Sequin And You Shall Find
From The
Independent, By Carl Miller, Wed Jun 7 2000
Shirley Bassey is a millennium dame. Yet by the end of Monday night's
performance it was clear that the DBE is, if anything, a demotion. For
her subjects, Shirley Bassey is already a queen, a goddess, a force of
nature - and her concerts have the hysterical fervour and charge of revival
meetings.
There is a theory that stars are people to whom the public want to make
love. Bassey's performance is certainly higher on bump and grind than your
average dame's. I don't know for example what sort of undergarments Vera
Lynn or Anna Neagle sported professionally, but I doubt that they wore
frocks slashed to the pubis and flashed the best part of a buttock at the
ecstatic front row. Yet if sex appeal is the secret, how to explain Bassey's
audience? They don't want to have sex with her - they want to be her. She
is a fantasy alter ego for the women who never quit Tiger Bay drab for
London glamour as teenagers and the small-town boys who yearn to say as
loudly as she that they are what they are. She doesn't sing songs so much
as one-liners. On the older numbers, enunciation and volume have been cranked
up and down so often that they become a drag queen's dream. It may be a
limited vocal range but Shirley is undisputed empress of that dominion.
Even where a song may seem to require wistful melancholy (Born To Lose
- The Party's Over) a Bassey belt out transforms the downbeat and the
introspective
into a triumph of the will. Most amazing of all, it is genuinely moving.
Elderly couples clutch each other's elbows. A mother and daughter crouch
in the aisle, mutually dabbing away tears as Shirley sings their suffering
for them. That a stadium-sized performer can touch individual hearts in
this way is the true Bassey magic.
There may not be a milligram of genuine feeling up there on stage, but
the glacial insincerity reflects back emotion all the better, just as the
mirror balls and dresses spangle and shimmer their stardust back on us
mortals. Too many entertainers (and some other public servants) assume
that their feelings are what audiences want. No, we want our own. The performer's
job is to help us to have them. That's why dame Shirley is queen.