History Forum / General / British History / December 2007

Renia and Dame Shirley have some complaints about Modern Britain in
common...

And Dame Shirley lives in Monaco and Renia in Greece....

'Nuff Said.

DSH

Lux et Veritas et Libertas
-----------------------------------------

'This isn't the country I grew up in. No one speaks a word of English these
days,' says Dame Shirley Bassey

By NICHOLAS PYKE

The Daily Mail

22 December 2007

Shirley Bassey rarely does "behind the scenes".  In fact, she rarely does
interviews of any kind, preferring to let her prodigious voice and that
painstakingly cultivated air of glamour do the talking.

So it is a little disappointing to find she is not glugging the pink Cristal
champagne rumoured to sustain her day to day.  She is making do instead with
a single cup of fresh mint tea.

Neither is she wearing a show-stopping creation from Julien Macdonald or
Vivienne Westwood. And, when we meet, she most certainly does not offer to
sing.

She is very much off duty, sporting the comfy jumper, fur beret and shades
of a woman who takes recuperation seriously. Dame Shirley has been on the
razz.

Few would recognise this rather slight figure as the vertiginously
high-heeled, big-bosomed diva of Big Spender or Diamonds Are Forever, but
this may be no bad thing.

She is safe enough here within the portrait-lined walls of Cliveden House in
Berkshire, the sort of hotel where the staff remember 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 for 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 Sharon and partner Des, and the
rest of the family.  Her business interests, too, are based in London and
Shirley 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
Cliveden library for a heartfelt denunciation of what now passes for
showbusiness.

"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 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.

"Another difference is that I was well looked after. Who advised Rhydian to
have that hair? I don't call that looking after him."
Shirley 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 recognised 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, Shirley seems barely to have altered
at all. In private she laughs about putting on a bit of weight, despite a
gruelling 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, the glamorous relaunch of brand Shirley courtesy of Marks & Spencer
and a remarkable bid for the youth market in the Glastonbury mud.

It is strange to think there was talk of retirement in the run-up 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
adverts 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 Shirley's 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 No
6 in the album charts, featuring Big Spender and I Will Survive. This in
turn led to one of the strangest episodes of her career so far.

"When they first invited me to do Glastonbury, I said 'No way'," she admits,
recognising that she feels more at home in hotel suites than open fields in
Somerset.

"I didn't think I'd like it - mud and all that. It's not me. I'm glamour. I
don't do mud. But I had a record out and the girls behind it were very keen,
and eventually I agreed."

Rock fans and Bassey enthusiasts were equally astonished when "The Dame"
braved the rain for a 40-minute set at the end of June.

"Naturally, I took a pair of wellies - and the nine-year-old daughter of a
colleague pasted on 'diamonds' spelling my initials, DSB. They weren't real
diamonds, whatever anyone says. I didn't wear the boots on stage. I'd have
fallen over."

Accounts of Shirley's life and words are often more spectacular than the
reality. And that, she insists, goes for claims about her diva-like
"requirements".

"They said I demanded a red carpet to get across the mud. I didn't ask for a
red carpet - they put it down and so I walked on it.

"They said I demanded 20 bottles of pink Cristal champagne. Actually, they
gave me one bottle and two I brought along myself. I don't have time to
demand anything. I'm too busy putting my energies into my performance to be
a diva.

"I was extremely nervous. It certainly wasn't my normal crowd. But I ended
up really enjoying it. I found it exhilarating getting the chance to do
that. I love doing different things."

If the performance was spectacular, the postscript attracted almost as much
attention when Shirley, her assistant and the promoter Harvey Goldsmith
found themselves in a fog-bound helicopter over the Home Counties.

Widely reported as a death-defying crash-landing, she says that the truth
was more Alan Bennett than Len Deighton.
"We were flying back to London after the show when suddenly we couldn't see
anything - it was thick with fog. The pilot, said, 'Dame Shirley, I'm going
to have to land in a field.'

"We were laughing and joking - we knew we were in safe hands. But we landed
in a school playing field in Camberley, Surrey.

"One little old lady asked if I would like a cup of tea. I said, 'No thanks,
I just need to find a toilet.'

"Then a man said he lived just across the road. We got there and he told his
wife that 'Shirl' would like to use the loo. I could hear his wife on the
phone while I was in there, telling people about her unexpected visitor."

Even Shirley herself appears surprised by the way the year has gone, and
with the US launch of her album in the New Year, 2008 looks likely to be
just as energy-sapping.

"This year has been just sensational," she says. "I feel as though it has
breathed new life into me. I can certainly recommend being 70 - things are
just as fabulous as ever."

They certainly were last Sunday at a 70th birthday celebration thrown in her
honour by Andrew Davis, the owner of Cliveden, the stately home turned
hotel, and organised by her friend Liz Brewer.

Guests included Joan Collins, Cilla Black, Bruce Forsyth and Christopher
Biggins.

She declares the bash a success - with one caveat. "The party was full of
gorgeous guys - but there weren't any I could take home," she says.  "What
happened?  It was my party. Something went wrong there."

Shirley, famously single, might be teasing. When it comes to singing,
however, she remains deadly serious. In fact, she is riled by claims that
she performed a selection of her hits on Sunday night.

She did, though, sing a brief but hilarious Happy Birthday To Me in the
style of Marilyn Monroe.  Bassey devotees can see it on YouTube.

"The papers said that I sang my hits at the party but it's not true. If that
gets out, then people will think I'll sing every time they invite me to a
party," she explains, from somewhere behind the shades. "I sing only when I
do my shows."

And she means it.

• Dame Shirley Bassey has requested that the fee for this article be donated
to the War Widows' Association.