Crests tend to come as standard for schools, sports teams and royal families. Outside of such institutions though, they’re not so commonly found and actual people almost never bother going to the trouble. So when you pick up Dame Shirley Bassey’s new album and see two Welsh dragons back to back, prominently featured above the initials “DSB”, it’s natural to ponder its raison d’être. Unlike Arctic Monkeys, who covered Diamonds are Forever at Glastonbury in 2007, Bassey — who was already pregnant with her first child when she worked as a packer in a Cardiff factory, aged 16 — is a universe away from her proletarian beginnings.

Dame Shirley, as she would rather you called her, rarely has occasion to slum it these days. However, she made an exception of sorts at that same Glastonbury. Negotiating the mud in diamanté-initialled wellies, she sang a resumé of her 50 years as a recording artist, eliciting a reaction which — in the mind of her label boss Colin Barlow — flagged a potentially huge take-up for a new album. Presumably seeking to maximise the record’s cross-generational appeal, he then enlisted a selection of artists roughly half her age to provide the material for her first new set in 27 years. As seems to be a statutory requirement where artists with a James Bond connection are concerned, David Arnold was entrusted to oversee the project.

Those of us who remembered Arnold’s work with Bassey on History Repeating Itself — her collaboration with Propellerheads in 1997 — didn’t hold out much hope. To rebrand Bassey, aged 72, as a post-ironic dance diva would have been a miniaturisation of her talents.

If Arnold didn’t understand that in 1997, the autumnal guitars and cellos that usher in this lovingly scored album suggest that he does now. Bassey berates interviewers who probe her personal history; happily, songwriters who draw on that same history to provide her with material fare much better.

Tom Baxter’s Almost There is perfect for her — a resigned dissection of the might-have-beens that time fails to soothe. As her racy early hits Kiss Me, Honey Honey, Kiss Me and Fire Down Below confirmed, she has always been a potent muse. In the ensuing decades though, the failed marriages, the virtual estrangement from her family and the death of her youngest daughter all dictate that this Bassey has to be a different kind of muse.

Notwithstanding the flamenco high camp of Rufus Wainwright’s Apartment, the best moments on The Performance come from writers who realise as much. The wan glow of resolve at the heart of This Time offers evidence that Gary Barlow is turning into the songwriter he was straining a little too hard to be in his early years.

It’s easy to see why Bassey recently took exception to being termed a “belter” by one unfortunate interviewer. A term that once described her singing style to a T is no longer appropriate. Most of these songs require restraint and hesitancy — qualities for which Bassey isn’t especially known. A case in point is Richard Hawley’s After the Rain. Hawley says that once he sent her the song, he “feared it was a bit too dark” — but during sessions at Grouse Lodge studios in Ireland the song reduced her to tears. It’s easy to see why. Framed by piano, cello and the sparest cymbal scrape, Bassey sings “This girl just can’t take it any more” from a part of herself we simply haven’t heard before.

Alas, it isn’t all as good as that. A little respectful cap-doffing from one Welsh institution to another comes courtesy of Manic Street Preachers’ The Girl From Tiger Bay. Verses bide their time for a chorus that scarcely justifies the wait; you can hardly blame Bassey for sounding wholly unengaged.

Swift on its heels similarly featherlight fare comes from KT Tunstall’s Nice Men. Both songs could learn a thing or seven from the two inclusions that flow from the pens of Bassey’s contemporaries. John Barry and Don Black’s Our Time is Now is a stately reprise of a musical phrase that first saw the light of day on Barry’s 1998’s piece Give me a Smile. Better still is Black and Arnold’s No Good in Goodbye. Lines such as “Where is the solace that I crave/Will it still haunt me to my grave?” are delivered with the air of a woman attempting to keep her poise amid the rising fumes of her own bitterness.

If these two contributions are the nearest this set gets to Bond-theme pastiche, herein lies the success of The Performance. It’s to the credit of Hawley, Baxter, Wainwright and co that their Bassey is a far more fascinating, multilayered creation than the vampish, diamond-encrusted persona of folk memory — a persona that, on Pet Shop Boys’ eponymous closer, is rendered as an iron lung of her own making. “I’ll play this part the only way I can/For to live, I’ll have to give/The performance of my life,” resound The Performance’s final words, dissipating into the orchestral ether like so much skywriting. What a way to go.

(Geffen)

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