The Black Welsh singer started out recording cover versions of American songbook classics but rose to international fame after her performance of the title song of Goldfinger. Movie songs, successful albums and popular television specials followed, but so too did personal tragedy and a highly critical (and gendered) reputation of her professional behaviour in the media.
The word ‘diva’ has been applied both admiringly and misogynistically to her life and work, typifying her experience as a Black British woman.
This lecture was recorded by Dominic Broomfield-McHugh on 21st March 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/bassey
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The Black Welsh singer started out recording cover versions of American songbook classics but rose to international fame after her performance of the title song of Goldfinger. Movie songs, successful albums and popular television specials followed, but so too did personal tragedy and a highly critical (and gendered) reputation of her professional behaviour in the media.
The word ‘diva’ has been applied both admiringly and misogynistically to her life and work, typifying her experience as a Black British woman.
This lecture was recorded by Dominic Broomfield-McHugh on 21st March 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/bassey
Gresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/
This absolutely filthy music evokes the spirit of another time. And remarkably it's 60 years this September since the premier of Goldfinger, the third James Bond film, from which of course, that music comes. When I watched the film again recently in preparation for this lecture, I was actually struck by how tame some of its seems now 60 years on, which I guess is pretty reasonable. But when we look at the footage of the premier in Leicester Square, we can see that the bond frenzy was, um, quite considerable back then in the 1960s. And the public is, um, vying with the police and with with each other to try and catch a glimpse of the stars of the film, albeit minus one, Sean Connery, who was off making another film somewhere else, but someone who was there was the young Shirley Bassey, who of course memorably recorded the title song or the yeah, the title song over the opening titles of the film. And here she is with Barbara Streisand, who was the subject of the first talk in my series about divas. Here they are both after the Oscars ceremony in 2013. The Gresham College lecture that you're listening to right now is giving you knowledge and insight from one of the world's leading academic experts, making it takes a lot of time. But because we want to encourage a love of learning, we think it's well worth it. We never make you pay for lectures, although donations are needed. All we ask in return is this. Send a link to this lecture to someone you think would benefit. And if you haven't already, click the follow or subscribe button from wherever you are listening right now. Now, let's get back to the lecture. In that talk I talked about, um, the idea of the word diva and how it has both positive and negative connotations. On the one hand, um, it literally means a goddess, but it also comes with positive words like glamorous, successful, outstanding things that we might want to be or want to be called. And then also things we might not want to be called like petulant and demanding. And these are the reasons why, um, Barbara Streisand very strongly dissociates with the idea of being a diva. She said, I think I'm not a diva. Shirley Bassey, on the other hand, finds it an empowering idea. And so what I'm interested in in this lecture is how she found that point where she became a diva as opposed to an extremely talented, popular artist. So let's stick for a moment with Goldfinger and look at clips of two live performances of the song. The first one comes from 1974 from a concert that she gave at the Royal Albert Hall. And I think in this one, she's still at the extremely talented and wonderful popular singer stage. And the second one comes, would you believe, from the National Lottery Results Show in 1997 when she was 60 years old. But in this performance, I think you can see that she has become a diva in the intervening years. So let's take a look at these two From Mr. Gold. Pretty girl. He out his heart go, his heart is good. From Mr. Finger, pretty girl. He wear up his go. It's hot, it's cold. He, he, So we can see, You know, it's a nightmare talking about this topic because she is so impressive in so many of these clips that it's hard to say anything equally effective in between. But anyway, there's huge power and impact in that performance, which I think is typical of Bassi once she has become a diva. And the first clip is also wonderful. I don't want to seem like I'm saying anything critical of her. I just think that something hasn't yet quite landed and arrived in her career. When I started thinking about this song, I noticed for the first time how peculiar it is and thought what a nightmare it must have been to be asked to write the words for a song called Goldfinger. And by coincidence, the um, papers of Leslie Brickers, who was one of the two lyricists along with Anton newly, were given to the Library of Congress just about three or four months ago. So I managed to get scans of some of them. And here we can see what's marked, at least as the first draft of the lyric of Goldfinger in Leslie Bricker's hand. And one of the things that surprised me is that even though there are some unfamiliar things, we see these strange lines, like here he comes, what a man and the, some ideas that they discarded like king of gold, man of gold. We do get some insight into the struggle to write this song because the lines are quite short and it's not really about anything very meaningful. And there is a bit of working in here as well. They changed the word world into the word web. But basically the song is there. And the reason for this, when I, um, dug a bit further is that John Barry, who wrote the music for many of the James Bond films, including this one, um, wrote the music first. So John Barry toured with Shirley Bassey in December, 1963. And during that period played for her, the music to the song Goldfinger, six months before any lyricists had been hired. And therefore the lyricists, once they had been hired, inherited the structure of the song. So I guess that's why on one level it was easy to write some words, but then on the other hand, the details required quite a lot of digging because they had to indicate something about this weird name. And also something about the plot of the film, about this man who kills people by spraying them with gold paint. I mean, it doesn't really inspire lyrical thoughts, I guess. So day two, which is the 12th of May, 1964, we find them struggling again with more ideas that we might not have seen before. On the top right hand corner, you can see a bunch of words that rhyme with gold, funnily enough, <laugh> thousand fold, sold foretold, what are you gonna do? Um, top left hand corner, generic ideas for badness. And then at the very bottom, this line that they struggled with. So they struggled to find out what is this song gonna be about? And of course, what it turned out to be about in the end was a warning to women not to mess with this man gold finger. And so this warning that comes in at the end of the bridge section, so this is the middle section of the song is as each golden girl knows when he's kissed her, it's the kiss of death from Mr. Gold Finger. So you can see the workings of the song are all here on the page and you realize it's quite amazing <laugh> that Bassi managed to spend 40 or more years singing this song over and over and over and making it convincing. And this is part of why we realize what a great diva she is. But on the other hand, I think there are things about this that make it a great showcase for her. So these words, which are a bit ridiculous, do allow her to sing about death and danger and punishment for sex. So there's a kind of sense of suffering in the lyric that she can play upon to give it some kind of emotion. I guess the rhythms are very turbulent. The vocal line is very cleverly written so that it builds up to the most exciting point, part of her voice where she can belt that final note that we heard in that national lottery performance, there's a mixture of sustained lines and kind of choppy thrown away lines 'cause the lines of the song are not very long. And the words seem both serious and not, and personal and not, I mean, she's singing about death, but she's kind of twinkly while doing it. And there's something about this gray area of interpretation that seems ideal for, for her. She can stand there and deliver this frankly bizarre lyric, but kind of achieve power through it. So I'm interested in pursuing how she got there. If we look at her early life, as is well known, she was born and brought up in Tiger Bay in Cardiff, which is the Dockland District. It was an unusually multiracial area for the time. It was home to sailors from over 50 countries, including her father who was from Nigeria. Her mother was white and from Yorkshire. And so for the first few years of her life, actually, they lived in quite deprived circumstances, but also in a kind of harmony because it was a very diverse community. Her father was deported while she, when she was a child. And so her mother moved the family to a town called Spot, and that's where she experienced racism for the first time and was taken aback by it because it was actually the first time she was living in a white community. And race in connection or the subject of race in connection with Shirley Batey is quite a complicated topic because of these early experiences, because of her heritage. One of the, um, biographies that I've read of her actually says, or claims that she considers herself to be white, which I have never heard her say in an interview, but there is some strange perception about her, about the relevance to the topic of race to her experience. And when I started digging into what she did, her first professional show was called Memories of Jolson, which was a tribute show to probably the most famous blackface performer in the history of American, an entertainment jolson. And so she was hired to be a featured singer in a show in which the star was white and appearing in blackface a year up. So she was 16 at the time, I should say a year after that she appeared in a show called Hot From Harlem. So I think we can tell what was going on there. And on the next slide, we'll see some reviews of these shows using Language of the Day to refer to people of color. And what I'm interested in here is just to kind of, um, talk about the fact that her early appearances were entirely framed by race, because we often hear in the discourse around her and around other popular performers that we shouldn't politicize them. But the whole point is that she started from there, that that was how, how she could get her career going. So let's take a look. You can see that all of these, um, performances that she made were entirely about, um, appearing alongside other performers of color. There were some mentions of her talent specifically. So she's described as attractive and an asset. It's quite typical of these early articles that she's objectified in, in that kind of way. And she's described as lively. She kind of clearly got fed up at this by the time she was 18 and appeared in another show. There was this article I found from the Stage Mag Magazine where she says, or it's headed, Shirley wants to be herself. There was also this article announcing her appearance at Piccadilly Club in Glasgow. And one of the things I notice is there's some confusion over her background. The one on the left says she's from the West Indies, and the one on the right says that she's American. There's criticism of her vocal technique. She's quite unreasonably being compared to much older, much more established performers like Ella Fitzgerald, who was at the peak of her, um, fame at this point. And Lena Horne who'd been a movie star for over a decade. And then there's this great quote from her. She says, my style is my own. I am no copyist. I prefer to be myself. So I'm very impressed by how empowered she is, at least in spirit, because she's saying, you know, I'm not somebody else. I'm Shirley Bassey. Her agent at the time then joined forces with the leading theater and TV producer of the day, Jack Hilton. And this led her to get the opportunity to appear on television. We find more reviews of her appearing this time at The Talk of the Town, which was one of the major places to perform in London at the time. And, and again, we see sort of the emergence of ability. The re the critic says she has something to offer but has not yet fully developed her talent. And then this article on the right announcing her appearance in a Christmas show again, basically focuses on her skin color. So this is not me politicizing the subject, this is just historical documents about what happened. A review of that Christmas show has the following bitter comment, Shirley Bassey sings with ous abandon. While I can cope with that, putting over with a plum, a new line in horsely slurred dentals and hissed sibilants rather shattering if you like, that sort of thing. So this 18-year-old woman had to deal with that kind of press. And then she's once more objectified. In another review of this, this is this time in the international, um, version of variety where she's described as shapely with an emphatically sexy voice and personality. And then at the end of the article, it emphasizes her working class read and talks about her having deserted and industrial job in Wales. How dare she. The following year she appeared at the Cafe de Paris in London, which was a really, really major place to appear in the 1950s. This was where you would find people like Noel Coward and Marlena Dietrich. So for the young Shelly Bassey who appear there was a big deal, and suddenly there's an intensity in the kinds of things they're saying about her. She's amongst the most striking new personalities. She still needs a little more experience, but should move safely into the top bracket. So now suddenly aged 18 or 19, sorry, we're seeing that she's going to be a major star. Skin color is again one of the subjects of the article. Again, she's compared to, um, much more established people. And then there's this horrible comment at the end that says her presentation can be faulted only on one minor score. Her choice of gown seems quite unsuitable for the occasion, which I find both offensive and kind of amusing given that gowns are one of the trademarks of the majority of Shirley Bass's career. And I feel like it's ironic that this person made this comment about the thing that would become one of the biggest parts of her, um, iconic, um, yeah, iconography. One of the things that her first agent did to help her become more distinctive was to commission material for her. And so he went to the person who he could afford, which was this guy who was famous for writing these two wartime songs and asked him to write what I'm sure was supposed to be a masterpiece called Burn My Candle at both ends. And it was with this number that became a successful, um, recording that she made her television debut at the age of 19 in 1956. And here's a little bit of it. What if t who to turn the I opened my door and the who wants to help me burn my Fun, but she didn't know what she was talking about or singing about. She said, I didn't even know what it was about in an interview. I'd never sung a risk a song. And I think they purposefully didn't tell me so that I could give it that innocence <laugh>. However, she was on her way to her career and she re recognized that one of the things she needed to do was to get her career going in America, partly for just commercial reasons that she needed to have an international market. She needed to be able to appear in multiple countries. And she talks in various interviews about her anxiety about this because she'd read about Jim Crow laws and segregation, and she actually reported that her experiences there were okay. And she talks in this particular interview, um, after the quote that I've put on there about how people thought she was Mexican and that is why she was okay. But she describes seeing many incidents and problems for African Americans, um, actually being badly treated, for example, being turned away from hotels. And so this made her very wary of appearing in America. Fast forward three years and suddenly a review of another show that she was appearing in is headed the new Shirley Bassey. And this time there's a sense that something has changed or she started to find the center of gravity of her performance style. So it says that the whole pretty dreadful show has been transported from the realms of mediocrity by the exciting presence of a new, much higher pressured and yet more sophisticated and relaxed Shirley Bassey. And it talks about how she's now using her hands and her fingers in a more economical and measured way in order to communicate her songs, which I think remains one of the key qualities of her singing and her performances well into her life. It also talks about her being as much of an actress as a singer sounding less American in her performances. And ends, of course, with another comment about her hairstyle and the way that she looks with this bizarre comment on the bottom left about how this new look, um, is giving her a more feminine and more complicated womanliness rather than the unsettled fem fertile we've been accustomed to seeing from her. So she's now 21, 22 and dealing with these sorts of comments, we can see it really was a difficult rise that she had through her career. Finding a out exactly how she could go or what she should do was quite a complicated process. She herself was rather inspired by Judy Garland specifically. She says this in a lot of interviews, and I pulled out this little clip of Garland singing the Man that Got away because although I don't think Shirley Bassey sounds at all like this, I think there's something about the intensity and emotion of the performance that is something that probably bassey drew upon. Let's listen. No, what happened? It's all a crazy, you been through the mill. This is what Bassie felt inspired by. She also loved Frank Sinat. She described Sinatra as her idol. And then the three people to whom she was most commonly compared were Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Earth, A Kit. So other artists of black heritage. And clearly that's the reason that they were being compared. I find her actually rather unlike all three of these vocally, but she kind of invited some comparison with Lena Horne because she frequently sang the song Stormy Weather in the first decade of her career. And this was Lena Horne's hit song. So here's a little bit of Lena Horne singing this Rain Down this pit and Pattern Beaten and spa drives me mad. So these are the sorts of things that she's being compared to, but still, even by into the 1960s, Bassie has not yet formed around a particular kind of repertoire and style. And I, one of the things that most surprised me while preparing this lecture was finding her recording of Ave Maria, in which she sings in Head Voice. I rather like a classical singer. And it's a really impressive feat, the way that she goes from chest voices, which is chest voice, which is how she normally sings into this more operatic place and then back again so smoothly. I really think that one probably wouldn't think this was Shirley Bassey singing if one just heard it on the radio. Oh, It's a real curiosity in her career. And it doesn't tend to appear on her greatest hits albums, but it it's an interesting one and it shows really how well she could sing. At some point between 1960 and 1964, something changed and I just perceive that she became more comfortable with what she was doing and how she was doing it. And I, I would really love to attribute this to working with George Martin, the famous Beatles producer on a song called I Who Have Nothing, which was recorded, I think in 1963, where suddenly she sounds much more like an intense and lively Shirley Bassey. And after this point, it's like she's in a different stage of her career. And I feel that we can hear that, that something has changed when we compare her performances of the same song as long as He Needs Me from the musical Oliver in 1960 and 1964, the 1960 version is a studio recording. So it was made for listening to In the Home, the 1964 version was recorded live at Carnegie Hall. I acknowledge that those performance circumstances are quite different. And so of course there's gonna be some difference. But the second one is definitely quite a different kind of performer, it seems to me. So let's listen to a little clip of each. First of all, 1960, As long as he me, I know where I must be, as long as he needs me. It's really beautiful. But here's the 1964 version, and from the very start, it makes you want to sit up. I think, Ah,