December 1997 - The Gay Times
CALL ME MISS BASSEY
SHIRLEY BASSEY is 60 and proud of it. In fact, she's been making a right old song and dance about it with a TV special, two open air concerts and a birthday album. Although she has been a professional entertainer for more than 40 years, she remains guarded about her private life.
VICKY POWELL took herself to the Royal Suite of a swanky London hotel to try to pin down the real Shirley Bassey.
SHIRLEY BASSEY doesn't answer personal questions. I know this for a fact because I'm sitting in the lobby of the Langham Hilton Hotel, off Regent Street, being given the third degree by one of her publicity people about what I'm going to ask her. There's a lecture on etiquette. "Remember to call her 'Miss Bassey'." Yes. "Now you're from a gay magazine; you won't ask her anything political about gay issues, will you?" No. "And I gather you're Welsh. She might be Welsh but she doesn't know anything about Wales, so don't ask..." Yes, I've got the idea. I'm on the verge of asking if l'm allowed to ask questions about singing, glamour and spangly frocks but decide instead to find out what sort of mood "Miss Bassey" is in, given that I'm the last journalist of the day and she' s been doing interviews since the crack of dawn.
The publicity guy mumbles hesitantly: "She's OK. She was in a bit of a mood earlier because some interviewer from the nationals started asking her personal questions. But I'm sure she'll be fine with you. I'll just go upstairs and check that everything's alright. Don't worry, she'll be fine with you," he repeats, trying hard to convince me. It doesn't work, though. I wasn't nervous before, but now I'm on the sofa in the lobby - where I've been left alone for ten minutes - imagining how frightening it's going to be interviewing a pissed-off Shirley Bassey, while simultaneously eyeing the cab outside and thinking: "If I move quickly, I could be out that door..."
"She's ready for you," the publicity guy's voice bursts my fantasy get-away bubble. Then, within the flash of a sequin, I'm sitting on the sofa in the Royal Suite -well, it is Shirley Bassey - listening to her ask the publicity man if there' s a reason why "they" keep locking the bedroom door. "What do they think we're all going to do, have a gang bang in there?" she asks him. Her voice is deep and expressive, her accent unusual, a cross between Professional Welsh (made famous by the likes of Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins), BBC English and a mid-Atlantic twang. She laughs loudly, then the publicity entourage shuffles out, leaving us alone.
The meeting with Shirley Bassey is nowhere near as traumatic as I'd been imagining in the lobby. She's very chatty and humorous, but every bit the star. Decked out in big earrings with even bigger hair, she wears an expensive suit with a short skirt, covered in huge coloured prints of stamps, airmail stickers and flanked envelopes. She looks fabulous; her skin is flawless, her legs are slim and this woman is not carrying one extra pound. I was at least expecting some under arm swoop - nothing. So how come she looks so good at 60 ? With a deep theatrical sigh and a dismissive wave of a ringed hand she says simply: "I... I... I wish I could answer you. I simply don't know. It must be genes, because my mother had incredible skin. Whereas I did not. I had terrible skin as a young person. It's got better and better. And I work hard to look like this. I watch what I eat, I go to the gym every day, and I even work out before a show." So now we know. Despite the long day, she makes herself comfortable on the sofa, with her legs crossed, one stilettoed shoe perched on the coffee table, and tells me excitedly about her new album, The Birthday Concert - recorded at one of two concerts she performed to celebrate her 60th birthday last summer.
Now, many people, celebrities included, might not want to make a song and dance about hitting the big Six-O. Not Shirley Bassey, though. She's certainly not playing it down. Already there's been a celebrity TV performance, two outdoor concerts where the audience sang Happy Birthday, one in the idyllic surroundings of the Spencer family estate, Althorp Park (obviously, before the death of Princess Diana), the other at Castle Howard, and now an album thrown in for good measure. It features the songs which spring-boarded her from ordinary singer to top-dollar celebrity performer, like Diamonds are Forever, Something, Lady is a Tramp and Big Spender - though, most disappointingly, no Goldfinger.
Besides being her first live album in over 20 years, it also gives you an idea of why she' s been able to hack it for four decades in the entertainment business and still remain at the top. Shirley Bassey is the ultimate all-round entertainer. She may entertain royalty, prime ministers and presidents but she still seems to have the common touch. She is one of only three entertainers who can guarantee that any tour will be a complete sell-out - the other two being Victoria Wood and, bizarrely, Ken Dodd.
I am not a glamour-seeker, but I became entranced by Shirley Bassey at a very young age after watching her singing on the Morecambe and Wise show in the 1970s. One of her strappy sandals fell off, only to be replaced with one of Eric Morecambe's old boots, but she managed to get through her song without cracking up as she hobbled round the stage. As a performer, she mesmerizes. Granted she has a unique voice, loud and extremely powerful - then so do many female singers of that genre - but with Shirley, I feel, there's something much more.She belongs to that by-gone day of Hollywood-esque glamour, of divine frocks, jewels and high drama. The real-life rags-to-riches story that everyone hankers after; she's made it to the top of showbiz from the bottom of life - from working men's clubs in Cardiff to the London Palladium - and you know there's a million stories behind the journey and even more faces have been stood on to get there.
Belting out her songs of love, deceit and jealousy, she gives it her all. Each song takes you on a roller-coaster ride of emotions, all made more dramatic by her inimitable facial expressions and gestures. When she sings I Who Have Nothing, you believe that she's been "done wrong" by some waster; when she sings Big Spender, you know she's going to get in that man's trousers and wallet; and as for Goldfinger, when she's finished telling you about the "man with the Midas touch", you are definitely going to beware "his spider's touch".
Apart from bringing songs to life, there's a great humour to her, too. She can laugh at herself as well as others, whether it's teasing the audience about arriving at The Birthday Concert on the bus - "well I'm not letting my new bus pass go to waste" - or changing the words of Lady is a Tramp to take the piss out of Hugh Grant and his indiscretion with Hollywood hooker, Divine Brown.
I tell her that listening to her music can bring me out of a bad mood, bring me up when I'm feeling down and can still excite me even after all these years - me and, no doubt, thousands of gay men alike. At this point she cuts me off mid-fawn and says with a laugh: "You are a fan, aren't you. I love it. I mean, somebody so young. I love it when young people come to my concerts and I see them jumping up and down and they want to shake my hand at the end of a show."
There's very little about her shows which is obviously gay-friendly and last year many gay men complained bitterly about one of her warm-up acts being more than a tad homophobic. Her 'people' apologized about not intending to offend and nothing more was said. Gay men continue to flock in droves to see her and buy her albums by the bucketful. What does she see as the appeal?
"I think it's the glamour and the theatricality of it all. lt's larger than life. It's the power of it, too: they like a strong woman, I think. Gay men are very creative and they admire creativity in others. They know when something is sincere, they don't just admire anybody. Look at Judy [Garland], she had a huge gay following. She was larger than life on stage."
And wouldn't you know it, not only were Shirley and Judy friends, but Garland also helped mould Shirley into the performer she is today - which probably says a lot about why she's such a gay icon. What began with Shirley listening to Garland's music led to a friendship from which the young Bassey took some valuable advice on her performance.
"She came to see one of my shows and sent a message back to me to join her at her table," Shirley recalls. "I asked her for some tips because I was going to America and I wanted to know if my act needed changing. She said, 'Don't you dare! You go and do what I saw you do tonight and you'll kill 'em. If you listen to everybody like I did, I had lights coming on here and there, I was like a clown. Stay with your instincts,' she said, and I'll never forget those words." Bassey adds rue- fully that the two never sang together because Garland's voice was "going" by then.
It seems ironic that though her heroine's voice deteriorated, Shirley's voice got better with age. Why? "It's uncanny to me. I don't know why it's like that," she says seriously. There's no voice coach any more, just tapes that the voice coach made, with vocal practice for 35 to 40 minutes a day - "after working out, of course."
Believe it or not, the young Shirley had no ambition to become a singer. In fact, she wanted to be "everything but". Born the youngest of seven children to a Yorkshire-born mother and Nigerian father, she was brought up in the Cardiff docklands, known then as Tiger Bay.
What the publicity man said is true: she does not like talking about her personal life, preferring to answer questions about her career and, since I've been warned quite firmly to steer clear, I'm loathe to ask too much in case she clams up and we're sat looking at coffee cups for the rest of the interview.
Yet she talks quite freely about her childhood and her need to be "wanted deep down". "When I came along my mother was getting on, you know. she'd already had six of us by then. Then all of a sudden there was me, the alts one, and I wanted a lot of attention, " she explains.
And what better way to get attention than with a loud voice. "I always had a big voice and I was always singing. Although I was a tomboy, I was very shy. It doesn't make sense, any of it. Now I play in front of thousands of people, but then I was very shy about singing and used to do it next door or under the table."
"I never had singing lessons, I can't read music, so by all accounts I shouldn't be here. I wanted to be a nurse, but when I saw blood, that was the end of my nursing career. I wanted to be a stewardess, but I couldn't speak any languages. Then, I wanted to be a model, but I wasn't tall enough." She eventually ended up in a factory, singing at night in local clubs, before being "discovered" at 16. She left home shortly afterwards. It must have made her a strong person?
"In my business, yes I am strong. I'm not, otherwise; I cry if a man promises to call and doesn't. But career-wise I'm tough, because it's a tough business. I've seen people I started out with fall by the wayside because they can't take it. They had no real ambition. Whereas I didn't think I had any ambition, but I obviously did." "It was different for me. I had a very ambitious manager. He got me all excited and caught up on a tidal wave, and I'm still on it. I only have the desire to go under the table sometimes, like when I'm really nervous, and then I think 'what am I doing here? I'm going to retire, I'm too nervous to go on'," she says. The personal details she gives are scant. She lives in Monte Carlo - "it's the only place you can walk around with jewels on" - and recently her grandchildren came to one of her concerts for the first time, which she describes as "thrilling". There's been a lot of pain in her life and a lot of tragedy - in and out of love - of which she says nothing. She admits instead to being "unglamorous" on days off; spending most of her time in bed, cooking and walking around her apartment wearing only "a long T-shirt and a tracksuit".
She never listens to her own music unless it's to approve a new album but she's aware of what her music gives to others. One person sticks in her mind, a young mother who wrote to her and said that after packing her kids off to school one day, she'd intended to commit suicide. Then, by chance, she saw Shirley on TV singing This is My Life and thought, 'damn it, this is my life'. "She wrote me a letter and I cried reading it. I saved this woman's life and I don't even know her. It wasn't even a live performance. I get a lot of letters from people who identify strongly with my music and, if you do, that's great. "People say to me 'who do you listen to when you're down?' I certainly don't listen to myself. I once did and I reached for the bottle. It depressed me so much because I could feel the pain that's behind some of my music. When I see people crying in my concerts I have to look away. It moves me, and I'm frightened it could set me off. I'll listen to anyone else though. At the moment I love Lisa Stansfield; now, she makes me cry."
The interview time is almost up and the publicity men shuffle back into the room. With the last few minutes I ask if she has any regrets. She immediately starts humming "No Regrets" and says "that's a great title for a song".
"I don't think so. Maybe a bit of guilt here and there, but definitely no regrets. There's some personal pain I wouldn't have liked to go through, but it's made me the performer I am today. I never wanted to be a singer, but having become one I've never turned round and wished for something else." And with a laugh she says, "I am what I am."
By: Vicky Powell