Weekly Review
From The Sunday Times (about 1973/74)
Prowls the stage like a tigress. Perhaps. But you will have heard that
before about Shirley Bassey. More like a boxer, really. Like a diminutive
Muhammad Ali in his prime, moving with svelte grace, loving it, spirit
dancing, nervously a-tingle, awaiting the subtle chance to sock it to them.
Sock it to them she does, this conquering empress of our age. Even when
she appeared at the Albert Hall on Election Night. Her latest recordings
are subtler than of old. But who could be subtle in this venue? She same
in like a world champion, a winner, arms aloft and outspread, borne on
tumultuous oceans of adoration. Then, with an orchestra which pounded away
in support at head and body, she began her assault.
Her act is all aggression. Her arms weave in extravagant patterns sometimes
in one-two motion as, insistently, she communicates and rouses. Her fingers
and her body are stretched as taut as her voice. Even the best silver bauble
she wears at her waist, adrift in a tideless ocean of black velvet, looks
like a trophy - a sort of singer's Lonsdale Belt.
Where a Diana Ross or Lena Horne will leave you excited, soothed and
occasionally moved, Miss Bassey leaves you bruised. Not with pain, however,
but with a numb pleasure which the power of her assault upon your feelings
ultimately induces. She is the flat-out, take-me, watch-me, love-me kind
of supersinger with operatic strength and also - for this she has learned
during the five past years of accumulating triumph - the ability, now,
to surprise by pausing in the action to breathe out a phrase or two quietly
and starkly.
It happened rarely, but awesomely, with magic. At the start of
Aznavour's
"Yesterday When I Was Young", after several of the audience had cried out
that the band was too loud, she did the introduction just with piano. Quite
stunning. She sang that marvellous song as if she believed it, every blessed
syllable of it, and that is another of her gifts. She has conviction, the
conviction that enwraps only the artist.
In the end she is untouchable, above the criticisms which it is possible
to make of individual aspects of her performance, part of the life and
the fantasy of those thousands who so rapturously received her last week,
inspirer of dreams and mirror of desires. the songs she sang were the songs
we know - from "Something" to "Big Spender" - and after six of them she
left the stage as if half a dozen rounds should be enough for the K.O.
She returned, of course, to give more and more until, for the final
plaudits she wrapped herself in a silvery, feathery dressing gown. Still
the champ. And, dammit, a British champ. We haven't too many of those.