David and Shirley
THE PERFORMANCE CONCEPT
BBC Review
A return to what Bassey does best: sweeping, orchestral overstatement.
Tom Hocknell 2009
After 2007’s patchy, Grandma-with-a-ringtone album Get the Party Started, The Performance is a return to what Bassey does best: sweeping, orchestral overstatement. This collection is also contemporary, but instead of resorting to Mark Ronson or other remixers du-jour, she mines the talents of a collection of disparate, yet established songwriters....
Billboard rapport
Shirley Bassey return to the performance
One of Britain's most beloved entertainers, with global career sales estimated at 135 million by her label, Shirley Bassey hardly needs to make albums anymore.
But on November 9 in the United Kingdom, Geffen/Universal will release "The Performance," produced by James Bond soundtrack master David Arnold and featuring songs custom-written for her by Take That's Gary Barlow, the Pet Shop Boys, Rufus Wainwright, KT Tunstall and others.
Wikipedia source concept
the telegraph.co.uk > The performance rapport
Incredibly, this is Dame Shirl’s first full-scale studio album in two decades, and it arrives like a ticker-tape parade down Broadway. It’s produced by David Arnold, reigning music supremo of the James Bond franchise, and is crammed with new songs by a slightly odd assortment of writers including KT Tunstall, Richard Hawley, Rufus Wainwright, Tom Baxter and more. There’s even a comeback by John Barry and Don Black, who wrote Diamonds Are Forever for Bassey in 1971 and contribute the newly penned Our Time Is Now.
At 72, you’d hardly expect Bassey to match the full ocean-going majesty of her heyday, but she still packs plenty of vocal wallop, as she demonstrates on the opener, Tom Baxter’s Almost There. It’s an autumnal ballad which bubbles up into a cataclysm of brass, strings and percussion, and she rides the sonic hurricane with aplomb. However, the image of Bassey as feather boa’d drama queen with orchestra has its limitations, especially when it’s refracted through Arnold’s Bond-centric world view, in which everything can seem like a pastiche of something by John Barry. Arnold himself wrote No Good About Goodbye with Don Black, but they might as well have called it Diamondfinger Never Lives Twice, so blatantly does it cherry-pick classic Bond moments. The Barry/Black effort Our Time Is Now is another skyscraper of grandiosity, with lyrics Black might have written at any time between 1965 and now “love has no season, there are no rules, those who stop dreaming are fools”.
The disc comes to life in its less prefabricated moments. Rufus Wainwright’s Apartment chucks a playful spanner in the works with its droll Spanish arrangement, grunting horns and surreal lyrics. Richard Hawley’s elegantly melancholy After The Rain works a treat, while I Love You Now (by Kaiser Chief Nick Hodgson) stands out for its simmering air of menace, and for the way it falls under the strongest part of Bassey’s vocal range. And K?T Tunstall’s Nice Men plays to Bassey’s own sense of self-mockery.
For a finale, the Pet Shop Boys have created The Performance Of My Life, a huge wobbly blancmange of melodrama. Its tone of ironic hommage is something some of the stodgier tracks are sorely lacking.
By Adam Sweeting
2:51PM GMT 11 Nov 2009