The grit and glamour of a working-class diva
As Shirley Bassey releases her final album today, James Hall reflects on the the girl from Tiger Bay’s extraordinary life
Afew weeks ago, talking to Dame Shirley Bassey over email about the release of her last ever album, I asked how she’d spent her time during the first lockdown. She said that she’d walked around her swimming pool in Monaco 12 times every day. “It’s quite big, so it was great exercise,” she added.
Two days later, her record company released a publicity picture of the 83-year-old in a gold sequinned face mask and matching cocktail dress.
The quote and the photograph are vintage Bassey: glamorous, brassy and witty, and they were no doubt delivered with a knowing wink. These are tropes that have served the singer well over her seven-decade career.
From co-headlining the London Palladium with The Beatles, to performing in front of JFK, recording a trio of Bond themes ( Goldfinger, Diamonds Are Forever, and Moonraker), and playing Glastonbury in £3,000 wellies, with her initials spelt out in diamanté crystals, Bassey and the high life have never been far apart.
But this side of the singer – the whirl of feather boas and fabulousness – hides a story that is both more complicated and pioneering than many realise. While Bassey’s thrilling voice has brought her global success, her eventful life has been beset by controversy and sadness. As a mixed-race woman growing up in poverty near the Cardiff
docks in the Forties and Fifties, she had to break through barrier after barrier to succeed. It’s no wonder that singer Liberace once said that Bassey w was “the stuff that superstars are t truly made of ”.
Consider the household she grew up in: the youngest of seven children, living in a street “full of b brothels”, as her biographer J John Williams put it, Bassey and her family h had “no money [and] no prospect of money”. Her father, a merchant seaman, was jailed for five years when she was a baby and deported back to Nigeria. When Bassey left school at 15, her first job was in a l local factory “wrapping
pee pots in brown paper”, as she once put it. But Bassey was determined to succeed and through sheer willpower and raw talent landed herself roles in two touring reviews in the early Fifties in which she impressed audiences with her emotional singing and sassy stage presence.
Somewhere on the road, though, and while still a teenager, Bassey fell pregnant. She returned to Cardiff to have her daughter, Sharon, who she secretly and reluctantly gave up for adoption to her sister Iris. Bassey resumed her career under the wing of a Svengali called Mike Sullivan, but had to deny Sharon’s existence.
The secret lasted a few years until a tabloid splashed the story.
This is a mere snapshot of the drama that came to characterise Bassey’s life.
Over the years she has been married and divorced twice, held at gunpoint by a jealous ex, and been romantically linked to Bond composer John Barry and Oscar-winning actor Peter Finch.
Her second daughter Samantha, whose father’s identity has never been disclosed, was found dead in the River Avon in 1985. All this matters because it adds grit to the glitter. Bassey has lived. When she sings of yearning and seduction, with her arms reaching out to the audience, it comes from somewhere genuine.
Nicky Wire of the Manic Street Preachers, the Welsh band who worked with Bassey on her 2009 album The Performance, says her voice is one of “fierce unrivalled power yet deep sensitivity”. She feels every word.
“You just cannot teach that kind of natural brilliance,” he says.
Of course, Bassey has had her detractors. Despite overcoming phenomenal prejudice, she has shied away from lending her voice to antiracism campaigns. Rather, says Williams, she deals with racism by ignoring it, preferring to flirt with Prince Charles at a gala or sip cocktails in a marina.
And then there are the diva demands. According to legend, her contract for a show at London’s Royal Festival Hall stated she was the only person allowed to use the lift.
But her track record speaks for itself. Bassey was the first Welsh person to have a UK number one single and the first woman to have two records in the top five simultaneously.
Bassey says her new album, I Owe It All to You, will be her last. “It’s the right time to release my grand finale,” she says.
So as the singer prepares to hang up her feather boa, let’s raise a glass of something fizzy and fabulous to this reluctant pioneer. Wire suggests the perfect toast. “Shirley Bassey. The girl from Tiger Bay. The Queen of Wales.”