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Posted by Roger on October 23, 2009, 11:16 pm, in reply to "Re: New Shirley Interview Part 2"
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By contrast, she says, she has continued to evolve, especially with the new album. "I have amazed myself. My vocal coach has always said I have a soft voice but I never use it and she was so right." You were surprised by the tenderness? "Yes, it knocked me out. I'm so used to singing out..." She spreads her arms dramatically. Belting it out? She gives me a stare that could freeze the sun. "Don't say belting. I hate that word."
God, you look scary.
She laughs. "Did I get scary? Hehehehe! Well, it's an awful word. I don't like belting. Belting is disrespectful, you know. Only my kind of singer is accused of belting. You don't say that opera singers belt. I don't belt. That's just my voice."
Does Tom Jones belt? "He sings. He's a singer. Amateurs belt. We've both learned our craft and we don't deserve to be accused of belting."
Dame Shirley, I take it back and apologise.
She giggles her forgiveness. "Thank you."
It was meant as a compliment but it didn't come out quite right.
"Hehehehe! You've made me all hot now. Ooooh! Oooh! Oooh!" She blows down her jumper again.
As she talks about her fellow Welsh singing legend, I can't help thinking how different he is from her – when I interviewed him last year, I was struck by how joyously he embraces his celebrity. She tells me how much she adores him, especially now he's allowed his hair to go grey. "I'm so glad he's gone au naturel. He looks fan-tas-tic." Have they sung together? "Yes, in the late 60s. We did the Beatles. The Beatles wasn't for us. We should have done Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better, no you can't, yes I can... Something like that."
She grins. "Yeah, we could call it A Knight With A Dame! Yeaaaah! Oh, get me the phone!"
Have you just thought of that?
"Isn't that incredible? I swear I've just thought of it."
I tell her that one of the things I love about him is that he insists on telling you about every bit of plastic surgery he's had.
"He's so lovely and honest, our Tom." She grins.
You've got a good smile.
"Thank you."
Your teeth are amazing. Are they your own?
"They were until until they started falling out."
You've had them done?
"Don't!" she warns. "Keep the glamour going!"
We're still debating the rights and wrongs of discussing her past. The thing is, I say, if I have to rely on old articles, I would have to assume you have a bad relationship with all your family. "Ach, so many of the headlines are rubbish," she says.
Is your relationship with Sharon good? "Fantastic. I even get on very well with my son, Mark." But the papers say you don't? "But I do. We have long conversations on the phone. I won't say it was always good, but we are now settled. We have a good relationship."
It's Samantha I really want to ask about. Her short life was troubled – Bassey never named her father (it was rumoured to be the actor Peter Finch with whom she had an affair), and Sharon told the inquest her younger sister sometimes drank to excess and had received treatment for depression.
Bassey has hardly ever said anything about her publicly. More than anything, I think her daughter's death has, not surprisingly, dominated her later years. I ask how difficult it was to cope with Samantha's death and expect her to stonewall me. But she doesn't. Far from it. She starts to talk slowly, uncertainly. "It was difficult. Samantha didn't... none of them liked it... me going away, but Samantha, she really took it to heart. And every time the cases came up from the basement the kids would be agh..."
You never thought she killed herself? "No. Never believed that. Listen, if somebody jumped off – this is what annoys me with the press because it's a more sensational story. If she'd jumped off the bridge, all her bones would have been broken. But there was not a bone broken. In fact she did not have a mark on her. So if anything, I'm suspicious about her death. They said she didn't have a mark on her, and she didn't have any water in her lungs. So if somebody's drowning, they gasp, don't they?"
Why wasn't there an investigation? "This is it. It's so long ago." She snuffles. "It's bothered me all this time. Because if she didn't have any bruises or broken bones, where did she fall? And if she didn't fall from the bridge… It's been with me all this time. My imagination goes wild. Detectives are telling me this. She didn't have a bone broken or a mark on her body and no water in her lungs. That's what the mortician told me, so why didn't they find that suspicious?"
Had you been in touch with her just before she died? "No. Actually I was going to England and going to see her before my tour of America." Two nights before she left, she tells me, she had a terrible premonition – her daughter seemed to appear before her. "I saw flashes of her image on the television and it was really scary." She's talking so quietly, and I can see that revisiting this eerie vision is traumatic for her. But she persists with the story, apparently determined to tell it. "In the end I got on the phone to her and the landlady said, 'Oh, just a minute.' Then she came back and said, 'Oh, Samantha's busy, she'll call you back' and she never did. And then I got off the plane to pick everyone up at the airport and there was my daughter Sharon at the steps. What's going on here? And they took me into a room and there was just a bed, and I said, this is not the VIP lounge, and then they hit me with it. And the tour was cancelled and the doctor was brought in. Ah. And you know it was hard… I never wanted to sing again. Children should bury their parents, not the other way round."
The room is silent. She swallows hard. There are tears in her eyes. "I didn't expect this kind of interview. I don't want to do this any more. You didn't tell me it was going to be this deep." She's angry and upset – with me, and possibly with herself. "No, no, no, no, no, that's it. You can't trust anybody, they want to talk to you about a record and then they go deep into your life. That's why the press have a bad name. That's so unfair, you know. To do that. Where's my coat?" And with that she disappears.
• The Performance is released on 9 November
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