{"id":9570,"date":"2025-07-25T12:02:09","date_gmt":"2025-07-25T12:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=9570"},"modified":"2025-09-07T19:47:54","modified_gmt":"2025-09-07T19:47:54","slug":"recalling-giggling-over-lunch-with-the-great-cleo-laine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=9570","title":{"rendered":"Giggling over lunch with the great Cleo Laine"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013 It was lunchtime at the Hotel Pontchartrain \u00a0in Detroit and things were getting a bit silly. Cleo Laine, who has died aged 97, was talking about Kurt Weill and the Berliner Ensemble when someone mentioned Monty Python and soon she was giggling over her Dover Sole. We swapped favourite lines and it took a while before we got back to talking about the reason she was on tour in the United States.<\/p>\n

It was one day in January in 1976 and I was at lunch with the singer, her husband jazzman John Dankworth and comedian Jimmy Edwards. Although they were household names in the United Kingdom, they had never met before so I suggested the meeting. Edwards was appearing in the farce \u2018Big Bad Mouse\u2019 at the Fisher Theatre with Eric Sykes, who would have joined us but for a bad cold.<\/p>\n

Edwards died in 1988, Dankworth in 2010 and Sykes in 2012. \u00a0Dame Cleo and Dankworth had performed in Detroit several times and they always found time for lunch. That time with Edwards was notable not least because Edwards added a comic touch to proceedings but because Laine was making her long overdue American theatre debut in the Brecht-Weill musical \u2018The Seven Deadly Sins\u2019.<\/p>\n

The laughter at lunch was a perfect example of the lady\u2019s free-wheeling taste, which allowed her to record an album of Schoenburg songs at the same time as she\u2019s singing a Spike Milligan bit about a man with two many tonsils. She first sang in the U.S. in 1971 and instantly won a cult following. Jazz critic Leonard Feather called her \u2018the greatest all-round singer in the world\u2019. She started singing as a child and sang with the Dankworth band until they married in 1958 when she thought it wiser not to continue.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dankworth continued as one of Britain\u2019s most successful jazz musicians and composers with many movie scores such as \u2018The Knack; \u2018Modesty Blaise\u2019 and \u2018The Knack\u2019. Cleo went on to great success as a recording artist, not least with the 1976 album \u2018Porgy & Bess\u2019 with Ray Charles. She\u00a0performed\u00a0<\/span>internationally and did a lot of work in the theatre including an acclaimed production of \u2018Show Boat\u2019. I asked why it had taken her so long to do a musical in the U.S.<\/p>\n

\u2018Things just didn\u2019t fall together,\u201d she said in her deep, expressive voice. \u2018I could have come over but doing what? For a long time, the Beatles dominated everything and all that was happening was rock and roll. It was the wrong time for me. I could have come over and done cabaret but if you do that, what do you do next?\u2019 The answer was \u2018The Seven Deadly Sins\u2019, which she had performed at the Edinburgh Festival, Sadlers Wells and Leeds. A 40-minute piece, it follows a devilish girl named Anna, portrayed in Detroit by dancer Mary Hinkson, who encounters temptation wherever she goes. Cleo played her conscience. \u2018She wants to get out there and have all the fun and I have to tell her to stop,\u2019 said Cleo.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, Cleo Laine never stopped having all the fun and she has continued to make records and appear on stage for most of her long life. She starred in \u2018A Little Night Music\u2019 and \u2018The Merry Widow\u2019, Dankworth\u2019s musical \u2018Colette\u2019, on Broadway in \u2018The Mystery of Edwin Drood\u2019 and in Los Angeles in \u2018Into the Woods\u2019. In England, she and Dankworth ran a non-profit music organisation out of the converted stables at their Buckinghamshire home. \u2018We call it the \u2018all music\u2019 plan,\u2019 she said. \u2018That\u2019s sort of ambitious but it\u2019s what we believe in. I\u2019d hate to be stamped in one mould. I like to do all kinds of music.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013 It was lunchtime at the Hotel Pontchartrain \u00a0in Detroit and things were getting a bit silly. Cleo Laine, who has died aged 97, was talking about Kurt Weill and the Berliner Ensemble when someone mentioned … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,1263,8],"tags":[4898,1704,1547,1705,4899,4900],"class_list":["post-9570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interviews","category-memory-lane","category-music","tag-cleo-laine","tag-eric-sykes","tag-hotel-pontchartrain","tag-jimmy-edwards","tag-john-dankworth","tag-kurt-weill"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9570"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11510,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9570\/revisions\/11510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}