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Programme Notes

I'm not very good at retiring, am I? I tried it first as a 17-year-old, when I ran away from the bright lights of the West End to a waitressing job back in Cardiff.

 But the following year I was performing in London again, and soon signed my first recording contract. I tried it again in 1981, when I thought I'd taken this career about as far as it could go. But then a younger generation discovered me, and helped me to discover new depths in myself. Maybe I'm addicted to performing - or to the response I get when I perform. I'm still nervous before a concert, but once it starts, you sweep me up and the years seem to fall away.

 After 50 years in this business, I suppose I should be thinking about retiring again. But despite al appearances, I've never really been in control of Shirley Bassey. So I'm going to have to trust you to tell me when the music's over. But not just yet - please - because I'm having too much fun. Bless you for coming tonight, and thank you for letting me do what I love doing - performing for you, performing with you.

Thank you for the Breaks

They say Dame Shirley has a tough childhood but that's only partly true, because she was lucky enough to be born into a family that loved music.

They may not have much money, but they had records by Sarah Vaughan, Judy Garland, Billy Eckstein, Al Jolson, and other greats: "Al Jolson was my brother's favourite. I loved his arrogance when he told his audience "You ain't heard nothing yet." I think I learnt a lot about showmanship from him."

 Coincidentally, Shirley got her first professional break in the touring revue Memories of Jolson in 1953. But the real turning point came when the bandleader Jack Hylton saw her in a show called Hot from Harlem. Shirley quit the show to return home; Hylton eventually got her back to London as a solo act in a revue called Such is Life. That led to a record deal with Philips in 1956, her first single Burn My Candle, and then her first big hits - Banana Boat Song, Kiss Me, Honey, Honey, Kiss Me, As I Love You (her first number 1). More hits followed, but not - as yet - in the States. But that wasn't long in coming.

Shirley has the composer John Barry to thank for Goldfinger. They were touring in England and Barry was conducting for her. One day he said, "I know your rule that you will never listen to a song unless there are words. There are no words, I must warn you - there's only music. We're waiting for the lyric." Shirley told him she'd break her rule just this once. A she struck up the opening chords, she said: "I don't care what the words are. I'll do it." The words when the came did the music proud, and Goldfinger was a huge hit in the States. It unleashed the vamp inside Bassey - a side of her she's never taken too seriously, but which she loves to explore.

Goldfinger not only opened up America for Shirley Bassey - it established her enduring association with James Bond. She went on, of course, to record Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker, and remains the only artist to be given more that one Bond anthem.

Thank you for the Inspiration

 Shirley's first album was called Born To Sing The Blues, an album that might have belonged to one of her great sources of inspiration, Ella Fitzgerald.

Ella poured her heart and soul in to every word, note and nuance of the songs she sang; Shirley ahs poured hers into an even broader repertoire. Judy Garland was another inspiration, and paid Shirley the compliment of coming to one of her concerts, just before Shirley was due to tour America Shirley wondered whether she'd have to change her act to appeal to American audiences; Judy said, "You do what you do and you'll be great." Those kind words have sustained Shirley throughout her career.

Shirley has always admired the great divas - Maria Callas, Joan Sutherland, Jessye Norman - and their ability to hold a note longer than ought to be possible. Frank Sinatra leant how to watching the saxophonists practise what's known as double breathing. Shirley has developed her own version of this technique; she takes a breath, holds it then produces the note. It's an idiosyncrasy that every musical director who has worked with Shirley has had to get used to - quickly.

Jessye Norman came to one of Shirley's concerts at the Carnegie Hall, backstage after the show, Jessye asked, "How do you do it? I'm on stage two maybe three times during an opera. You do an hour and a half. I could never do that." It was a wonderful compliment from one of the true divas.

Thank you for the Songs

 Before she became a major star, Shirley's producers picked the songs. While she gave those numbers everything she'd got, she didn't always feel comfortable with them.

But once she'd had a few hits, the tables turned. Ever since then, she's chosen the songs - sometimes against her record companies' advice - songs that she knew she could make hers. Now it's almost impossible to imagine anyone else performing numbers like Big Spender, I Am What I Am and This Is My Life. They belong to Shirley.

She was advised to stay away from contemporary pop, but she knew she could give new meaning to songs like George Harrison's Something and the Door's Light My Fire. She even took the risk of releasing Something a few months after the Beatles had charted with it. Shirley's version stayed in the UK top 50 for 22 weeks - 10 weeks longer that the Beatle's original.

I Want To Know What Love Is Is was another apparently unlikely Shirley Bassey song, insofar as it has been a hit for a rock group, Foreigner. But Shirley wanted it as soon and she heard it, because it could have been written for her: "I love the Foreigner song. I've attached myself to it, and so has the audience. They'd never heard a solo artist sing it before."

Thank you for the Years, the title track of her new album, actually was written for her, as its composers Andrew and Elizabeth Neve explain: "When we wrote Thank You, there was only one person in the whole world we wanted to sing it - Dame Shirley." She performed it for the first time on Parkinson in May this year, the song looks certain to become a favourite with her audiences.

That song, along with her other big heart-rending numbers like If You Go Away and Never, Never, Never are almost as emotionally exhausting for her audiences as they are for Shirley herself. This is why she offsets them with lighter songs like Kiss Me, Honey, Honey, Kiss Me and Big Spender. As Dorothy Fields' wonderful Big Spender lyrics go, "Wouldn't you like to have fun, fun fun? How's about a few laughs?" In planning her concerts, Shirley gives a lot of thought into striking the right balance between emotion and mischief.


Thank you for the Magic

 Shirley grew up at a time when performers - particularly the female of the species - were expected to dress the part.

She remembers dressing for one of her first shows, Hot from Harlem, "I didn't have any glamorous clothes, but I did manage to get my hands on a black, strapless, lacy top. It was meant to be worn underneath but I didn't care. One of the girls lent me a long lavender net skirt and I put them together. I looked in the mirror and that was glamour for me - a borrowed bit from here, a borrowed bit from there."

"I went on stage and it was great until I hit the top note and the skirt began to come down. I grabbed hold of it and started to run off. My manager said, "Next time, you stand still and let it drop!" He was always searching for publicity! He also wanted me to change my name but there was no way that I was going to do that. If I became famous, I wanted all my school mates to know it was me."

Douglas Darnell designed the first of Shirley's commissioned concert gowns, when she was just 18. He has been working with Shirley ever since, although she does use other designers as well. She'll have a rough idea of what she wants, and will ask Douglas and possibly another designer to come back with some sketches. Whatever it is, it has to be spectacular - she couldn't perform in anything less.

Shirley never wears her stage gowns offstage - "Many of them I can't even sit down in!" - and claims she dress quite conservatively for dinner parties: "The offstage Shirley Bassey sort of dreams of being who I am onstage. I've always been a dreamer - that's what helps me do what I do." Many of her most famous concert gowns are in safe keeping in a warehouse in London, awaiting a charity auction by Christies later this year. Bidding is expected to be keen!

Thank you for the Highs

Some of the biggest highs in Shirley's career have been in unlikely places like the Armory in Washington DC, where she sang for President John F. Kennedy, or onstage with Morecambe and Wise for their 1971 Christmas special, performing Smoke gets in Your Eyes, as professionally as ever while mayhem broke out around her.

She was able to exercise more control over he own BBC TV series, which ran from 1979, and over a theatre full of celebrities in An Audience With Shirley Bassey in 1996.

But of all her concerts, Shirley is perhaps proudest of her five sell out shows at Carnegie Hall in 1975 - a record for a solo British artist. And the following year, she was voted Best Female Entertainer by the American Guild of Variety Artists, which confirmed her status as a truly international star.

The past ten years have been just as dramatic as the previous 40. They've seen Shirley get her CBE, make her screen debut in La Passione, celebrate her 60th Birthday with a TV special and outdoor extravaganzas at Castle Howard and Althorp Park, and perform for charity in one of the most spectacular settings on Earth - at the foot of the pyramids in Egypt. With the baritone Bryn Terfel, she opened and closed the Rugby World Cup in Cardiff, with World In Union, and in 2002, sang in the gardens of Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Queen's Golden Jubilee.

But of all the highs she's enjoyed over the past decade, nothing tops receiving he DBE from the Queen in 1999. No, not even receiving the Legion d'Honneur from the French Government in April this year. As the song goes, there is nothing like a Dame - nothing like this Dame, at any rate.
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