September 11, 1994
The Observer
WHY THE BOYS LOVE BASSEY
Shirley Bassey, unrivalled Diva of British popular music, is back on the road.
Andy Medhurst explains his love of diamonds, brass and 'Goldfingaaah.'
'It's a loud voice/ And, though it's not exactly flat/ She'll need a little more than that/ To earn a living wage' " this was one of the many pieces of evidence Noel Coward threw at Mrs Worthington in order to dissuade her from putting her daughter on the stage. After four decades of headlining concerts, more weeks in the singles charts than any other British female singer, and enough houses, furs and jewellery to make the very idea of a living wage a distant memory, Shirley Bassey might be said to have spent her whole career proving Coward wrong. Forty years in the business, and all sung in the key of loud.
It's true she's not had a big hit since 1973, and the days when she could commandeer acres of prime-time TV are long gone, but she'll have no trouble in packing them in on her new tour. Live performance is the core of her appeal and the context in which she best displays her unapologetically emotive, ensnaring talent to her hard-core devotees. No punches are pulled, no quarter given, and subtlety never enters the equation " she's a gale-force barnstormer, a one-woman semaphore seminar, a melodrama in eyelashes and heels, a true queen.
That last designation is deliberately loaded, since to mention Bassey without her gay male following would be akin to discussing Millwall with no mention of hooligans. Consider the depth and longevity of the connections: every tacky drag act since the Fifties has cut its teeth on her swirling movements and punctuating grimaces, a tribute Freddie Mercury took into rock stadia by frequently encoring with 'Big Spender', while many of her signature songs have exploited gay roots, from Lionel Bart's 'As Long As He Needs Me' (one of the finest of those trenchantly masochistic hymns to self-abasement that gay writers are so adept at penning) to 'I Am What I Am', lifted from the Broadway musical La Cage Aux Folles.
Her rigorous commitment to flamboyance, her evident enjoyment of the regal arrogance of stardom, the tragedies of her private life (failed marriages, a daughter's suicide), the I-will-survive defiance of her lyrics, her often overlooked sense of self-mocking humour (remember the famous Morecambe and Wise sketch) " these combine to further endow her with iconic status among a certain generation of gay men. She's the nearest thing to Garland that's still going, and in grateful consequence most of the good seats at her concerts will be filled by impeccably turned-out male couples.
Such an audience offers her adoration without the clammy distractions of sexual desire, and she acknowledges and revels in it. She has a highly attuned grasp of camp " nobody parodies her excessive theatricality better than herself, yet she also (and this wry contradiction is fundamental to camp's deeper world view) still genuinely believes in the old myths of stardom and mystique. She works on a queer wavelength and always has done, as a BBC biographical documentary broadcast this July tellingly revealed. Those restless arms, the gestural arabesques which remain her trade-mark, were in fact learned from a queeny choreographer friend, an intriguing example of femininity borrowing from effeminacy, rather than vice versa.
Except, paradoxically, that she isn't very feminine. There's nothing remotely butch about her (far too many leopardskin frocks and diamonds), but she's tough as old boots, her success driven by a strength and single-mindedness that sits uneasily with social expectations of the feminine. Asked in the BBC film why her romantic relationships with men tended to founder, she said, wistfully but without a trace of regret, that she 'was not fragile enough'.
Underpinning that strength, perhaps, though it's never a subject she readily discusses, is the fact of her blackness and the determin-ation it must have taken to establish herself in the Britain of the Fifties. The indignities of making her West End debut in a British revue called Hot From Harlem or of having a first hit record with the colonial kitsch of 'Banana Boat Song' (all this in the era of the Notting Hill riots) are memories that surely fuel the conviction with which she sings of transcending adversity.
Being black, and being Welsh, has given her a usefully askew perspective on English showbiz. She is untroubled by gentility or politeness, borrowing her codes of glamour from the Hollywood films that enraptured her as a wide-eyed child in Tiger Bay, and her musical repertoire more and more from Europe. Many of the belters that she does best were Italian songs for which she commissioned English lyrics, quasi-operatic show-stoppers such as 'This Is My Life' that are deliciously free of any Home Counties emotional restraint. She made it on to her beloved big screen not with acting, but with the theme tunes for Bond films, their camp tone ideally suited to her (nobody else has been asked to record more than one). 'Goldfinger', sorry " 'Goldfingaaaaah' " is still probably her most emblematic performance; unabashed, flat-out, ludicrous and irresistible.
It's been a long journey since the coy, frilly novelty songs of the late Fifties, those Coganistic, Clooneyesque trifles like 'Kiss Me Honey Honey Kiss Me', which she now performs on stage only to send up rotten, but she can still fill the conference centres like no other star of her generation. All she needs for a perfect career is to make a record with the Pet Shop Boys, except that she already almost has. While the Pets were disinterring Dusty and gearing up for Liza, Shirley was summoned in 1987 by their more arcane European equivalent, the Swiss duo Yello. The result, an Ennio Morricone-styled essay in exquisite aching melancholy called 'The Rhythm Divine', was not a huge chart success but its knowing, playful, myth-tweaking proved beyond doubt the enduring power of both the Bassey lungs and her diva status.
Deadly serious in her love of the idea of stardom, only too aware of the ridiculousness of it all, she walks that fine line with the consummate professionalism of the old trouper that she is " long may she fling out those arms and hold those notes, impossibly long and impossibly loud.
By: Andy Medhurst