My fascination with the life story of the late British jazz singer Cleo Laine begins in a room in the British Library in the sultry heat of the summer of 2024. I am standing in a long gallery watching a vintage film clip from the BBC archives of 1965. The clip is being played inside a large room-sized glass case on a black and white TV screen. Over the screen ripples a lithe female figure in front of a square-headed microphone, her hair cut in a dark chin- length bob, backcombed at the crown. She is wearing a pale,sequinned close fitting mini dress and jacket. Standing to her left and slightly behind her, is a saxophone player in a sharp grey suit, with cropped slicked back hair. They look like any couple typical of their era, except that when the woman opens her mouth to sing a sparky, witty rendition of “Oh! Lady Be Good”, into the microphone in front of her, an extraordinary, timeless set of notes comes out. To my ears, the sound she makes, stands at the crossroads between a flute, a bird’s trill and a low husky sigh. These are the unmistakable vocal tones of Clementine (shortened to Cleo) Laine and her husband, John, or Johnny Dankworth, one of the most influential UK composers and jazz musicians of all time. This TV studio performance by the Johnny Dankworth Seven, a band with several chart hits at this point in their career, was broadcast to the nation in 1965. In the summer of 2024, this TV appearance is taken from TV archive vaults once more to the curious gaze of the exhibition crowds, every fifteen minutes or so via the small screen mounted high above them as they pass by. Looking around me, I see that to many, this might seem a mere curio suspended in time and glass. Yet this pert, bobbed haired singer would go on to become a national treasure who, along with her husband, helped changed the face of entertainment in the UK. This wave of popularity was mainly disseminated, not by the many digitised platforms we know today, but by the main status symbol of the time, the black and white television set, installed in pride of place in mid-century living rooms. Her growing fame was also achieved by word of mouth and, for anyone lucky enough to see her live performances with other musicians, on the national jazz club scene as well as the international concert hall circuit. Later, Dankworth and Laine together would also go on to be jazz educators, and founders of The Stables, a major live concert venue in Wavendon, Buckinghamshire, their UK residence.
This tableau I am watching, is one of the major exhibits of “Beyond The Bass: 500 Years of Black Music”, curated and staged during one of the warmest summers on record – I have travelled on a sweltering minibus from Brighton to St Pancras in London to see it – at the British Library by Dr Aleema Gray and Dr Mykael Riley, the latter based at the Black Music Research Unit at the University of Westminster. And Dame Cleo Laine, despite being 96 and fragile, in 2024 is still yet a formidable living presence.
As I stand at the glass case, looking in, I realise I am witnessing for an historic split second, the meteoric rise of this beautiful, high cheekboned, mesmeric muse on screen. At the same time, she seems almost like a caged bird amongst the black and the gold vinyl discs and Dansette record players on the walls in the “Beyond The Bass” exhibition. But in fact, although this makes the loss of her only a year later, all the more poignant, the name of Cleo Laine is unavoidably synonymous with the rise of mid- twentieth century British mass media and with the growing demand for more diversity in TV entertainment schedules, which naturally presented opportunities to those Black female singers rising to prominence alongside her.
These were first Winnie Atwell, then Shirley Bassey and the pop singer Millie, of “My Boy Lollipop” fame, who, like Cleo, were gaining popularity with the British public and were consequently given more broadcast airtime and greater freedom of expression in the wider arts world. This was also happening in entertainment during the same period in the US, with some artists of colour, such as singers Ella Fitzgerald and Lena Horne, hosting their own prime time TV shows there.
The 1960s in Britain saw a galaxy of music and variety television programmes which had featured rising Black British stars. Having recorded her debut album “She’s The Tops!” for MGM Studios in 1957, Cleo was amongst the first post-war wave of these. The new rock n’ roll, and the flowering into the pop charts of the Beatles and the Yardbirds, intermingled with light entertainment. Easy listening singers, like Alma Cogan, dominated the charts, live venues and TV. Meanwhile racism was still something Cleo would have had to contend with. When she and Eartha Kitt were included in the all-star lineup for the BBC’s 1962 Royal Variety Performance, so was the Black And White Minstrel Show, all blacked-up faces and white painted lips, as Al Jolson had been some generations before, a spectacle that would hardly get airtime on contemporary TV.
But the tipping point to these trends was really 1964, a special year for Black female singers. Cleo was invited to appear on the ITV show “Freedom Road”, performing the Billie Holliday hit “Strange Fruit” as part of a group of Black singers performing songs from the days of slavery to the burgeoning civil rights movement. She then followed this up by singing words and Sonnets in the critically acclaimed ITV special “Lyrics by Shakespeare”. This was a precursor to her stage acting career, taking in productions from “Showboat” to the RSC where she was directed by Tony Richardson, the husband of venerated British actress Vanessa Redgrave. Cleo’s own star, both in music and theatre, was clearly on the rise at this time.
In 1927, the year of her birth, however, it was a different story. Britain was struggling with harsg economic conditions of the interwar years. Britain broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. It was, however, significantly in this year that universal suffrage was granted, with all women over the age of 21 permitted to vote. The upward social mobility, the big career breaks, and the glitter and glamour of the television age were in reality far in the future.
Cleo Laine, or Clementine Bullock, as she was named by her parents, Alexander and Minnie, was born in Uxbridge, Middlesex and grew up in Southall, just beginning to be the bustling, bubbling, seething London suburban mix of global cultures it is today, the accompanying racial street tensions fusing and melding with joyful community activity and vibrancy.
In Southall’s neighbouring suburb Greenford, the Lyons Maid ice cream factory was built, and many local people worked there. In the same period, white collar workers would commute to Central London, to jobs in the West End. The Bullock family’s income could be sporadic, as Clementine’s father’s earnings as a street busker and construction labourer, soon proved. Her performance talents however, were becoming apparent, and she was sent for training in acting, singing and dancing by her mother, perhaps with an eye to the young Clementine’s earning potential and independence.
By her own admission, Clementine’s dancing was not her strong point, although her singing and acting was to emerge head and shoulders above the rest, at a later phase in her long life.
For her 90th birthday celebrations, seven years before her passing away in 2025, Dame Cleo Laine gave an audio interview to the BBC Sounds podcast, “Front Row”, in which she declared that as a child growing up, if anyone should venture to make racially charged remarks in the school playground, “ she’d thump ‘em” and that as a result, no one ever called her white mother names for marrying a black man, as they did others. Given this background, her own two mixed race marriages seem so natural as to be of no consequence, both to her at the time and from a contemporary point of view. Yet they were indeed of consequence. They were an important statement, and are an irrevocable part of Black history, and of the narrative around Black popular music, in the UK.
In her interview for BBC Sounds in 2018, Cleo comes over as tough but tender, head and heart ruling together. She recalls her audition for the Johnny Dankworth Seven with pragmatic warmth, saying she only stood out in the queue of eager hopefuls, because hers was the only lower female voice amongst a whole flock of sopranos. She then gives her change of stage name the briefest of shrugs, saying “Clementine” was way too long. It seems that her straightforwardly assertive approach to growing up in West London as a mixed race girl, emerged in marked contrast to her own father’s, who disliked confrontation. In response to the interviewer’s questions, she observes that she couldn’t remember her father standing up to racism in quite the same way as her, and that he was often absent from the family’s lives.
Nevertheless, throughout her long career and personal life, Cleo seemed to toss racism out of her way by the horns, in much the way she did other obstacles or significant experiences, such as being a jazz woman in a world of male players, which catered mostly to male performers. In interviews, she talks warmly about scary moments for her, like freezing on stage when she couldn’t remember the words to a song, and getting no help from her straight talking pianist husband John Dankworth on that occasion, either. Working in the jazz idiom, she was frequently put on the spot in a live setting, in front of an expectant audience, to improvise and to use her voice like another musical instrument from very early on, which helped to develop her distinctive scatting style. She also explains however, that it was not until later in her career that she developed the higher ranges of her vocal range, due to having to match her band members’ higher registers on their own instruments. She developed a deft “call and response” ability facing these live challenges, and she could also match any musician in improvisation on stage or in the recording studio. In 1979, she was awarded an OBE, in 1986, she was became the first female artist to win a Grammy award in the jazz category and simultaneously for her work in jazz, classical and pop music. In 1997, she was made a British Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for her services to music.
But it seems to me, it is not these awards that she considered the most important. The more I listen to Cleo Laine’s extensive musical oeuvre, the more I feel that she was successful precisely because she was a creature of collaboration: from the hit “You’ll Answer To Me” with the Johnny Dankworth Seven, in 1961, to her duo performance “He Was Beautiful”, with guitarist composer John Williams, in 1974, to her humorous duetting on TV in a medley of songs culminating with “Girl Talk”, with US jazz vocalist supremo Sarah Vaughan. Even side by side with Ray Charles, like “Summertime” and also with Frank Sinatra, visually Cleo’s wide eyes and auburn curls draw you in, the camera constantly lingers on her face, while her voice can go from a whistle to a howl to a whimper to a purr, and it often takes you on an entire emotional journey in the same phrase. At the same time it is determinedly authentic, intelligent and honest: it has integrity; it never dumbs down or sells out. And this is her true legacy which she leaves to us.
