Dame Shirley Bassey teams up with Blake to take on X Factor in race for Christmas number one

Dame Shirley Bassey sits in a suite at the Ritz Hotel, surrounded by admirers, waiting for staff to bring her a glass of pink champagne. “It’s hair of the dog”, says the 78-year-old singer, shifting in her Ralph Lauren dress and adjusting a Cartier watch that reads two o’clock in the afternoon. “I went partying last night at the British Museum”. No, they weren’t wrong about Dame Shirley Bassey. She’s definitely still got it.

Christmas has come early for the Welsh icon. She has just finished working on her first ever festive single in a career spanning more than 60 years, a cover of The Christmas Song in collaboration with the all-male Brit-Award-winning vocal group Blake.

It’s good — good enough to have the bookies offering odds of 10-1 on them topping the charts at Christmas before the single release was even announced, with Dame Shirley’s voice joining Blake’s like a whole brass section on a coiled spring. Think of Dame Shirley’s Goldfinger with several added layers of Christmas carol to the mid-range mezzo and you’ve got the picture. How do you like them chestnuts?

Sitting in the plush Mayfair hotel room, as Dame Shirley pours the drinks, the boys seem quietly confident. “Dare I say, if we get a Christmas number one we’ll be drinking a lot of champagne”, says Stephen Bowman, 35, one third of the trio alongside Ollie Baines, 32, and Humphrey Berney, 35. “If we get a Christmas number one, we might have to come and annoy the Dame in Monaco”, says Baines.

The trio first met Dame Shirley when she asked them to perform Moon River at her 70th birthday party. She leapt up to join them on stage mid-performance — in a single bound, according to Berney.

Seven months ago, the group were reunited with Dame Shirley at the children’s charity Variety’s 70th anniversary, and suggested a collaboration to feature on their Christmas album. She was thrilled, and agreed.

The charity theme continues — a percentage of the sales of the album will go to Variety, and all of Dame Shirley’s royalties from the single will go to Noah’s Ark, a children’s hospital in Cardiff which she supports.

Her new singing pals want to know what a Dame Shirley Christmas looks like. “Oh, it’s very quiet”, she says, ‘I like to spend it on a boat. Last Christmas I was on a cruise from Argentina, going around the coast to Brazil, and ended up in Rio.”

Dame Shirley has been in town for the Spectre premiere, and as a Bond veteran with three theme tunes under her belt she loved every minute: red carpet, real-life royals, Ralph Fiennes. “I’m in love with Ralph Fiennes”, she says. “I told him so. My heart was going boom boody-boom.”

She wore a Jenny Packham dress. “Did you like it?” she asks. “Everyone said it had the wow factor. It had the Bassey sequins.”

When it comes to her wardrobe, everything’s worth more than the price tag. “I lost an earring once, it was very valuable, it was an emerald diamond earring”, she says. “I was very upset. I stayed in bed for a week. I do go to bed a lot when I’m upset.”

If Dame Shirley occasionally carries a scent of eau diva, she puts it down to her professionalism. “Everything has to be right, and if it isn’t then it’s very upsetting, and it upsets everyone”, she says. Did she and the boys have any clashes during recording? No, says Dame Shirley. Yes, say the boys. “I did stamp my foot at one time”, she says, looking over at Baines. “He was having a go because we were miming for the video. I hate miming because I like to sing live. He started getting agitated and I realise now he was carrying a temperature ...”

Baines disagrees. “Is that what it was? I think it’s because we were paying 20 musicians, and we were just hitting overtime which was costing about a £1,000 a minute.” There’s laughter. The boys are clearly smitten.

Dame Shirley does like to sing live. She bursts into the Goldfinger chorus three times during our interview, and says she’s always struggled to keep “the voice” down.

She grew up in Tiger Bay, the docklands area of Cardiff, with her mother Eliza, three sisters, two half-sisters, and one brother. Her Nigerian father, Henry, was deported when Dame Shirley was just two and she never saw him again.

“You know what I used to do?” she says. “Instead of crying, I would sing. I shared a bed with two sisters, and if I was unhappy, I would just sing. My song was Jezebel, and my sisters would say ‘Mum, Shirley’s at it again’. So I was not appreciated. How I became a singer, I don’t know.”

In 1986, she nearly lost her voice for good. Her second daughter, Samantha, 21, left a pub in Bristol — and nine days later was found to have drowned in the River Avon.

A grief-stricken Dame Shirley threw herself into an international tour. “I went back too early. I was grieving, grieving through singing. I wasn’t using my vocal cords properly, I wasn’t breathing correctly, and the voice just told me I’d had enough.” After pitch-perfect rehearsals in Sydney, she opened her mouth to sing her most famous hit for a packed arena. “I walked on stage to sing Goldfinger and got out ‘Gold-‘ … then nothing. I just wanted the ground to swallow me up.” She had to see professional voice coach, who “put me back together again. I thought I’d never sing again but here we are”.

It’s a heartbreaking tale. “That’s why I sing all these ballads, I suppose” she shrugs. Bowman agrees. “Behind great singers, you have to believe in that emotion. We always say, jokingly to our fans, we want to make them cry”. So we should all be crying at Christmas? Yes, says Dame Shirley. No, say the boys.