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"Let's Be Frank" columns
Shirley Bassey, a one-time Las Vegas headliner, rarely does interviews, preferring to let her prodigious voice and that painstakingly cultivated air of glamour do the talking. However, she recently spoke with a writer from the London Daily Mail after a pickpocket stole her purse while she was holiday shopping in London
The writer, Nicholas Pyke, says that she was safe enough within the portrait-lined walls of Cliveden House in Berkshire, the sort of hotel where the staff remembers she is a Dame Commander of the British Empire. But a recent brush with the criminal classes has left her shaken.
“It was all rather nerve-racking,” she says. “I was Christmas shopping in Knightsbridge with my daughter, Sharon. We’d been into Harvey Nichols to find some presents. Somebody must have seen all the money and cards when I opened my bag to pay and followed me. I felt a bump but nothing more than that. And when I opened my bag at the next shop, there was no purse.”
It seems unremarkable, perhaps. Pickpockets are a fact of life in most big European cities, and ever more so in London. But to someone used to the security of life in Monte Carlo -- the ritzy, casino-laden side of Monaco -- it was a genuine shock.
“The worst of it is the worry” she says. “My cards can be cancelled but I worry who has my details or a picture of me. They took my residence card for Monaco.” She spends most of her time in the principality these days and, as she explains in her first interview in more than two years, the comparison with the life she sees back here is far from flattering.
“This isn’t England any more -- at least it is not the country I remember growing up in,” she says. “You don’t hear English spoken here. You read about terrible things, not just drugs, but all the killings. When you live in a safe place like Monte Carlo, you can walk home at any time of the night and you don’t have to worry. I don’t feel at risk there. If I drive myself, I can leave the car doors unlocked. I wouldn’t do that in London.”
But at Christmas, not even the balmy warmth of the Mediterranean will keep her from flying over to be with her daughter and the rest of the family. Her business interests, too, are based in London and Bassey is at pains to say that she has not rejected Britain.
However, the rising sense of physical danger here is not the only change to worry her. When the conversation comes to the unstoppable spread of reality television, she becomes animated, sitting forward on a silk chair in the library for a heartfelt denunciation of what now passes for show business.
“It seems there’s no place for people with talent any more,” she expostulates. “You have only to look at television to see that. And if people do have any talent, they get voted out of the shows. It’s disgusting. It’s an abuse. It seems that people want to be famous for doing nothing or drinking.
“It was totally different when I was breaking into the business. I learned by standing in the wings and watching established acts on stage. Today, no one seems to have any training. I’m always being asked if I watch The X Factor (Britain’s version of American Idol) and I do from time to time. I know it makes for great TV and that Simon Cowell has a real gift. But it is a crying shame that kids who ought to have a great future are being ignored.
Bassey had to scrap for her breaks. Raised by a lone mother in the Tiger Bay area of Cardiff, she was repeatedly dismissed until that extraordinary voice finally won over the record labels.
By the early sixties she had a string of hits and an EMI recording contract. Then, in 1964, she found international fame with the title song of “Goldfinger,” the Bond film.
“If hard work and talent can’t get you anywhere, what hope is there?” she asks, warming to the theme. “Someone like Tallulah Rendell, a young singer at my 70th party last Sunday, she’s got a wonderful voice. What can she do to get a chance? Why should you have to wear a dress slashed to your backside to get recognized alongside all these no-talent-nothings out there?
“I’m for old-fashioned glamour. There’s not enough of it. Glamour has gone out of our lives. It’s very sad.”
If Britain has changed for the worse, Bassey seems barely to have altered at all, writes Pyke. In private she laughs about putting on a bit of weight, despite a grueling gym regime. But even close up, her face is curiously unlined while on stage she looks, and more importantly sounds, almost immune to the passage of time - and never more so than in the past 12 months.
Her response to turning 70 has been a new album, her first solo hit for a decade and the glamorous relaunch of brand Shirley courtesy of Marks & Spencer. It is strange to think there was talk of retirement prior to 2007. A once-great career was said to be on the wane. The first hint that the doubters were to be proved wrong came with a surprise appearance in the M&S advertisements last Christmas, in which she sang “Get The Party Started.”
Her re-emergence in the charts was more unexpected still. “The Living Tree,” a modern take on classic Bassey anthems, would not have happened but for the persistence of two UK-based songwriters, Nikki Lamborn and Catherine Feeney from the group Never The Bride. Determined that their song was a sure-fire Bassey hit, they persuaded staff at her Monte Carlo gym to hand her a demo CD. And they were right. It made the Top 40 and gave her the record for the longest span of hits in the UK charts. In June came an album, “Get The Party Started,” a compilation that reached number six on the album charts, featuring “Big Spender” and “I Will Survive.”
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