Today a few newspaper articles from 1982. A year with ups and downs. Shirley Bassey had a serious health issue but recovered just in time before the recording of the TV Show A Special Lady. One of the few shows ever released on DVD. The year mentioned on the cover of the DVD is not correct. The DVD was released in 1983. Another TV special recorded that year was the Summertime Special. Also that year the album and single All By Myself were released although in some countries the album was named Love Songs. Her tour that year had to be postponed because of the medical problems Shirley had. We saw her at the Royal Albert Hall that year and she looked and sounded fantastic. (Picture below by John den Outer)
Today the second part of the 1971 Ed Sullivan show which is a sketch of Dame Shirley with Ed Sullivan and American comic, actor and writer Sid Caesar(Special thanks to Jed for the information). I hope you enjoy this gem.
On today’s blog we want to wish Dame Shirley Bassey a very happy birthday! What better song to play now than I Capricorn from her YouTube channel.
Glamor, glamor and “gold fingers”: Dame Shirley Bassey turns 85 (From 24 world hours)
In the past 70 years she has been an absolute constant: Shirley Bassey has been in the top 40 with at least one album in every decade. The British woman is the first artist to have succeeded – thanks to her last album “I Owe It All To You” , which made it to fifth place in their home country. At the same time, the “grand finale”, as she called it, marked her departure from the world of music. She will be 85 years old on January 8th. Most recently, the singer was hardly seen in public – not even on her social media channels.
Like hardly any other singer, Dame Shirley stands for pomp, glitz and glamor, for theatricality and something triumphant in her voice. This made the singer, who was born in the rough working-class and harbor district of Tiger Bay in Cardiff, the ideal candidate to sing the song “Goldfinger” composed by John Barry in 1964. Two more 007 songs followed later, “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971) and “Moonraker” (1979). That means a lot to her, emphasized Bassey: “I’m the only person who has sung three Bond songs! How fantastic is that?”
In fact, Bassey, dubbed Dame Shirley since she was knighted in 2000, had her first number one hit in Great Britain five years before “Goldfinger” with “As I Love You”. She was 22 at the time and had had a tough youth. She left school at the age of 14 and began performing as a singer in clubs and bars as a teenager. Her private life has always been turbulent and complicated. In 1954, at 17, she became a mother for the first time, and in 1963 for the second time. Who the father of her two daughters is was never made public.
After the death of her daughter Samantha Bassey temporarily lost her voice. But every time the public almost wrote her off, the singer came back successfully.
Dame Shirley Bassey Blog 
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