Shirley Bassey They Sold a Million

Out of the South Wales

poverty-stricken docklands of Cardiff's Tiger Bay in the 1950s

rose a star with a voice like a force of nature

about to take the world by storm.

MUSIC: "Big Spender" by Shirley Bassey

# The minute you walked in the joint... #

Shirley Bassey soon became the first Welsh artist

to have a UK number one

and the most successful British female chart artist ever.

She moved rapidly from singing in pubs to

performing for American presidents,

from bars to Bond movies.

But what made her records sell in their millions?

Was it just her amazing voice? Her style?

Her onstage drama?

Or did toughness and determination play a role?

Did her manager make her?

Or was she lucky? The right girl at the right moment?

What was Bassey's x-factor?

The record shows Shirley Bassey quickly became

one of the greatest divas of all time.

A Welsh diamond, still shining

and now celebrating her 60th year in show business.

MUSIC: The Girl From Tiger Bay by Shirley Bassey

# I bought the ticket of a lifetime

# There's no denying who I am... #

SHIRLEY BASSEY: 'I was born in Tiger Bay

'over an Indian restaurant.

# Forever, I will stay the girl from Tiger Bay... #

'This seemed to be the only place in the world

'until, of course, I left at the age of 16

'and I discovered that there were other places.'

# ..the girl from Tiger Bay. #

My mother said I was singing before I could talk

and instead of crying, I would sing.

Uh...

But... I mean, I didn't want to be a singer.

It's something that happened.

Shirley was the youngest of seven.

Her father Henry, a black West African seaman,

her mother Eliza, white, from northern England,

moving to Cardiff, probably

because Tiger Bay was a more racially tolerant community.

As a vibrant melting pot of all races and religions,

it also had a lively nightlife of music

and gambling in the pubs, clubs and shebeens.

She grew up in an area where

it was almost the New Orleans of this country, Cardiff, it was,

you know, it was docks, it was a lot of mixed race people there then.

Henry Bassey, Shirley's father

used to run a shebeen over there on Bute Street.

A shebeen was like an illegal nightclub.

You would turn your home into a nightclub,

make sure nobody could see from outside,

you would have blackout curtains in there,

and people could pay to come in your house, buy a drink and have a dance.

Her dad wanted to dance all night long down in Tiger Bay,

you know, this was the time when pubs shut at ten o'clock, you know,

but life never stopped in Tiger Bay.

Tiger Bay was the part of Cardiff to be avoided.

It was very cosmopolitan but it was troublesome.

It was supposed to be notorious and all that.

Tiger Bay wasn't like that.

OK, there was a gambling corner, and...

it was just great.

At the age of four, after her father had left home for good,

Shirley moved with her family across the docks to Splott

where stepfather Joe helped provide stability at home.

As a mixed race pupil at Moorland Primary School, Shirley stood out.

'I think we were the only coloured family that lived in Splott

'but we were accepted, you know, like anybody else.

'I hated school, though.

'I was a terrible tomboy when I was in school.

'I loved playing football, climbing trees, playing cricket,

'I was just wild.'

I was always singing and always being told to shut up.

I had no encouragement, so I don't know how I became a singer.

You know, even when I was in the school choir, the teacher...

I was in the front row, then in the middle, then I was in the back,

and then in the end, I found myself in the hall singing all to myself.

But Shirley was still friends with the Tiger Bay girls

and, in fact, I think she also went to Mr French's dance classes.

All the girls would go and do tap dancing

and Mr French, an old African from West Africa, he used to say,

"I'm going to turn you into film stars."

Her mother Eliza always knew Shirley had a special talent.

As a child, Shirley would sing from under the table,

too shy to come out

but as a teenager, she blossomed and began to

belt it out, soon singing around tables in pubs, clubs and parties.

Weekends, I found there was somebody looking for a singer

to sing at working men's clubs, you know, because...

And I was only 14.

It was just for extra money to buy my mother a birthday present

and that's how it all started.

Tiger Bay was this unique place on earth,

unbeknownst to me at the time how unique it was.

And Shirley was really an expression of it.

It's the talent of having a little essence of everything in you.

And Shirley had it in her. She was a natural show woman.

A bit of a show-off, if you will.

People would go to parties in Loudoun Square

and it was common, everybody sang in chorus,

everybody sang the latest songs together,

but Shirley would then belt it out, and they would go, "Oh, listen to her."

Ladies and gentlemen, we present Welsh Rarebit.

Wyn Calvin was a young Welsh comic working on a BBC radio talent series

called Welsh Rarebit when he heard of a young singer in Tiger Bay.

I had been down in the docks and heard about a kid who was singing

and I heard her singing in...

I think it was called the Ship and Pilot pub in the docks.

I thought, "She's tremendous."

I told Mai Jones, who was the producer of Welsh Rarebit,

I told her about this wonderful kid.

She was 15.

And I arranged a audition at the BBC in Park Place in Cardiff.

Afterwards, I was told not to waste their time

with rubbish like that again.

So, not professional enough or Welsh enough for the BBC.

But there was another way out of Tiger Bay and into show business.

In that era, lots of shows used to come to London from America

and some of these shows were all-black revues.

They used to say to these groups, you have to have a certain number

of British actors or dancers and singers or whatever within the show.

Somehow, it was discovered there were these beautiful girls in Tiger Bay

and so they came from London deliberately

to look for girls to just be the background in Show Boat

and all those kinds of shows that they had needing black people.

So, our girls went en masse. They couldn't wait.

So, in 1953, a very young Shirley joined the touring revue

of Memories Of Jolson, followed by Hot From Harlem.

One of the Tiger Bay girls was dancer Louise "Lulu" Freeman,

who became a close friend and room-mate of Shirley while on tour.

I first heard her voice when she came into Paris After Dark

and she used to sing Ebb Tide. And I thought, "God, she is fantas..."

You could tell, it was star quality,

it was fabulous, she had a fabulous voice from then.

It was... I mean, it was untrained, she had an untrained voice.

But Shirley had to leave. She was shocked to find herself pregnant.

Suddenly, back in Cardiff as a single mum,

her career seemingly over before it had begun.

She was working as a waitress in a local factory

when she was asked to join a new show, Caribbean Heatwave.

Urged on by her mother, who looked after baby Sharon,

Shirley went to London to audition.

This girl was unkempt, um, and although she had a voice,

she had no style then.

She had impact.

But there was nothing smooth about her approach.

The show's agent, Mike Sullivan, who died in 1995,

said in his autobiography

that Shirley made a poor first impression.

He said she was wearing crumpled jeans, a dirty yellow sweater,

had a short crop fuzz of black hair and didn't know what key to sing in.

He nearly sent her away,

but he had hired the rehearsal room and paid her fare.

Then, she sang.

# Don't know why... #

"I shivered, an uncanny spine-tingling sensation.

"This had never happened to me before

"and I was hardened to singers in auditions," said Sullivan.

He had discovered gold.

So, Shirley passed the audition

and was off to Jersey to join the show led by her friend,

choreographer Ben Johnson, who had a lasting influence on her.

I liked this choreographer, I think, in fact, that's where I got all my movements from.

I used to stand in the wings and watch him

and God, he was so graceful.

Finally, it all started to come into play,

so one day, I found out my hand had moved, but at the right...

Not just moving like a windmill

but moving to make a point of what

I was actually singing about at that moment.

He was all...this. He was all...

# When they begin the Beguine... #

And all that was Ben.

He would have said to her, "I want more movement,"

or, you know, "Give it a bit more," you know, when she was singing.

And then she sort of went further with it.

The show's agent, Mike Sullivan,

then came to Jersey to sign up Shirley as a solo act.

He had plenty of average acts in his books

but here was a diamond, rough around the edges

but unmistakably a gem, and Sullivan needed a break.

He was heavily in debt, desperate for the big time.

She said, "Oh, I'm going to join his agency

"and he's going to look after me and he's going to spend...

"they're going to spend £100 on gowns."

And we were like... "£100 on gowns!"

We were like, "Oh, that's fabulous!"

You know... £100!

And after Jersey, she went...

I don't know whether she went to live with Mike and his wife

but they took her over then

and then, that was the start of Shirley Bassey.

# I'll get by... #

Sullivan promised stardom, but not with a baby in tow.

Shirley made the heartbreaking decision to

leave baby Sharon in the care of her mother and sister Iris.

In the following months of 1955,

Sullivan then claims

he and his wife trained Shirley into being a star,

taught her stagecraft, gave her a style and selected her songs.

At the time, many British artists covered the hits of American stars

like Eartha Kitt and Lena Horne.

Now, Sullivan believed he had a British version.

She was dubbed the Tigress of Tiger Bay.

They always give this sexual image of black singers. I don't know why.

But they always identify certain black singers

like a sexual animal thing what they're supposed to have, etc.

So, that's where they coined it for Shirley.

They were looking for a black British Eartha Kitt

and she came at the right time.

Shirley's solo career was launched softly

here at the out-of-the-way Hippodrome in Keighley, Yorkshire.

About to go on, Sullivan said she was near to panic

but she went down well, especially with the older audience.

Next stop, the toughest place in Britain to perform -

the Glasgow Empire,

notorious for its raucous audience.

I was singing... # I've got you under my skin... #

And, then, they started.

They let me have it!

"Yes, take it off!" And whatever...

SHE GASPS

And this went on throughout the song and I kept going.

And, then, when I finished that song,

before I went on, I stopped, and I said in my broad Welsh accent,

"Now, listen here,

"I've come here tonight to entertain you

"and if you don't want to listen, I'll go home.

"But, first, give me a chance."

Silence. I thought, "God, what have I done?"

Silence.

I peeped out because it was very dark, and they were still there.

And at the end, a round of applause. It was great.

So, it went through the grapevine that I passed

and I got a contract for all the Moss Empires.

The incident demonstrated Shirley's determination to succeed

and her toughness forged in her Tiger Bay upbringing

and in the sacrifices she had already made -

personal qualities she acknowledged at the time.

'Because of that time,

'I can cope with all the toughness of show business.'

And... But that was a good background

for my...way up the ladder to success.

She saw that there was a chance of Shirley Bassey being

something bigger than the kid from Tiger Bay.

And her determination became so obvious

when she was performing because before going on stage,

she would be quite quiet and quite reserved and then,

when she got on there in the lights,

she lit up like a huge bulb.

From Glasgow on, Shirley was up and running

and growing by performance around the British variety circuit.

But Sullivan needed to break through, so switched track,

moving Shirley into the London cabaret and club scene.

I remember seeing her at a club, I am sure it was the Astor Club

in Berkeley Square, and she was singing

all very sexy stuff, quite innocent but suggestive stuff,

and to be honest with you, she had some rough edges then.

She was just starting.

She didn't look quite right, she didn't sound quite right

but there was something about her that made her different.

Watching her at the Astor was Jack Hylton,

one of the biggest impresarios of the time, who asked Shirley to

appear the next night at the famous Adelphi Theatre

and then on Hylton's fledgling TV shows.

This was Shirley's big break.

She was now armed with her own signature song and first record.

# Who's got a match for striking?

# Don't say it all depends

# Who wants to help me burn my candle

# At both ends? #

Burn My candle was deliberately full of sex and innuendo.

Sullivan wanted an impact, wanted her noticed.

# After he's sown wild oats

# Who wants to take a chance and help me

# Burn my boats? #

This saucy single was duly banned by the BBC

but while it stirred things up,

her apparent innocence balancing the lewd lyrics, it didn't sell.

# ..at both ends! #

Commercially, it remained a safer bet to cover American hits

so, with Calypso fever gripping the UK,

she covered Harry Belafonte's huge chart topper,

the Banana Boat Song, then left for New York and Las Vegas.

Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Shirley Bassey!

There, Shirley enjoyed the Rat Pack company of Frank Sinatra

and Sammy Davis Junior, but also experienced racial segregation,

not even allowed to walk down a Vegas street with her white manager.

Returning from Vegas, the Banana Boat Song was climbing the charts,

reaching number eight in the spring of 1957.

Shirley's first hit. Sullivan wanted to capitalise on the success.

Shirley had been out of the country,

out of the British press for a while,

so a triumphant homecoming to Cardiff was planned.

Coming off the train was so staged by Mike Sullivan,

magnificently,

with a huge open car and the children from the Rainbow Club.

He got it all set up wonderfully,

and had me there, helping to make sure of this big welcome for her.

Shirley was upstairs and my mother was there, and they were waiting for her to come down and all

the kids from Tiger Bay and the docks

were waiting for her to come on stage.

And my mother said she walked to the top of the stairs and stopped

and my mother had the foresight to think, oh,

she was in the presence of something regal

and that she was waiting for a lady-in-waiting or something like that

and so my mother went to the stairs before her

to walk down, so Shirley immediately walked behind Mrs Sinclair

and of course, my mother was the first to arrive on the stage

and as she came out, everybody was screaming, "Shirley, Shirley!"

And then along comes Shirley behind my mother, you know,

the real star!

Back in London, Shirley topped the bill in the Hippodrome.

But sales of her new single flopped

while her private life, always turbulent, turned violent.

A boyfriend held her hostage at gunpoint.

She fled to tour Australia, but the British press hounded her there

about her so-called "secret" daughter Sharon.

Returning to the UK in the summer of 1958, agent Sullivan

once again conjures up publicity, even pretending Shirley was missing.

With this and other devious tactics,

Shirley was soon back on stage in the limelight

and then recording in quick succession

the ballad As I Love You and the up-tempo Kiss Me Honey Honey.

# Kiss me, honey, honey, kiss me

# Thrill me, honey, honey, thrill me... #

The single sells slowly, but then, Shirley appears on TV

in Sunday Night At The London Palladium

hosted by a young Bruce Forsyth.

# Welcome to Sunday Night At The London Palladium... #

And record sales take off,

reaching number one and three in February 1959,

the first Welsh artist to top the charts.

And, now, I would like to sing for you the song that introduced me

to number one position in the Hit Parade.

# I will love you

# As I love you all my life

It was a number one out of nowhere,

and rarely gets played these days.

You will still hear Climb Every Mountain,

or Kiss Me Honey Honey Kiss me,

there are some that will still get played, but As I Love You just came

out of nowhere, was a number one.

Who bought it? I don't know. I guess the older people bought it.

And there weren't as many shop windows then, of course.

There were two or three TV shows that she might have been on,

there weren't the big chat shows then, it was probably

Sunday Night At The London Palladium watched by 20 million people

and if one million bought it, you've got a number one.

# As I love you... #

With the stardom came confidence.

Shirley always felt overworked,

bullied and exploited by Mike Sullivan

and shortly after opening a new West End show called Blue Magic

with Caerphilly's comedian Tommy Cooper,

she sacked her ruthless but ingenious agent.

Her new husband Ken Hume

took over managerial role

as Shirley now enjoyed being part of a set of rising stars.

Her new friends included Anthony Newley, who had his own TV show

and co-wrote Goldfinger.

Then of course, I did an all-time winner, of course,

which went something like this.

# I'll never let you go

# Why? Because I love you

# I'll always love you so Why? Because you love me. #

How about that, then?

# I will love you

# As I love you all my life... #

Bond theme composer John Barry

also had a close relationship with Shirley,

asking her to sing Goldfinger

even before their friend had written the lyrics.

So, we go to John's apartment at 11 o'clock in the morning

and we sit there, and John goes...

# Dun! Dun-dun! #

And we both went... # Wider than a mile... #

which was not a good way to start a collaboration

with a film composer.

But Mancini had just won for Moon River the year before

so it was also that era.

Um... And then, we wrote this very weird lyric, but of course,

we were hearing someone playing the piano,

we did not hear that orchestration that was yet in the future.

So, we took the tape, and the next day,

we did it at my little apartment and gave it back to John.

The next thing we ever heard was, "When are you going to come

"and pick up your gold record?"

MUSIC: Goldfinger by Shirley Bassey

And I tell you, I just heard those opening bars and I got goose pimples.

# Goldfinger

# He's the man, the man with the Midas touch

# A spider's touch. #

It was an experience to do that,

we were in the studio with 60 musicians.

And I had to sing Goldfinger to what was happening on the credits,

but we got to the end

and the credits didn't seem to end and I had to hold this note.

And it was like forever.

And I was looking at John, I was going blue in the face...

# ..finger... #

No, he loves... # Go-o-o-o-o-old... #

The credits are going, the credits are going and he's going... SHE MOUTHS

At the end, I just... I nearly passed out.

She liked John's simplicity.

There was something about that

because John was a very blunt Yorkshireman.

He would say... When she said, "I don't how to do Goldfinger,"

he said, "Just do the bloody thing and stop thinking about it."

Goldfinger, if you read the lyric, it's a bit daft.

It's a very unlikely lyric, but there it is. She made you believe it.

She believed it when she was singing. She believed what she was saying.

She was saying beware of this heart of gold.

And she sang it with all the drama

and she was a great actress in her conveying a lyric to people.

She has a way of seducing you into the lyric.

It is that come-hither,

and you feel that lure of the forbidden about her, there is

something about Shirley Bassey and Bond that is irresistible.

Goldfinger, the album, sold in its millions, reaching

the top of the charts in America at the height of Beatlemania.

# I like the free, fresh, wind... #

Shirley had now reached superstardom both sides of the Atlantic.

Her return to the States was attended by Hollywood's finest.

She sang for President John F Kennedy and back home for the Queen,

beginning her record-breaking sequence

of Royal Variety performances

and a friendship with her Royal admirers.

# Funny how I often seem... #

In the '70s, Shirley Bassey flourished.

Now, with her family around her, two daughters and a second husband,

she became one of the biggest stars on the planet,

with more Bond movies, her own prime-time TV show

and more record-breaking album sales...

..as well as playing her part to perfection in a comedy classic.

AUDIENCE LAUGHTER DROWNS OUT SONG

The thing about Shirley's career which I have always loved,

she has never been diminished, you never see her on one of those

third-rate quiz programmes like so many people did.

She was always remote. Great stars should be untouchable.

Like Streisand. Those sort of people.

And Shirley Bassey is very fussy about what she does.

She doesn't just do anything and when she does perform,

the orchestra has to be right, the rehearsals have to be right,

she is a perfectionist and it shows

and that's why her career is as strong now as it has ever been.

In the '80s and '90s, she moved from being a star to being an icon.

Honoured as a dame, she was now a legend.

# Aside set the little bits of history repeating... #

Celebrated by a new generation of musicians and fans,

culminating in a memorable appearance at Glastonbury.

CROWD CHANT: Shirley, Shirley!

CROWD CHEER

'This strange thing took hold,

'this electricity in the air, you know,

'and I was away with it, I got caught up in it.'

MUSIC: Big Spender

# The minute you walked in the joint

# I could see you were a man of distinction

# A real big spender

# Good-looking, so refined

# Say, wouldn't you like to know what's going on in my mind?

Shirley Bassey is the most successful British female

chart artist of all time.

She is also the oldest female person to chart.

She charted with Get The Party Started in 2007

when she was over 70, so she's the oldest one to chart.

She's the most successful,

she was voted in the Top 100 Greatest Black Britons,

in the top ten, and of course,

Shirley then later got the Legion d'Honneur,

she became a CBE, she became a dame,

um, she got so many awards, she got the UNESCO Peace Prize.

I mean, this for a girl dragged up,

really dragged up on the back streets of Cardiff.

Born a diamond in the rough of Tiger Bay,

over her 60 years in show business,

Dame Shirley Bassey

became a diamond the world will cherish for ever.

# Diamonds are forever, forever, forever

# Diamonds are forever, forever, forever

# Forever

# And ever. #

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd