15 September 2009
Newsdesk
Dame Shirley Bassey, Britain’s most successful female artist ever, is set to release her brand new album ‘The Performance’ on November 9th on Geffen Records.
The 11-track album is Dame Shirley Bassey’s first full studio album in over 20 years. David Arnold, the Grammy Award-winning producer best known for scoring five James Bond films has produced the album.
‘The Performance’ features songs written specifically for Dame Shirley Bassey, by a stellar cast of contemporary artists, including, Take That’s, Gary Barlow, the Manic Street Preachers, Pet Shop Boys, KT Tunstall and Rufus Wainwright. The album also features a brand new composition from John Barry and Don Black; the first new song written by them for Dame Shirley since ‘Diamonds Are Forever.’
Speaking about producing the new album, The Performance, David Arnold said:
"All these songs were just songs, until Dame Shirley Bassey sang them. Now they’re Shirley Bassey songs - hopefully classic and contemporary, like that voice. There's something about a Bassey performance that can knock the wind out of your sails, make you laugh, make you cry, let you in on the joke or be led to a more exotic place. I tried to make a record that made the most of that voice and one that could sit alongside her other classic recordings. There isn’t a 'next Shirley Bassey', there never really was and I doubt if there ever will be. She's as unique and wonderful today as she has ever been and I hope this record will reach an audience who may never have heard her before, so they can say 'she's got it', and for her fans from the past who can say ‘she's still got it’.”
During a career that has included 135 million record sales, Dame Shirley Bassey has had many incredible highlights, including being the only artist to record three James Bond movie theme songs. Dame Shirley has received numerous awards including a DBE [Dame of the British Empire] in 1999.
In 2007, Dame Shirley appeared at the Glastonbury festival, where at the same event Arctic Monkeys covered ‘Diamonds Are Forever’. Kanye West also sampled the same track on his 2005 Grammy-winning song ‘Diamonds From Sierra Leone’.
