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However much she insists that it's "ludicrous", "ridiculous" and "impossible",
it's true. This is Shirley Bassey's 50th year in showbiz.The 66-year-old legend doesn't know the meaning of making a comeback. Because she's never been away.
It's a success story that would be returned to any scriptwriter foolish enough to submit so fantastic a fable to a Hollywood film studio. But while her career has rarely faltered, there have been many personal heartbreaks - not least the death of her beloved daughter Samantha in 1985 at the age of only 21.
The circumstances of Samantha's death are as stark as they are sketchy. Her body was discovered in the water at the base of the Clifton Suspension Bridge after an evening visit to a pub in Bristol.
Shirley has never spoken of the hurt she feels when people say her daughter took her own life. But today she breaks her silence to explain why she cannot ever believe the rumours.
"Every time someone writes that, it's like a stab of pain in my heart," she says. "They make out she committed suicide. But Samantha would never have done that. She enjoyed having a go at me too much.
"She had my resolve. She was strong like me. We clashed, yes. But then we were so similar."
It was the lowest point of the singer's life.
"I tortured myself. Samantha's death had been my fault. If I'd been a better mother... so many thoughts run through your head. Your children are supposed to bury you, not the other way around."
The stress caused Shirley to temporarily lose her voice.
"It was a combination of the guilt and the grief and the nervous strain," she says. "It didn't send me round the bend. It could have done, but it didn't.
THAT battling instinct came out again and told me to get up and get out on stage.
"I couldn't sit around for ever feeling sorry for myself. Samantha wouldn't have
wanted that. But you never really get over it. I'll take it with me to my
grave."It's not the only tragedy to beset the singer's life.
Samantha's father, Kenneth Hume, a homosexual, killed himself at 40. There was Shirley's divorce from her second husband and manager Sergio Novak after 10 years of marriage. And the loss of her mum Eliza Jane.
But such heartaches have added depth to Shirley's stage persona.
"I've always been rather dramatic," she says. "I noticed that audiences respond to that. It makes them feel I'm telling them a bit about my life."
"My gay fans, particularly, have always liked the roller-coaster of my life. You know... she's gone through all this and she's still up there. Mind you, they like the frocks, too."
The roller-coaster ride began on January 8 1937, when Shirley was born in Splott, a rundown dockland district of Cardiff.
Her Nigerian father, Henry, a merchant seaman, walked out when she was two. She never saw him again, nor, she says, does she have any personal recollection of him - just a photograph and the stories her sister Marina used to tell her.
But her mother, from Yorkshire, lived to see Shirley's success.
"She had seven mouths to feed. I think she felt she'd made a mess of her own life, so she was especially thrilled that one of her children was making something of hers. In the end, I was able to spoil her. I bought her a house and clothes and her own fur coat."
Shirley's big break came in 1953 when, at 16, she went to London to audition for a touring variety show, Hot From Harlem. By the time she returned, she was visibly pregnant with her first daughter, Sharon. She has never named the father.
She explains: "Sharon gets touchy if I mention it and I understand that. She's a woman in her 40s with four sons of her own."
When Shirley was 18, a promoter said he'd like to see whether she could handle the Glasgow Empire.
"It was like a bear pit," she recalls. "I stood in the wings and heard them boo the acrobats when they nearly lost their balance and boo the comedians when their jokes weren't funny enough.
"Oh, they were dreadful. I was petrified. But I told myself that that wasn't going to happen to me."
Her first song, an up-tempo number, was sufficiently noisy to mask any heckling.
But the second, I've Got You Under My Skin, was slow and delivered in what was
to become Bassey's signature seductive style. And that's when the trouble
started."The audience began hooting and hollering and telling me to get my clothes off," she says.
In mid-song, she stopped. Slowly, the barracking died away until not a sound could be heard in the cavernous auditorium.
"Now look here," she said, in a broad Welsh accent. "I've come here tonight to entertain you, and if you don't want to listen then I'll bloody well go home. But you can at least give me a chance."
The hush was deathly - but by the time she finished her final number the applause was deafening.
Moss Empires got to hear of the young girl who had faced down a Glaswegian audience and rewarded her with a contract. "I was a heroine," says Bassey, without a trace of arrogance. "It was a milestone."
NOW, 48 years later, in a photographic studio in South West London, she is still every inch a star.
A succession of impossibly glamorous shots are taken of her for the sleeve of Thank You For The Years, her new album celebrating her half century at the top.
She has the looks of a woman for whom pampering is not so much a luxury as a way of life, and she is in buoyant mood. Perhaps this is due to a man called Greg Smith. They met at a dinner party in March and the attraction was instant.
At 62, the prosperous film and theatre producer - once married to Michael Barrymore's ex-wife and manager Cheryl and then, briefly, to actress Lynda Bellingham - is Bassey's contemporary.
Shirley, who divorced Sergio Novak 26 years ago, says: "I'd practically given up. I thought I'd never find anyone else. But I didn't like the idea. I was concerned I'd be on my own without a partner."
Now her face-splitting smile tells its own story. I'm looking at a new girly Shirley.
"Everybody keeps asking what's happened to me," she giggles. "When I say I'm going out to dinner, I'm told my eyes light up. He's an adorable man. We're having a great time. He understands me. It's incredible. I have such good vibes."
She stops. "Oh God, but I mustn't tempt fate. I'm terrible like that. I can't help feeling that if I get too happy it will be taken from me.
"But this is the best of times. I've just recorded a fabulous album. I'm celebrating 50 years at the top. And, well, I've met my man. I can't remember a moment when I've looked forward with more hope."
And, after so many personal setbacks, it would take a very churlish person to deny Shirley Bassey one last go at having her cake and eating it.
© Daily Mirror 2003
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