FROM THE ARCHIVE 593 -1975-

In 1975 the album Good Bad But Beautiful was released. A great song from that album is the beautiful Send In The Clowns. A live version of the song below.

FROM THE ARCHIVE 592 -1974-

Today we go back to 1974. The Nobody Does It Like Me album was recorded in the USA. For some reason Shirley Bassey’s least favourite album but a great one to me! The song When You Smile was released as a single with the wonderful The Trouble With Hello Is Goodbye on the B-side. A song with great lyrics. I chose Morning In Your Eyes for this blog but it was a difficult to chose a favourite. Also there is the duet with Bernard Ighner Davy.  Below a review of the album and some newspaper clips from 1974.

Review of the album
By Joe Viglione, All Music Guide

Nobody Does It Like Me is an appropriate album title for the queen diva, Shirley Bassey, this 1974 release being another in-the-pocket delight. Producer Martin Rushent, who would take the Human League to the top of the charts in 1982, is here in an engineering capacity and the sound is somewhat different from her ’60s albums and even the double-live disc from the year before. M. Randall’s “Leave a Little Room” starts things off, and the feel is more geared toward the ’70s adult contemporary audiophile than the cabaret circuit. Sure, it’s the same instrumentation and voice her fans adore, but the music is pulled back somewhat; “When You Smile” is ready for radio, the orchestration not in your face. “All That Love Went to Waste” from the motion picture A Touch of Class finds sweeping strings and dynamic horns playing off of Bassey’s intuitive phrasings. Bernard Ighner composes and duets with Bassey on “Davy,” the approach Melissa Manchester would take a few years later for her tune “Whenever I Call You Friend,” which Kenny Loggins hit with. Even the song selection seems positioned to get the artist a piece of that 1970s radio play that Helen Reddy, Anne Murray, and Barry Manilow were so successful conquering. Paul Anka’s “I’m Not Anyone” is a seemingly perfect vehicle for just that. But where the Anne Murrays and Helen Reddys weren’t known for belting tunes out, the pop music radio did embrace back then was not the operatic style Jane Olivor and others were issuing. Bassey pulls back nicely on “Morning in Your Eyes,” but it still has too much elegance for programmers to latch onto. “The Trouble With Hello Is Goodbye” is traditional Bassey, subtle and overpowering all at once. The title track, “Nobody Does It Like Me,” is from the Broadway musical Seesaw, and it breaks out of the soft rock of most of the album, delivering a snazzy number that, truly, few can do like Bassey: “I got a big loud mouth/I’m always talking much too free/If you go for tacky manners/Better stay away from me.” The lower volume level is noticeable when “I’m Nothing Without You” follows that tour de force, its “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” strings and feel coming back to the mission of this record. And that mission is accomplished with the closing track. Just as Bassey recorded a superb version of Bobby Hebb’s “Sunny,” she re-interprets Stevie Wonder’s song with the same flavor, “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” It oozes with classy adult pop majesty, understated vocals, and bubbling instrumentation. Totally wonderful. This rendition should have been a huge American radio hit and is the frosting on the cake.

FROM THE ARCHIVE 591 -1973-

The year 1973 was another extremely busy and successful year for Shirley Bassey.
Is was the year the Never Never Never album was recorded and released. The song I chose from this year is Somehow. Shirley sang it live in concert that year.  A  concert that was recorded for TV at the Royal Albert Hall in November that year and was transmitted on January the first in 1974. During that concert she received TEN golden records. The live version of Somehow was just incredible. 

Below 2 articles from magazines from that year. Listen Easy & TV. Times.

Somehow
Music written by Larry Grossman and lyrics by Harold (Hal) Hackady. Released in 1973 on the album Never, Never, Never. 

I don’t know if anyone else did this song before. I only know that the two who wrote this song have also written a musical together – “Snoopy” in 1975 about the little dog of Charlie Brown. 

Lyrics:

You are what you are
It was, what it was
The world didn’t end
The world never does
I wake up alive
From habit I guess
Yes, I can survive, one love more or less

And sometime, somewhere, somehow
I laugh all my laughter
I’ve cried my tears now
I want my years now
My years

I’ve nowhere to go
That I have to be
There’s no one I know
Who’s waiting for me
There’s so much inside
I still have to give
So much to be tried
A life time to live

And sometime, somewhere, somehow
I’ll have my tomorrow
Today won’t stop me
No way to stop me
Not now

The world still holds me
I want what’s due now
If not with you now
Then someone, sometime, somehow

(Transcribed by Roman)

FROM THE ARCHIVE 590 -1972-

The year 1972 was another extremely busy year for then miss Shirley Bassey. She recorded 2 albums that year: I Capricorn & And I love You So.  She did TV performances  and the recordings of her first This Is Your Life plus one of her very best specials All About Shirley. Below I have the original audio of the interviews for you from that special.
As song from 1972 I picked For All We Know also from a TV special from that year. and of course some newspaper that year.

Original audio of the interviews from All About Shirley