Cherry Wainer (March 2, 1935 – November 14, 2014) was a South African-born musician, best known as a member of Lord Rockingham's XI and a soloist on the Hammond organ.
Cherry Rachael Wainer was in show business almost from infancy. Her father promoted tours by nationally renowned artistes while her mother ensured that their daughter’s obvious musical talent was formalised. “I was going to be a classical pianist,” she recalled. “At the age of eight, I performed a concerto with an orchestra. I was, I suppose, considered a child prodigy – because, in my early teens, my mother took me to London to start at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School.”
While she finished the course, she failed the audition to join the associated ballet company. However, on returning to the Transvaal, her imagination was captured by the Hammond organ, a keyboard that was becoming increasingly more prominent in jazz, notably beneath the hands of the American exponent Jimmy Smith. “I was entirely self-taught,” she confessed, “mostly by applying what I knew on piano to organ. I wanted to be the female Jimmy Smith!”Response to her performances in regional clubs was sufficiently encouraging for Wainer to seek engagements further afield – in the first instance in Holland, but she was too young to go on her own, so her mother went along too. “I only knew six tunes, which I played over and over again while trying to learn new ones,” said Cherry Wainer in later life.
them work on the variety circuit and in US military bases. Burns also got them booked on ITV’s Lunch Box, the lightest of light entertainment shows, which was hosted by Noele Gordon.It was through one such appearance that they came to the attention of Jack Good, who had been commissioned to produce the first series of Oh Boy! that autumn. As well as incorporating Storer and Wainer into Lord Rockingham’s XI, he also brokered a recording contract for Wainer. Her output was to include Money (1960), historically the first Tamla-Motown number to be covered in the UK (and, later, a set track for many beat groups).
While chart entries proved elusive for Wainer in her own right, a maiden Rockingham single, Fried Onions, made the US Hot 100. Hoots Mon, the follow-up, was a domestic No 1 – and was heard on a section of Oh Boy! featured in the 1959 Royal Command Performance. Wainer became the focal point of the band – publicised as “the female Liberace” – with solo spots as both a singer and instrumentalist.
During live broadcasts of Oh Boy! on ITV in the late 1950s, its procession of chiefly male idols passed so swiftly before the cameras that screaming girls scarcely had pause to draw breath. However, screams became cheers for Cherry Wainer, seated at an upholstered Hammond organ as part of the programme’s house band, Lord Rockingham’s XI. With her grinning vibrancy and ping-pong eyes, Cherry was adored more as an admired elder sister.
Along with the band, Wainer played in the 1959 Royal Variety Performance, held at the Palace Theatre, Manchester. After the final edition of Oh Boy! in 1959, Wainer went on to star in another ITV series, Boy Meets Girls, which was aimed at a wider audience. In 1960, she appeared as herself in the musical Girls of the Latin Quarter Wainer married drummer Don Storer with whom she appeared regularly as a duo during the 1960s. They appeared regularly in a German television series, Beat! Beat! Beat (1966-1967). Wainer released several solo albums and singles, none of which made the UK charts. Wainer and her husband moved to Las Vegas in 1968, working in cabaret.
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She later retired from music but remained in Las Vegas and worked in a gift shop. Her husband died in 2006.
She later retired from music but remained in Las Vegas and worked in a gift shop. Her husband died in 2006.
Wainer died of natural causes on November 14, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada, aged 79. (Edited mainly from The Telegraph)