Told me love was too plebeian - told me you were through with me

Continuing my trip back through the 1961 album charts.

29/01/61 : The Fabulous Shirley Bassey - Shirley Bassey

After our last visit, I've absolutely no complaints about bumping into Shirley again - I'm looking forward to listening to this.

Oh yes, she really does have a lovely voice here - very strong and coupled with great control. It's just shocking to compare this with the rubbish churned out by Adam Faith or Anthony Newley - just no contest at all. And, as an added bonus, she does a version of "Cry Me A River" on here - I'm not sure it's quite up to Julie London's version but it's still really very good. Overall, this is a fine album, which is obviously of its time but also timeless.

We're at #12 in the chart this week on her second week of a two week run which is just shocking - did people have no taste back then? Although I guess we have to be thankful they let it into the chart at all. The top five this week were Elvis, South Pacific, George, Cliff and Frank (yes, I'm very bored of typing those names) and there were no new entries in the chart this week.

Wikipedia tells us this was her third album - it was released in '59, so I've no idea why it took two years to chart. The music is provided by Geoff Love and his orchestra and that's pretty much all it's got on it, other than a surprisingly long paragraph that tells you the mono version was never re-released - and I can think of absolutely no reason why anyone would be in the slightest bit interested in it.

"Customers also listened to" Dinah Washington, Marion Ryan, Michel LeGrand and Petula Clark - most detinitely not my areas of expertise. And I can't claim that Shirley is either, but she's greatly gone up in my estimation this year.

22/01/61 - An interesting listen
05/02/61 - A bloody awful album

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