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25th Anniversary Album
25th Anniversary Album:
40 Greatest Hits
Collection 1978:
United Artists / EMI UK SBTV 60147/48
Germany: 1C 172-61965/66 |
This album went platinum within several months of it's release. For a collection
of photos from this anniversary please go to the
Photo Gallery.
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Entered:
Nov 04 1978
Highest: Albums: #3 Run: 12 weeks
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Track Listing
With timings and original release dates |
LP One: Side One
01.
2:42 - (1957)
Fire Down Below
02. 2:50 - (1958)
As I Love You
03. 2:40 - (1958) The Banana Boat Song
04. 2:41 - (1959) You, You Romeo
05. 2:23 - (1959)
Kiss Me, Honey, Honey, Kiss Me
06. 3:13 - (1960)
With These Hands
07. 2:56 - (1960)
As Long As He Needs Me
08. 2:53 - (1961) Reach For The Stars
09. 3:01 - (1961) You'll Never Know
10. 2:25 - (1961) I'll Get By (As Long As I Have You)
11. 3:08 - (1961) Climb Ev'ry Mountain
LP One: Side Two
01. 3:07 - (1962) Far Away
02. 3:46 - (1962)
Ave Maria
03. 2:52 - (1962)
What Now My Love?
04. 2:31 - (1962) Tonight
05. 3:12 - (1963)
What Kind Of Fool Am I?
06. 2:39 - (1963)
I (Who Have Nothing)
07. 2:51 - (1964) My Special Dream
08. 2:38 - (1964)
Gone
09. 2:46 - (1964)
Goldfinger
10. 4:24 - (1965)
No Regrets
LP Two: Side One
01. 1:48 - (1967)
Big Spender
02. 2:27 - (1969)
Does Anybody Miss Me?
03. 3:11 - (1969)
This Is My Life
04. 3:32 - (1970)
Something
05. 3:13 - (1970)
The Fool On The Hill
06. 2:39 - (1971)
Diamonds Are Forever
07. 3:12 - (1971)
(Where Do I Begin?) Love Story
08. 2:42 - (1972)
For All We Know
09. 4:24 - (1972)
And I Love You So
10. 3:34 - (1973) Make The World A Little Younger
LP Two: Side Two
01. 3:37 - (1973)
Never, Never, Never
02. 2:14 - (1974)
Nobody Does It Like Me
03. 3:19 - (1975)
Send In The Clowns
04. 4:14 - (1975) Emotion
05. 3:23 - (1975) Good, Bad But Beautiful
06. 2:46 - (1975) The Way We Were
07. 3:41 - (1976) What I Did For Love
08. 4:41 - (1976)
Feelings
09. 4:01 - (1976)
If I Never Sing Another Song
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Sleeve Note
By Peter Clayton |
You can work it out on your fingers if you want to. Shirley Bassey made her first professional appearance in a touring revue called 'Memories of Al Jolson' at the age of 16. This year Miss Bassey celebrates her solver Jubilee in the business. Sixteen plus twenty-five. Easy.
Only a few of them ever own up. But then, only a very few stay so young that it doesn't matter. Fewer still make that climb to the top and remain there long enough for us to bother with mental arithmetic at all. What is being celebrated really, then, is not statistics but stardom.
Stardom, like genius, is fairly easy to recognize but almost impossible to define. All we know is that it exists by public consent; when a sufficient number of the paying customers decide that a performer is a star, then he or she is a star, and then that's that. In the beginning, Shirley Bassey didn't even want to become an entertainer, let alone a famous one, though entertainment has always been one of the recognized ways out of tough districts and drab streets . As the youngest of seven children in the dock area of Cardiff her first ambition was simply not to have to inherit any more cast-off clothing, so she dreamed off one day maybe working in a gown shop. 'And I wanted to be a model; I wanted to be a nurse; I wanted to be so many things, almost anything but part of show business. It wasn't one of those things where you're seven and you're watching the film your mother has taken you to and you say that's it, I'm going to be an actress or I'm going to be a singer. It never entered my head. Honestly.'
Shirley's singing career began in Cardiff. Her speaking voice, smooth and brown as her arms, still has faint Welsh overtones, mainly in the way she'll come down on certain words - 'I wanted to be a nurse' and the tiny hesitations, like little hyphens, between the syllables of certain others. Otherwise her speech is as international as her reputation, worked on by somebody, presumably, the way her grooming and even her stage presence were worked on in the early days. 'You're like a piece of wood' she used to be told in the beginning. It's hard to believe now that the singer with the 'out-stretched, expressive hands', as one women's magazine called them, once used to stand stock-still and had to be coaxed and bullied into that exotic semaphore which is today part of her performance. It seems hardly credible that she had to be told to move her lithe body about the stage.
Shirley's career really began to move in 1955. Unlike the lady in the song who 'had to go and lose it at the Astor' (whatever 'it' was), Shirley found it there - 'it' in this case being the means to great fame. She was spotted at the Astor Clu in London by
impresario Jack Hylton, who as an ex-bandleader presumably knew a promising singer when he heard one. He signed her for a show 'Such Is Life', built round comedian Al Read, that he was preparing for the West End. It must have been about that time that I first became aware of Miss Bassey as a force in entertainment. I was shortening my life expectation cutting up stationery on a hand-cranked guillotine in a factory in Buckinghamshire at the time. A girl there was the first person I'd ever encountered who was totally obsessed with pop music. Events in her young life were recalled by reference to what had been in the hit parade at the time. In the winter of 1955 she went to Oxford to see Al Read in what must have been 'Such Is Life' (either on its way to the West End, or touring after a London run) and she came to work the following Monday morning raving, in ecstatic terms, about this new singer she'd seen. Her talk for weeks after was full of Shirley Bassey, and if I'd known then that I was going to be typing these notes just over 22 years later I'd have taken careful note of what she actually said. As it is, I'm left with the impression of one young girl who had been completely bowled over by the talent and personality of another. Multiply that first young girl by several hundred per performance, throw in equal quantities of young men, old men, and assorted citizens of other kinds, and you have a body of instinctive opinion conferring stardom on a hitherto unknown artist.
Her success was rapid and great. She was making records by 1956 and had had a run of respectable hits by the time she was 23 - records like Banana Boat Song; As I Love You; Kiss Me Honey Honey Kiss Me; As Long As He Needs Me. Furthermore as a live entertainer she had survived the worst that publicists could do. Her first major London headlining appearance was at the old London Hippodrome in 1957, and advanced publicity for it was not noticeably modest. 'But', said one opening night reviewer, 'Miss Bassey justified the build-up'. And that wasn't one of your 'little mentions' in the local rag, but a full-scale review in a national newspaper.
She became someone special. In little more than two years after her entry into
show business she achieved what so few British artists ever achieve and that is to become a household name in the whole of Europe and, above all, America.
Acceptance in America was considerably helped by the enormous popularity of her record of the theme song of the James Bond film 'Goldfinger' in 1964. But she had actually establishes herself there as early as 1961, in cabaret in new York. She was also a success in Las Vegas, which is vastly different from saying merely that she appeared there. Plenty of artists of very little standing appear in Las Vegas, for the place is greedy for entertainment. But the smaller acts work the smaller rooms, where the gamblers hardly stop betting long enough to notice. Shirley was not among the sideshows but in the big league. 'I suppose I should feel hurt that I've never been really big in America on record since Goldfinger, and it's a pity in a way because the business in America is very much geared to the idea of a hit record. But, concert wise, I always sell out.'
For the sake of completeness we can make a list of Shirley Bassey's achievements in the purely statistical sense - the 14 silver discs in Britain, Holland and France; and the 28 gold's earned by sales in those countries and others as far apart as the South American states and Sweden. The TV Times named her Best Female Singer in 1972 and 1973; Music Week followed suit in 1974; in 1977 there was a Britannia Award for the Best Female Solo Singer in the last 50 Years of Recorded Sound; the American Guild of Variety Artists voted her best Female Entertainer for 1976; the late President John F. Kennedy invited her to sing at the White House. All that leaves out the various series of Carnegie Hall Concerts in 1972, 1973 and 1974, each lasting only a few evenings but which could probably have been extended to a couple of weeks and still sold out. It forgets her triumphant Paris debut as late as 1974 (British performers as a rule, don't make easy conquests in France). There have been four Royal Variety appearances and sell-out tours all over Europe, including the 22-day British tour in 1976 to mark her twenty years as a recording artist.
On her arrival in Britain earlier this year she had to announce her intention to semi-retire before the newspapers roused themselves. 'Semi-retirement' is simply an extension of a process already begun - a cutting down on the touring, an even greater choosiness in the selection of dates and venues, the spending of more time at home. Unlike Judy Garland, whom she understood so well and admired so much, she doesn't feel that she must have applause in order to feel alive. She has always accepted it and enjoyed it when it's been given, but it isn't part of her diet. The press is going to find it awfully dull, for singing to the delight of thousands of people, even only occasionally, is not news somehow. But it is and will continue to be the audiences themselves, and they, after all, were the ones who started it, by noticing how extraordinary she was twenty-five years ago.
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