It’s brassy, it’s classy, it’s sassy: Dame Shirley Bassey is a one woman genre, a bridge between the Broadway standards and the Bond themes
Dame Shirley Bassey I Owe It All To You Out Friday
This is a new album, billed as a ‘grand finale’. After making records since 1957, Shirley Bassey has surely earned the right to retire. But in showbusiness every finale is a good excuse for an encore.
And Bassey, astonishingly, is still on top form at 83.
Her voice remains a magnificent retort to the choir teacher at her primary school in wartime Cardiff, who told her to ‘back off’. If any of these new songs came on the radio, with no introduction, you’d know instantly who it was.
After making records since 1957, Shirley Bassey (above) has surely earned the right to retire. But in showbusiness every finale is a good excuse for an encore
Bassey is a one-woman genre, a bridge between the Broadway standards (she has done hundreds) and the Bond themes (she has done three – two more than anyone else). Her sound is her brand. It’s brassy, it’s classy, it’s sassy – it’s Bassey.
After a 30-second overture the first track proper is Who Wants To Live Forever by Queen. It takes guts to cover Freddie Mercury – and lungs. First purring, then roaring, Bassey makes the song her own.
What follows is quite unlike Queen but very like this Dame. She roams from Barry Manilow to Beyoncé, from John Miles to Albinoni, from Lady Gaga to Charlie Chaplin (a superb remake of Smile, putting on more than a brave face).
Bassey’s charisma comes laced with reality: like another Welsh legend, Tom Jones, she started out working in a factory – gloves in his case, munitions in hers.
There are a couple of mis-hits. Her cover of Always On My Mind has little to add to the classic version by Elvis Presley. With You Ain’t Heard Nothing Yet, the recording that Bassey can’t improve on is her own.
Its place should have gone to You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet by Bachman-Turner Overdrive: she’d be great at hard rock.
The only new song is the title track, written by Don Black, who gave her Diamonds Are Forever. A natural-born showstopper, I Owe It All To You is My Way with less grandstanding and more gratitude.
‘This audience of mine,’ Bassey assures us, ‘has been my bread and wine.’
It only adds to the suspicion that she’ll be back.