MAIL ON SUNDAY

June 16, 1996

She's Still This Big; Night & Day

At last, the big moment has arrived. The stage is bathed in light. A respectful hush comes over London's Royal Festival Hall, which is packed with the fans of Shirley Bassey, the strange, singular 59-year-old showgirl from Cardiff. I've never seen anything quite like this. Hundreds of this theatre's seats contain young gay men in bright summer clothes; hundreds more are filled by much older people - carefully groomed men in cardigans and ties, some sporting toupees; then there are the genteel, dainty women in pastel dresses. These are Shirley's people. Which tells you that there's something pretty interesting about Shirley.

These fans, you see, are not just people who have come along to see any old show - Bassey's followers adore her in a specific, focused way. Many of them are clutching gifts for their heroine - they intend to rush up to the stage with flowers and bottles of champagne. Somehow, this strange, tragic Welsh grandmother drives them wild.

And then . . . a figure appears, and moves swiftly to the centre of the stage. Bassey? No - it's a grey-haired, ferrety man in a black suit. He's holding a microphone. 'The parking's terrible around here,' he tells the packed auditorium. 'I had black hair when I arrived.'

This is Mike Lancaster, Shirley Bassey's warm-up man. 'You're about to meet an extraordinary woman, ' he tells us. As if we didn't know. Lancaster is the man Bassey has chosen to precede her before every show she does. He's from Bolton. 'I went to Peckham,' he continues. 'I thought I'd visit my hubcaps.'

Shirley's fans - her worshippers - look towards the stage in stupefied silence. These people don't need warming up - they need Shirley. They have come to watch something simple and therapeutic - an elderly glamourpuss who, miraculously, continues to behave in the same way she did when she was a middle-aged glamourpuss. A young glamourpuss, even. What a tonic!

Shirley hasn't changed much since she started - she still performs with the same air of wounded optimism, as if she really believes in the power of spangled dresses, feline movements of the head, and loud, forcefully pronounced words. There's something brave and unwhingeing about Shirley Bassey - something old-fashioned. She's a noble beast. That's what these people have come to see. Poor Mike Lancaster. His task is virtually impossible. 'I love working here,' he tries, 'It stops you getting big-headed.' Rows of pert young men look on, unmoved, clutching their bouquets. 'I'm not gay,' says Lancaster, 'but I've slept with someone who is.' He looks up at the still gallery. 'Have you reached a verdict yet?' The jokes keep on, and on. After five minutes, I feel like applauding Lancaster for his courage, his ability to keep on being quick and ferrety in the face of so much self-generated unease. After 10 minutes, people are beginning to laugh at his jokes.

Behind him, Shirley's large orchestra is assembling itself, a gaggle of tuxed-up nerds with violins and guitars. There are about 20 of them; this is clearly a big operation. 'I knew someone who overdosed sniffing curry powder, pipes Lancaster. 'He fell into a deep korma.' Moments later, glowing and grinning, he makes his way off the stage.

You can sense the anticipation. What will she look like? What will she be wearing? And then . . . the lights go down, and the music starts up. It's Goldfinger, as you might imagine, but the sound of it, the sheer camp swagger of the orchestra's effort, is enough to knock us out. Everybody applauds. At the back of the stage, a spotlight comes on. And everybody goes mad! It's her! We can hardly see her yet, but the music is being drowned by clapping. When she comes into view, mid-stage, everybody stands up - she gets a standing ovation just for being her.

She looks like Shirley Bassey, certainly, but she looks rather more like somebody impersonating Shirley Bassey - the dress is silver, spangled, low-cut, slit to mid-thigh, with a yard of material trailing behind. And Shirley doesn't exactly walk - she glides, as if her high-heels were skates.

The applause goes on and on, and Shirley responds by giving the audience a sly look out of the corners of her eyes. How sexy! Please! People are overcome with emotion.

And there's something special about the tone of this emotion. It's the kind of choked, half-tearful applause that people get when they've suffered a terrible tragedy and come smiling through; it contains hope, and sadness, and compassion. Here's a 59-year-old granny strutting around in a slit dress with part of her bosom showing; a woman who, on some psychological level at least, believes she can cheat the ravages of age - mortality, even. You can see exactly why her camp- loving fans go mad for her. She demonstrates the therapeutic benefits of the superficial - of the spangles, the make-up, the hairdo. Is that a wig she's wearing? Who cares?

But the emotional charge of this ovation contains something more serious, too. Even if you don't know many specific facts about Shirley Bassey's life, you know - one just knows - that Shirley is in some way a tragic woman, that things have gone terribly wrong in her life. With Shirley Bassey, you can sense the aura of banner headlines, of tactful, wallowing tell-all interviews; even if you forget the details, you know that this woman carries the baggage of untimely deaths in the family, troubled marriages, traumatic moves. She pulls them along like the train on her dress.

Do you know what's happened in Shirley's life? It's not been good. Her father left home when she was two, Her first husband committed suicide. One of her daughters committed suicide. Her son turned to drugs. She turned to the bottle. She's been depressed, over and over again. Well, wouldn't you be? Yes, of course you would. But - and this is the important thing - would you have the courage to appear in front of large crowds, to glide towards massed ranks of people with your bosoms half hanging out of your spangled dress? No, of course you wouldn't. And this, pretty much, is the thing that's interesting (and courageous, and uplifting) about Shirley. That's why all these people are crazy about her.

She belts through her songs. She sings them with a sort of gliding, controlled ease; sometimes she seems to be moving around inside them, biting off lines swiftly, giving herself more space to growl and yodel. Her voice, of course, is deep and syrupy, exactly like it's always been. In between numbers, she talks in a knowing, sexy way, not saying too much. Her accent is half-Welsh, half-American - a sort of Bond-girl lilt. At one point, she makes a vaguely waspish remark about Michael Jackson's tendency to say that he loves everybody; at another she makes a risqué comment about Hugh Grant's notorious episode in Los Angeles. She sings S'Wonderful, Crazy, Try A Little Tenderness; when she does Kiss Me Honey Honey Kiss Me, she wiggles about and slaps her roundish - but certainly not fat - bottom.

And then the kissing starts. A middle-aged chap in a V-necked sweater darts gingerly towards the stage with a rose in his hand; Bassey kisses him and places the rose on top of the piano. Next5 another chap runs down - again a kiss and a rose - and then another, and another; pretty soon, there are 30 or 40 people standing in front of the stage. And they don't go back to their seats - weirdly, they kneel down on the floor, and remain kneeling, some of them clasping their hands together as if in prayer. A gay couple behind me are wild with enthusiasm; they're hooting. Frankly, it's genuinely uplifting she believes in herself, which makes the world a more hopeful place, if only momentarily. In her own terms, this performance is succeeding brilliantly.

And, in these terms, the performance gets better and better. Bassey, who started singing to audiences in Cardiff when she was 14, was told by her first manager that her songs would not sound convincing until she had lost in love. But she doesn't

exactly project pain these days. What she does, as she slides along the stage, playfully kicking the train of her dress out of the way, is infinitely more touching - she projects a blindness to pain, a need to keep smiling through.

It works because we already know about Shirley's pain; she's a sort of icon of pain. When she sings Hey Jude, she sings the second line, 'don't make it bad' playfully at double speed. It's as if she's failing to understand the meaning of the song. What we're left with is plucky, gilded, bursting-out-of-her-dress Shirley, struggling through the words, keeping her spirits up.

Naturally, she does Big Spender, a song whose sentiments she claims to live by - she can, she says, only live with wealthy men. Both of her husbands - Kenneth Hume, the suicide, and Sergio Novak, the tall, mustached Italian she referred to as 'my giant' - have been rich: both of them acted as Shirley's manager. 'I go for men with money, ' she once said, 'because I once had a romance with a poor man and I didn't think it would make any difference. He got all paranoid and threatened, and I lost respect for him.' Poor Shirley has had the worst luck with love. 'Sometimes I hate love, ' she has said, 'because it is heartbreaking and destructive.'

Naturally, she sings Goldfinger; it's a hyped-up, cheerfully cartoonish arrangement. And she goes on with a pulsating, Tina Turner-ish version of I Wanna Know What Love Is, before moving towards the end, which consists of I Am What I Am, a song about being defiant and bloody-minded, and Yesterday, When I Was Young, which makes everybody feel suitably sad. Men keep rushing to the stage with flowers. Before she goes, Shirley throws about 30 red carnations into the audience, and scuffles break out between men in cavalry twill slacks and other men with close-cropped hair and earrings. It's wonderful. Hundreds of people make their way out of the auditorium, happy as you like. I hope they can spare a thought for poor old Shirley.

By: William Leith

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