Are your daughters going to follow in your footsteps?
Kyla is a singer songwriter and she left school at 16, she went to Brighton Institute of Modern Music and did a song-writing course there but ever since then she just gigs and writes. She’s a prolific songwriter, she is writing every single day and she wants to make it without my help. She never pulls the ‘Cheryl Baker card’ out ever. She never says that my dad, my husband Steve, was a bass play for Cliff Richard for 20 years. He still plays for some really good bands but she never pulls those cards out. So if and when she makes it, in whatever capacity maybe as a performer, maybe as a writer she will have done it off her own back and I am really proud of her for that. Natalie is more into musical theatre, she is playing Sandy in this production, not because I think she is the best one for it, well she is the best one for it, but not because she is my daughter! She left school at 18 with fantastic A Level results, all As and A stars but she left saying ‘I don’t know what I want to do’ so she has taken some gap life at the moment. She has taken a year out but she is now coming around to thinking maybe she will go to vocational college and do some musical theatre and then perhaps go into directing because she has got a good eye for direction. She is helping me with this production. But whatever they do, if they work in Sainsbury’s as long as they are happy it’s what it’s all about, I don’t care what they do.
summer I do a summer workshop for her just for two weeks of the year for her and I love it. I think we have done some really good shows. We did Les Mis last year which was amazing. It was as good as any professional production. There was someone from Cameron Macintosh (one of the biggest musical production companies) there who took a DVD into work and said you could take any one of these performers and put them in the West End now. I was really proud. And West Side Story, the year before that, we did Footloose the musical which I was in for a year in the West End and Fame we’ve done. So this year it’s Grease. I love it. I really get a kick out of it. It just makes you feel good it really does, and you think, they could be out on the street, they could be doing stuff that they shouldn’t be doing, but they have chosen to come into these studios and work their socks off. My daughter just said, she’s got blisters on her feet but they are happy to carry on because they get on the stage to do these fantastic shows. And they cry at the end, like I used to when I was an amateur because it’s been such a great experience. To be a part of that and to know that you are giving something that is changing their life just for those two weeks, makes you feel great. I’m doing it for purely selfish reasons, I just get such a kick out of it, I love it. And on show days, I went Les Mis last year, and I couldn’t stop crying, neither could Jill. We were sitting at the back crying like babies. It was just so emotional, so wonderful. This show is different because it is such an uplifting show it will still bring tears to my eyes without a question.
to pay for the researchers - this is what the charity does. You know when you say to someone ‘can you help, we would like you to buy this’ and they go ‘yeah here you are, this is yours’ and it says donated by … you can’t do that with research because its like a dripping tap it’s always going on like cancer research, you know. When they have actually found the final cure, it will be amazing but until then you have to do research you have to keep looking and you might not find the answer but you are always progressing and every bit of progress is saving someone’s life. So that’s why I do what I do.
You work with children’s charities and IVF charities too, is that right?
Every charity! I’ve just been very involved in Demelza Children’s Hospice but also a charity for bereaved parents called Abigail’s Footsteps and, they just explained what happens when you have a stillborn baby and its almost like people go ‘oh never mind you can try again’, but you’ve just lost your child, you know? They are trying to raise enough money to buy cold cots so you’ve got a refrigerated unit where you can grieve over your baby, because otherwise they are just taken away. It’s also about teaching midwives and nurses how to deal with the parents.
To be more sensitive?
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