Muhammad Ali": on the cover of the album Raw Like Sushi. Photograph: Internet Jean-Baptiste Mondino [who shot the picture] had been to my house and saw me breastfeeding and we did the picture like that. Ray Petri used to say I looked like the female Muhammad Ali. Cherry, seven months pregnant. People still talk about the Top of the Pops thing. It wasn't planned, there was no scheme, there was just no changing it: I was about seven months pregnant. Judy just got some stretchy stuff and I wore that. This jacket is by Mark Lawrence, a new designer coming up out of Central Saint Martins. Cheap and cheerful: The dollar bodysuit. Photograph: Mick Hutson/Redferns This was from Patricia Field's shop in New York - it's not by her, it's by some drag-queen designer. I think we ran out of money, spending it on baby clothes, so needed something cheap and cheerful. Those are $7 earrings. A decade on, Cherry still owns this top. This is a bit more girly but I'm sure I'm still wearing it with trainers. I'm not sure what that top is, but I still have it. I've tried to get better at keeping the things that have emotional value, that I can pull back out. A flea-market find in Sweden, where Cherry lived as a child. This is my weird 60s cocktail dress. I should be on a patio with some green olives. I bought it at a flea market in Sweden with my mum. I was really hungover. I tried it and it fit like it was made for me. Stella on loan: Cherry attends the Stella McCartney show during Paris fashion week womenswear S/S 2015 Photograph: Pierre Suu/Getty Images I was playing at Stella McCartney's after party and my daughter Mabel had never been a fashion show, so we got the early train. I was wearing a Stella McCartney knitted jumpsuit, Judy Blame necklace and Stan Smiths. I had all these amazing Stella McCartney clothes on loan. I'm still mourning sending them back.