7 Seconds

The seven seconds of the title are the first moments of a child's life. As Neneh Cherry explained it, they are the brief time before a newborn knows anything about the problems and violence of the world. She and Youssou N'Dour wrote the lyrics together, with music by the producers Cameron McVey and Jonathan Sharp. N'Dour sings in Wolof, French and English, while Cherry answers only in English. Cherry later told The Independent that they made it as an experiment and that it then grew on its own, completely out of proportion. Released on 7 June 1994, it reached the top ten across Europe and beyond and went to number one in France, Italy, Switzerland, Finland and elsewhere. In France it held the top spot for 16 consecutive weeks, a record at the time. Its black-and-white video, shot in New York by Stéphane Sednaoui, showed faces of many different backgrounds passing by as the two sang, and it won the MTV Europe Music Award for best song of 1994. Not everyone was credited: the Swedish producer Christian Falk said he had produced and played on the track and had to hire lawyers to be paid. One American radio critic heard in it a powerful case for common humanity, made all the more striking by recent events in South Africa. In 2010 it was included in the book 1001 Songs You Must Hear Before You Die. Three decades on it remains Senegal's best-known recording abroad, a song about innocence that became a global hit.