Farewell to the only female singer to be nominated for a Grammy Award in Jazz, Classical and Pop. Dame Cleo Laine has died at the age of 97. A personable pioneer, the Sunday Times once described her as “quite simply the best singer in the world.” Yet no matter how versatile she was — and she was always solid, dependable, and frequently outstanding — this legendary and onetime local lady will always be remembered as Britain’s First Lady of Jazz.
Or is that the First Lady of Milton Keynes? Because for such a soulless and sterile city, MK can boast not only Laine and hubby Sir John Dankworth but George Melly, too, had a strong connection to the place. I used to work with his niece, after all.
Let me explain.
In a career which spanned seven decades, legendary performer Cleo Laine, who has died at the age of 97, was one of the most distinctive voices in jazz. Indeed, regarded by many as Britain’s greatest contribution to the what is quintessentially an American genre, she recorded over 50 albums and appeared in countless stage productions.
Born Clementine Dinah Hitching in October 1927, she was the daughter of a Jamaican father and English mother whose childhood in the working class suburb of Southall, west London, was supported by her labourer father’s busking talents. Though before her musical career really took off in the 1950s, Cleo was destined to carry on as a hairdresser’s assistant, a hat-trimmer, a librarian, and a shop assistant in a pawnbroker’s shop.
The plucky lass never gave up, though, entering numerous talent contests and singing on a semi-professional basis before finally auditioning for the composer arranger Johnny Dankworth, the man she would go on to marry, making them the UK’s First Couple of Jazz.
Living in Kilburn until a move to rural Buckinghamshire (the exact opposite to me 30 years later), the pair got to know the Count Basie and Duke Ellington bands, and their house become a social centre for London’s jazz-chic crowd. Oscar Peterson and Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young and Dizzy Gillespie all became friends.
Although best known as a jazz singer, Laine was also an accomplished classical actress with a colourful and diverse resume. Laine had such dramatic depth that she bagged the lead in Flesh To A Tiger at London’s Royal Court Theatre, the title role in Sylvia Wynter’s The Barren One, and, closer to home, starred as the biracial Julie La Verne in a West End revival of Show Boat at the Adelphi, notching up a staggering 910 performances over two years in the early 70s.
Indeed, after years of homegrown plaudits, the seventies was when Cleo Laine broke through in the US. She was all over TV — including a tasty turn on The Muppets — faster than you could say Shirley Bassey: an exotic hothouse flower with the loose-limbed, doll-like moves of a marionette, and a headful of floppy Afro curls that made her look a bit like Marc Bolan with a tan.
The T. Rex tunesmith didn’t have the range for this next song, though. On a Dutch telly spot belting out the exuberant 60s show tune A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Laine takes listeners on a giddy helium balloon ride. With casual elegance, she soars circles around the tune, then leaps up to an ear-popping high G. For context, Joan Sutherland — regarded and opera’s greatest coloratura soprano, only sang up to high F.
Audiences loved hearing Laine do an Albion Ella and scat in unison with Dankworth’s clarinet or alto saxophone. Her luscious, swooping low contralto zoomed huskily almost four octaves into the ether, like a 1977 telly spot filmed at home in Buckinghamshire where she literally scats herself into becoming not one but several different instruments in the pace of 30 seconds.
Enraptured critics proclaimed her the world’s greatest singer, the dowager aristocrat of song, despite her working class roots and accent. Indeed, Cleo Laine’s versatility knew few bounds; she sang everything from Shakespeare to Bessie Smith, Perdido to Stephen Sondheim. She recorded with Ray Charles, toured with Sinatra, dabbled with Dudley Moore and earned a Grammy nomination for her version of Schoenberg’s atonal song cycle Pierrot Lunaire.
By 1985, Laine’s intimate and smoky chops were the toast of New York, where in February of that year she won a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Performance, for her album Cleo At Carnegie. Its success was a revelation, puncturing the honorific hegemony that saw the majority of the night’s gongs dominated by another couple of mixed race powerhouses also now dearly departed, Tina Turner and Prince.
Around this time, my mother — herself a product of myriad indigenous heritage — came back from walking our new West Highland Terrier at Willen Lake, a man-made moana on the eastern fringes of what is now one of the UK’s newest cities, Milton Keynes.
“Guess who we bumped into,” she asked of me.
“I don’t know — The Queen?”
“Close, Cleo Laine. And she was wearing bright white flares!”
Indeed, fashion faux pas notwithstanding, my parents were while not exactly friends with the Dankworths, certainly on nodding terms with them — a cursory smile and a “hello” and that’s the end of it — chiefly because the HQ of my father’s employer, Milton Keynes Development Corporation, was at Wavendon Tower, a mixed use venue 10 minutes from where my parents lived, and a place where we’d often spend Friday nights socialising with other planning types.
I’d even spend a few weeks there in the summer of ’86 trying out a temporary chef assignment, arranged by Father of course.
Crucially, Wavendon Tower was also around the corner from The Stables, the acclaimed arts complex Johnny and Cleo built in the late 1960s in the grounds of their stately rectory home on the edge of town, where the likes of Amy Winehouse and Dave Brubeck put in appearances.
The couple had previously lived 10 minutes further out on the Bucks-Beds border in Aspley Guise so were already something approaching local royalty, for want of a better expression. Indeed, as a MKDC Clerk of Works inspectorate my father was called out a few times to survey plans and applications whenever the Dankworths wanted to submit changes or expansions to the venue. Or even just to apply for grants to keep the endeavour afloat.
Did we ever go and see them perform? I’m ashamed to say we didn’t. Unlike my like my aunt and grandparents, my nearest and dearest were never jazz fans, and one day when I asked Mother if she’d be interested in seeing a Cleo concert she declined and sent up her scat style, “what, all that ‘Doo-bee-doo-bee-doo. Doo-doo-dee-dah. Dah-dah-dah-dah-dah’? No thanks!’
Alas, for some reason best known to me and my therapist, I only managed to fit in a gig at The Stables in 2017, a good quarter-century after I’d moved from the area. Following Dankworth’s death in 2010 Cleo had virtually retired by then, so with callous aforethought my oldest school chum Jo and I caught Echo & The Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch in particularly vitriolic spirits in the round, and inebriated. Very.
Targets for Mac the Mouth‘s barely comprehensible ramblings included his mum, southerners, Jo Wiley’s feet, and even Cleo Laine herself (pretty half-assed attempt at impersonation too).
Even his supposedly all-time hero didn’t escape unscathed – the Scouse scally rubbishing David Bowie’s goodbye album, Blackstar, with the slightly hearing-impaired overview, “Where’s the fookin’ tune?”
Cleo was probably backstage appalled and somewhat slightly fazed. Because, of course, there ain’t nothing like a Dame.
Steve Pafford
Dame Cleo Laine, Born 28 October 1927 in Middlesex. Died 24 July 2025 in Milton Keynes
Live review: Shambles at The Stables – Ian McCulloch in Milton Keynes is here
