I am truly sad to hear of the passing of Dame Cleo.
A true great.
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She was indeed.
R.I.P.
She will be missed. Rest well Dame Laine.
I listened to the tribute edition of BBC Radio 3 Jazz Record Requests yesterday. It struck me that the word “artist” is a courtesy description applied to musicians. Dane Cleo was the real thing.
Her and Johnny have left a lasting legacy on the community I live within. They built “The Stables” in their garden - and it operates to this day as a vibrant and diverse theatre space, even though what was once was a village has now been largely sucked in to Milton Keynes. I know there were various planning battles in recent years, but the Stables resisted them all.
Its about 2 miles from my house - although we have the Duke of Bedford to thank that we are still in green belt, and Milton Keynes stops abruptly as soon as his estate begins - and we go regularly. We are next there to see Trevor Horn on his tour talking about his career and playing music.
It’s also worthy of mention that she was one of the very first mixed race people to become part of the british artistic pantheon (Her father was Black Jamaican) even though to this day not many people knew that she was.
At one point she was so well known that pretty much every kid in every playground could do a passable impression of her scat singing style!
A true great - and much missed.
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I only recently discovered that I attended the same infant school as her in west london . It was a pretty rough place during the late 70/80s ( the national front were rife ) so I can only imagine how hard it was for her decades earlier .
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