Wearing those gowns, making people happy, seeing the fans stand up is the greatest thing in the world. It’s better than sex

Dame Shirley Bassey on her dazzling

DAZZLING in the spotlight as the audience rise to their feet, Dame Shirley Bassey is in her element.

Her incredible voice is made for big numbers including Big Spender and Goldfinger, helping her sell 135 million records in a glittering 60-year career.

“Wearing those glamorous gowns, making people happy, seeing people stand up, which is the greatest thing in the world, it’s better than sex,” says Dame Shirley, who turns 80 on January 8.

But behind the sequins and the adulation lies a torment that has driven her success – and every triumph has come at the cost of personal happiness.

“I’ve found happiness in my work but not in my private life,” she says.

“The one takes from the other. I had to make a lot of sacrifices.

“I was happy until success entered my life, then it was downhill. Success spoilt me. It took away my happiness.”

The drive to succeed was powerful enough to propel her from the life of poverty and turmoil she was born into in the Tiger Bay area of Cardiff, which was then a down-at-heel neighbourhood.

Trouble

She was a year old when her father, Nigerian sailor Henry Bassey, was jailed for having sex with a nine-year-old girl.

Shirley’s mother Eliza Metcalfe moved the family to a new neighbourhood, Splott, where fresh trouble awaited the youngster when she went to school and was targeted by a violent teacher.

“I was the only coloured kid in the school, and I swear the teacher I had was prejudiced,” she says.

“She set about me one day with a ruler, up and down my legs and arms so I just went ‘Pow!’ (mimes a punch).”

The diva had arrived – and as she grew up, she began to revel in the power of her blossoming sex appeal.

“I learnt to become more feminine as a way of controlling men,” says Dame Shirley. “Girls can’t help but flirt.

“When you wear your first bra you look down and say, ‘Oh look at these!’.”

She quit school at 13 to work in a sausage factory by day while performing in clubs by night.

By the time she was 16 she was pregnant with her first daughter, Sharon. But she was determined to keep working, so her sister Iris brought Sharon up – and Shirley became “Aunty Shirley” for the next eight years. As she built up her success Shirley rarely saw her family.

“I’d been gone since the age of 16 and I only ever saw them when I went home. It’s just how it was,” she says.

Racy

She got her first recording contract aged 19 in 1956. Her first single, Burn My Candle, was considered so racy the BBC banned it. Several singles followed but her first No1 was in 1959. Called As I Love You, it was the first chart topper by a Welsh artist.

She signed to EMI/Columbia and in 1960 her career moved up a league, with hits including 1963’s I Who Have Nothing and 1965 James Bond theme Goldfinger.

In the same year she divorced her first husband, Kenneth Hume, after four years’ marriage. He was 11 years her senior, believed to have been ga gay and died of a drug overdo dose in 1967. Shirley had se second daughter Samantha in 1963 while they were still we wed, but she was believed to be t the product of her affair with the actor, Peter Finch. Shi Shirley has stayed silent on th the issue. In 1967 she released Big S Spender, and a year later wed Italian Sergio Novak. She adopted her greatn nephew Mark, but she and Novak had no children of their own and split in 1979.

“None of my relationships have worked out,” she says. “They’ve all been great in the beginning, then after a year they think no, I can’t cope with this anymore.

Peak

“They were called Mr Bassey. It’s very difficult for a woman who’s successful.”

Shirley reached the peak of her success in the 1970s and 1980s, with two more Bond themes – Diamonds Are Forever, followed by Moonraker, and 1984 anthem I Am What I Am. It meant she was touring the world as her children grew up. “I wasn’t, you know, cut out to be a mum because I was in the business,” she says.

“None of them liked it, me going away, but Samantha took it to heart. Every time the cases came up from the basement the kids would be ‘Aaagh!”

Shirley fell out with Mark after he sold the story of her turbulent home life. Then in 1985 Samantha was found dead, at the age of 21, in the River Avon in Bristol. Police said there was no crime but Shirley remained suspicious. “It’s bothered me