Dame Shirley Bassey - The Living Tree

Dame Shirley Bassey has been an active member of the charts for more than 50 years! And she still sounds as good as ever!

With 6 versions of the same song I am now faced with an interesting task; I shall begin by saying the remixes are pretty cool and in fact I might take a leap here and say they are better than the original…Yeah ok I said it – the remixes are all better than the original song. Now don’t get me wrong the original is pretty damn cool too – showing off Shirley’s BIG voice which is no longer the focus in the dance remixes, instead creating something people can – well dance to obviously. So my next task here would be to decide which is the best…

This may be more difficult as they are hard to tell apart to be honest.

The CD features 4 club remixes. After listening to all of them several times, including the original and radio edit versions too I came to the decision that track 4/ Stuart Critchon Remix was my favourite.

However this is not to take away from the magnitude of the original! I mean come on – its Shirley Bassey so you know it’s going to be something special. This track in fact comes with an interesting history – it was written by an unknown duo called “Never The Bride” who made a tape and left it at the hotel Dame Shirley was staying at with a note saying it would be perfect for her. I’d say they were right. I hope she said thank you…