The Anthem She Sang in Exile: The Battles Behind Shirley Bassey’s ‘This Is My Life’
In February 1968, Shirley Bassey stood on the stage of the Sanremo Casino, in the Italian resort town that had turned its annual song festival into a national obsession, and sang a song that was not yet hers in any language she fully owned. Half of it she delivered in English, half in Italian. She was, at that moment, a superstar in the middle of a quiet collapse: her British hits were drying up, the pop world was being remade by younger voices, and within months she would leave Britain altogether as a tax exile, forbidden to work in her own country for almost two years. The song she sang that night — “La vita”, written by Bruno Canfora and Antonio Amurri — did not win the festival. It did something stranger and more durable. Once her producer Norman Newell had finished translating it, it became “This Is My Life”, the defiant first-person anthem that Bassey would still be closing concerts with half a century later.
This is the story of a song with three lives and at least four battles: a battle inside a festival still haunted by tragedy, a battle between two singers assigned to the same composition, a battle of translation in which an Italian reverie about life was rebuilt as a Welsh diva’s declaration of independence, and a battle against time itself, as the singer who adopted it fought exile, disco, remix culture and her own fading chart fortunes — and kept winning with the same three minutes of music.
A Voice Out of Tiger Bay, a Star Out of Fashion
To understand what “This Is My Life” meant, you have to understand what Shirley Bassey stood to lose in 1968. She had come from Tiger Bay, the docklands district of Cardiff, about as far from the Sanremo Casino’s chandeliers as Britain could offer. Her first hit, “The Banana Boat Song”, had reached No. 8 in the UK in February 1957, when she was barely twenty. Two years later “As I Love You” made her the first Welsh artist to top the British singles chart, and a double-sided No. 1 followed in 1961. Through the early 1960s she became one of the country’s defining balladeers, a singer of enormous technical power and theatrical instinct, and in 1964 she achieved global fame with a Bond theme that this series has covered elsewhere and that we will leave, here, as a passing shadow — the gold standard against which everything else in her career would be measured.
By the middle of the decade, the ground had moved. The beat boom and then psychedelia redrew British pop around guitar bands and singer-songwriters, and the big-voiced interpreters of the cabaret circuit — the singers who did not write their own material and relied on arrangers, orchestras and other people’s songs — were being pushed towards the variety-show margins. Bassey’s record sales faltered from the latter part of the mid-1960s. Between 1966 and 1970, only two of her singles would reach the UK Top 40. She remained a formidable live attraction and a television fixture, but the charts, the era’s brutal scoreboard, had begun to file her under yesterday.
It was in this climate — famous, bankable on stage, but commercially cornered — that Bassey did what several generations of European singers did when the home market cooled: she looked to Italy. Italy had its own parallel pop universe, with its own stars, its own publishing empires, and at its centre one extraordinary institution: the Festival di Sanremo.
The House That Sanremo Built
The Sanremo Music Festival, held in the casino of the Ligurian resort town of Sanremo, was by 1968 in its eighteenth edition and had long since become the engine room of Italian popular music. Founded in 1951, it was a contest for new songs rather than for singers, and its format was peculiar and revealing: each competing song was performed twice, in two different interpretations, traditionally once by an Italian artist and once by a foreign guest. The publishing houses and record companies fought to place their compositions there, because a Sanremo success could sell records across Europe and launch a melody into dozens of cover versions.
The 1968 festival ran across three nights, from 1 to 3 February, with twenty-four competing songs. The foreign contingent that year was glittering and slightly surreal, as Sanremo’s always was: the festival regularly imported international stars to lend glamour to Italian copyrights, and Bassey — Welsh, glamorous, and equipped with one of the biggest voices in the business — was exactly the kind of guest the organisers coveted. For her, the invitation was both an honour and a lifeline: a major stage, a major television audience, and a foothold in a market where traditional pop singing was still honoured rather than apologised for.
But Sanremo 1968 was not a carefree edition, and the song Bassey had been assigned carried her straight into the festival’s complicated heart.
A Festival Under a Shadow
The previous year’s festival had ended in one of the darkest episodes in popular music history. During the 1967 edition, the singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco, despondent after his song was eliminated, took his own life. The tragedy convulsed Italian music and turned Sanremo into a byword for the cruelty of the contest machine — the hype, the juries, the fortunes made and broken in three-minute increments. The 1968 festival, the first held after Tenco’s death, was staged under that shadow, with organisers and broadcasters keen to restore the event’s image as a celebration rather than a bear pit.
The machinery, though, remained the machinery. Twenty-four songs, two interpretations each, regional juries doing the voting, and — in the practice of those years — only the winner publicly crowned, with the full placings kept from the public. And the whole country watched: RAI broadcast the festival to a nation that treated it as an annual plebiscite on its own taste, arguing over the songs in cafés and newspapers for weeks. To sing at Sanremo in 1968 was to sing, briefly, to all of Italy at once — which is precisely what made it such a valuable stage for a British star whose home audience was slipping away, and such a dangerous one for a young Italian newcomer sharing her song. The winning song of 1968 would be “Canzone per te”, written by Sergio Endrigo with Sergio Bardotti and performed by Endrigo alongside the Brazilian star Roberto Carlos. It was a worthy, literary winner, and history has been kind to it. But festivals measure everything in the moment, and in the moment, the trophy was all that counted. What nobody at the Sanremo Casino could have predicted was that one of the losing songs would out-travel nearly everything else on the bill — carried not by its Italian interpreter, but by the foreign guest who had sung it half in a borrowed language.
That song was “La vita” — “Life” — and before it belonged to Bassey, it belonged to its writers and to a young Italian singer for whom Sanremo was the opportunity of a lifetime.
Canfora, Amurri and a Song Called “La vita”
Bruno Canfora was one of the pillars of Italian light music: a composer and conductor whose melodies powered films, television spectaculars and RAI orchestras, and a man fluent in the festival’s grammar of swelling strings and choruses built to be remembered after a single hearing. Antonio Amurri, his lyricist on “La vita”, was a witty and prolific writer for stage, screen and song. Between them they produced a song that was less a narrative than a stance — a meditation on life addressed head-on, with the title phrase placed where a Sanremo chorus demanded it should be: at the centre, repeated, impossible to miss.
The Italian lyric of “La vita” is philosophical and bittersweet, a shrug and an embrace at the same time, and it is important to what happened later: the song was not, originally, a diva’s manifesto. It was a contemplative festival ballad, melancholy around the edges, of a type Sanremo produced by the dozen. Canfora’s music, though, had a festival conductor’s instincts built into it — he had spent years shaping performances for the RAI orchestra pit, and he wrote melodies that rose in broad, singable arcs, the kind that a great voice can ride to a climax the audience feels in its ribs. In the hands of a lesser singer it would have remained a handsome, melancholy ballad. In the hands of the singer Sanremo assigned to it, those broad arcs became a launch ramp. What turned it into a declaration was the collision of three things: an unusual dual-performance format, a singer whose whole art was defiance delivered at full volume, and a translator who understood that singer better than anyone.
The first interpreter of record, however, was not Bassey. Under Sanremo’s rules, every song had two faces, and “La vita”’s Italian face belonged to a newcomer named Elio Gandolfi.
Two Singers, One Song
Elio Gandolfi had earned his Sanremo place the hard way: he and Giusy Romeo had won the 1967 Castrocaro Festival, Italy’s contest for new voices, and the prize included the right to compete at Sanremo. For Gandolfi, “La vita” was the biggest stage of his life, and he sang it as a straight Italian ballad, conducted by Angelo Giacomazzi. For Bassey — conducted, in her performance, by Brian Fahey — the same song was an export vehicle, a way into the Italian market and Italian television.
The dual format created a strange, unspoken contest within the contest. The juries voted for songs, not singers, but everyone in the hall compared the two versions, and the foreign interpretation was always judged against an implicit suspicion: that the imported star was decoration, hired glamour draped over an Italian copyright. Bassey’s answer to that suspicion was characteristic. She did not attempt to out-Italian the Italians across the whole song; instead, her version was rebuilt as a bilingual performance — part English, part Italian, with the great chorus delivered in Italian, in the song’s mother tongue, at maximum Bassey intensity.
That hybrid was not a compromise cobbled together for one night. It was the work of the man who had managed her recording career for years, and it represented the first stage of a translation that would take the song further than anyone in the hall imagined.
Half in English, Half in Italian
Norman Newell was one of the most important behind-the-scenes figures in British light entertainment: an EMI producer and A&R man who had produced Bassey since her Columbia years and who specialised, among many other things, in fitting English words to continental melodies. Again and again in Bassey’s career, the pattern repeats — an Italian or French song, a Newell English lyric, a Bassey performance that makes the result sound inevitable. He understood her instrument and her persona exactly: the huge sustained notes, the attack, the sense of a woman addressing her own biography in public.
For Sanremo, Newell rewrote part of “La vita” in English for Bassey, leaving the chorus in Italian. The result, performed at the festival and then recorded, was a genuinely bilingual record: an English-speaking star meeting an Italian audience halfway, then seizing the refrain in their own language. It worked. Bassey’s version of “La vita”, with its Italian chorus, became a Top 40 hit in Italy — a remarkable result for a foreign guest in a contest built for domestic copyrights — and Italy opened to her: she recorded several songs in Italian, performed frequently on Italian television, and for a period became a genuine Italian pop presence rather than a visiting celebrity.
But the hybrid was only the halfway house. The song’s second transformation was already implicit in its first: if part of it could be English, all of it could.
The Italian campaign, meanwhile, was no token gesture. Bassey threw herself into the market with a thoroughness that British stars rarely bothered with: a full Italian edition of the album, with an entire side of Italian-language performances, Italian singles released only in that territory, and frequent appearances on Italian television, the medium that actually decided Italian pop success. Two of her Italian recordings made the Italian Top 40. She was learning, in real time, the skill that would define the rest of her career — how to be a local artist in a foreign country, singing its songs back to it with interest. Italy was the rehearsal. The exile, when it came, would make the arrangement permanent, and “La vita” was already the centrepiece of her Italian identity before anyone had decided what it would become in English.
The Translator’s Craft
It is worth dwelling on Newell, because “This Is My Life” is as much his victory as anyone’s. In the post-war decades, British pop ran on imports: French chansons, Italian festival songs, American standards, all refitted with English lyrics for the home market. Newell was one of the masters of that invisible trade, a producer-lyricist who understood that a translated song is not a copy but a re-casting — the melody keeps its passport, but the words must be reborn as something the new singer could plausibly have lived. He had worked with Bassey since the end of the 1950s, through her years at Columbia, and he knew precisely where her power lay: not in subtlety, but in the sense of a woman testifying.
That is why the two-stage translation of “La vita” matters. A single-stage job — a quick English lyric for the British market — would have produced a competent cover version and probably a minor hit. Instead, the song was allowed to grow in public: first the bilingual festival performance, testing which parts of the Italian original carried across untouched; then, months later, the full English text, written not when the melody was new but when its singer’s circumstances had given the title a meaning no lyricist could have commissioned. By the time Newell wrote the remaining English words, Bassey was an exile. “This Is My Life” reads the way it does because it was finished by a man who knew his singer was, at that moment, quite literally living out of a suitcase on the wrong side of the Channel.
There was risk in the method. Every month spent on the hybrid version was a month in which the song might cool, be covered by a rival, or be forgotten by the British business entirely. Newell and Bassey took that risk because the alternative — rushing — produced records, and they were building something else: a signature.
The Trophy Went Elsewhere
On the final night, 3 February 1968, the juries gave the festival to “Canzone per te”, and “La vita” went home without the trophy. Judged by the festival’s own arithmetic, Bassey and Gandolfi had lost. It is worth pausing on how completely history reversed that verdict. “La vita” went on to be recorded by dozens of artists — the cover-version databases count more than forty interpretations of the Italian song — and its English incarnation spread further still. The Sanremo machine was designed to manufacture standards, and in this case it did; it simply manufactured one for a singer who had technically been there as hired help.
There was a lesson in it that Bassey’s career would repeat: she was never at her most dangerous as the anointed favourite. She was at her most dangerous as the woman who took a song somebody else had written, somebody else had premiered, somebody else had won with — and made the world forget the original paperwork. “La vita” had been Gandolfi’s big chance and Endrigo’s festival, but by the end of 1968 the song belonged, in the public ear, to the Welshwoman who had sung it with one foot in each language.
What she could not have known, as she left Sanremo, was that the country she was about to lose was not Italy. It was Britain.
Exile
In 1968 Bassey became a tax exile. Britain’s top marginal tax rates in that era could consume the overwhelming majority of a top earner’s income, and the roll of stars who left — actors, racing drivers, singers — reads like a society page of the decade. Faced with the era’s punitive British tax regime for high earners — a familiar story among British stars of the period — she moved abroad, settling in Lugano, Switzerland, and the terms of exile meant she could not work in Britain for almost two years. Nor was the exile a holiday. The rules of non-residence turned her professional life into an itinerary of foreign engagements: European concert halls, international cabaret rooms, television studios in countries whose languages she did not speak, all of it coordinated from a lakeside town in Italian-speaking Switzerland. She was thirty-one years old, at the peak of her powers, and effectively stateless as a performer — a headliner with no home stage. For a singer whose living was made on British stages, British television and British records, the exile was a professional amputation performed at the exact moment her commercial position at home was already weakening. She could not tour the country that had made her. She could not do the television specials that kept a balladeer in the public eye. She was, in the cruel shorthand of show business, gone.
Italy, providentially, was not gone. The Sanremo connection became a working base: Italian recordings, Italian television, an Italian album. The Italian version of her 1968 album, titled This Is My Life (La vita) and produced by Norman Newell with Dave Pell, is one of the most unusual artefacts of her discography — one side of Italian songs, including the bilingual festival version of “La vita”, the other an edited version of her British album. Of the six Italian-language performances on it, only “La vita” has ever been released on CD. The exile years made Bassey, briefly, an Italian recording artist with a Welsh accent, and the song that had carried her into that world sat at the centre of the arrangement.
The asymmetry of the dual performance followed both singers home. For Gandolfi, Sanremo 1968 was the summit of a career that never reached those heights again; he remains, in the reference books, the original interpreter of “La vita”, a footnote with a famous song attached. For Bassey, the same three minutes became a foundation stone. The festival’s format had been designed to make songs, not stars — and in the long run it made one of each, in the opposite corners from those the organisers intended.
Exile, though, also concentrated the mind. A singer who cannot go home needs an anthem about owning her own life. Newell was about to finish building her one.
Newell Finishes the Job
Back in London, the other half of the project took shape. Newell now wrote English lyrics for the parts of “La vita” that had remained Italian, and the result was the all-English “This Is My Life”. This was far more than a translation exercise. Amurri’s Italian lyric had been reflective, a meditation on life’s terms; Newell’s English lyric, tailored to Bassey’s persona, was a declaration — the song of a woman announcing that her life, with its triumphs and its damage, is hers, lived on her own account and at her own price. The title phrase became a hammer blow of self-possession. Where the Italian original mused, the English version planted its feet.
The English recording headlined her 1968 album This Is My Life, released on United Artists in October 1968 and produced by Dave Pell, where it sat on side two among standards and show songs. It is a compact performance — just over three minutes — built in the classic shape of her best records: a controlled, almost conversational opening that gathers force verse by verse until the title phrase arrives with the full weight of the orchestra and that unmistakable, sustained Bassey tone behind it. Nothing in the arrangement is experimental; everything in the delivery is. Pell’s production simply builds the staircase and lets her climb it, and the climb is the record. And then — the battle underneath all the others — almost nothing happened. The album failed to chart in Britain. Traditional pop was in retreat, Bassey was out of the country and unable to promote in person, and the British market of late 1968 had little room for a big-voiced ballad sung by a thirty-one-year-old exile. The anthem had been written, recorded and released into near-silence.
Many signature songs are born as hits. This one was born as a flop, and was saved by the least chart-dependent weapon Bassey possessed: the stage.
The Encore It Became
A concert singer’s repertoire is decided by a different electorate from the charts. Night after night, in theatres and concert halls, Bassey discovered what “This Is My Life” did to a room. Placed at the end of a show, it functioned as autobiography and challenge at once: the Tiger Bay girl, the hitmaker, the exile, the survivor, summing herself up in a title that required no explanation. Audiences responded to it not as a translation of an Italian festival song but as a personal testament, and Bassey — a performer of acute instincts — understood what she had. The song became her standard closing statement, often the final encore of her concerts, the number with which she took her leave.
This is the quiet miracle of the song’s history, and it is why the usual measures fail it. “This Is My Life” was not carried into the canon on a wave of 1968 sales; the album had missed the charts entirely. It was carried by repetition, by ritual, by the accumulated force of hundreds of performances in which a singer famous for excess feeling stood in front of an audience and told them, in three words, who she was. By the time her British exile ended and she returned in triumph in 1970 — her comeback sealed by a BBC television special recorded in Sweden and a bold, contemporary album — “This Is My Life” came home with her, no longer an Italian experiment but a piece of her permanent armour.
The charts, eventually, would have to reckon with it too. But first, in the late 1970s, the song had to survive the strangest of its reinventions: it had to go to the disco.
The exile ended as dramatically as it had begun. In March 1970, British television announced her return with a BBC special pointedly titled The Young Generation Meet Shirley Bassey — filmed in Sweden, because the comeback had to be negotiated around the last of the restrictions — and broadcast on BBC1 on 18 March 1970. The title was a gauntlet thrown at the decade: the young generation, the very audience that had supposedly replaced her, was formally introduced to the exile, and the exile won the evening. That same year her album Something re-established her as a contemporary recording artist rather than a nostalgia act, and the 1970s became, against every prediction made in 1968, one of the most successful decades of her career on record.
But notice what the comeback was built on. The returning Bassey was not a novelty or a revival curiosity; she came back with a repertoire hardened by two years of foreign stages, and at its centre sat the anthem she had assembled in exile from an Italian festival song. “This Is My Life” was, in effect, her re-entry speech. Britain had not heard her work in person for two years; the first thing she had to tell it, at the end of every show, was the title of that song.
Disco Boots
In 1979, Bassey’s long tenure with United Artists was drawing to a close, and her final album for the label, The Magic Is You, arrived in the afterglow of her 25th Anniversary Album, a double set that had reached No. 3 in the UK in late 1978. The lead single from the new album — its opening track, and its obvious commercial gambit — was a newly recorded disco version of “This Is My Life (La Vita)”. It was a very 1979 calculation: take the signature anthem, dress it in the rhythm of the moment, and aim it at the dancefloor economy that was then consuming the industry.
The disco episode deserves a moment’s sympathy, because Bassey was hardly alone in it. The late 1970s subjected every pre-rock star to the same ultimatum: adapt to the dancefloor or be filed as heritage. Singers of her generation were marched into studios and handed four-on-the-floor arrangements of their signatures, and most of the results were exactly as uncomfortable as that process sounds. What distinguishes Bassey’s attempt is that the song survived the treatment — the anthem’s bones were strong enough to carry a disco arrangement without breaking — and that the European market, which had adopted her in 1968 and never entirely let go, rewarded it while Britain shrugged. The same year, 1979, she also sang her third and final Bond theme, a passing reminder that the old machinery still called on her for the grand occasions. But it is telling that when her United Artists years were later summarised, it was the disco-flavoured signature, not the film song, that kept resurfacing.
In Britain, the calculation failed completely. The single, released on 27 April 1979, failed to chart — a humiliation, on paper, for one of the country’s most successful female chart artists. But export told a different story: in continental Europe, where her Italian and festival connections had never faded, the disco “This Is My Life” was a substantial hit, reaching the Top 5 in the Netherlands and Belgium. The song had done it again — rejected at home, embraced abroad, exactly as in 1968. The disco arrangement spawned multiple mixes, several of them by the American remixer Rick Gianatos, some of which stayed in the vaults until the album’s CD reissue in 2011 finally released them. The Magic Is You itself reached No. 40 in the UK and closed her fourteen-year United Artists chapter; the anthem she took with her into the next decade was the same one she had carried out of Sanremo.
And its transformations were not finished. In 1984 she re-recorded “This Is My Life” for her album I Am What I Am — and a quarter of a century later, that very vocal would be lifted into a dance remix on the album that returned her to the Top 10 at seventy, a story told in this series’ companion piece. Songs this stubborn do not retire.
Consider, too, what the failure of the original album says about the era’s machinery. In 1968, a singer in Bassey’s position — contracted to an American label, exiled from her home market, recording in two languages for two countries — fell through every gap the business possessed. United Artists released This Is My Life in Britain in October 1968, in mono and stereo, with no chart impact at all. Italy got its own edition, its own title, its own track listing. America got the British one. The song existed in three commercial forms within a single year and conquered none of the three markets on release. Its conquest was slower and stranger: a decade of encores, a disco afterlife in the Benelux charts, a remix in the next century. The record business of 1968 had no category for a hit that took fifty years to happen. Bassey’s career is the argument that such hits exist.
The Name Above the Title
The final measure of what the song had become arrived in 2000, when her record company assembled the definitive hits collection of her career and needed a name for it. They did not name it after the Bond themes, or the No. 1 singles, or the showstoppers. They named it The Greatest Hits – This Is My Life. The compilation reached only No. 54 on the main UK chart, yet it went to No. 1 on the HMV specialist chart and earned her another gold disc — the commercial pattern of the song’s whole life, modest on the headline numbers, immense underneath. A song that began as a Sanremo also-ran had become the title over the door of her entire legacy.
That is the deepest of the battles this song won: the battle for what Shirley Bassey means. Every great singer’s catalogue eventually compresses into a phrase, and the industry, the fans and the singer herself all voted, over fifty years, for the same three words. Not the golden gun, not the diamonds — the life. It is the song she closes with, the song the compilations are named for, the song other singers cover when they want to borrow her defiance. The databases count dozens of versions of both “La vita” and “This Is My Life”, but all of them are, in effect, tributes to a single interpretation that began in a casino in Sanremo with a chorus in the wrong language.
Television told the same story. When Bassey’s career was celebrated in the great set-piece specials of her later decades — the Audience with Shirley Bassey programmes that drew audiences in the tens of millions in Britain — the architecture of those evenings always bent towards the same conclusion: whatever else was sung, the night belonged to the moment when the woman from Tiger Bay stood still and accounted for herself. Producers of compilations and producers of television specials, working decades apart, kept arriving at the same editorial decision. The Bond songs were the attraction. “This Is My Life” was the verdict.
Why It Endures
“This Is My Life” endures because it is not really about 1968, or Sanremo, or exile, or any of the machinery that produced it. Those battles explain how it survived; they do not explain why it still lands. It lands because its central statement is the one every audience member is silently making about themselves, and Bassey’s genius was to sing it not as a slogan but as a settlement — a life accounted for, the good and the bad entered in the same ledger, and the total claimed without flinching. Countless singers have the voice for the notes. Very few have the biography for the words, and she had paid for every line of Norman Newell’s lyric in advance: the docklands childhood, the early fame, the fading hits, the exile’s suitcase, the comebacks.
There is also a simpler, musical truth. The song is built like a standard and sung like a finale, and it belongs to the small class of recordings that improve with their singer’s age. Each decade Bassey has sung it — the exile’s version, the disco version, the concert encores, the remixes built on her middle-aged vocal — the title has grown heavier and truer. A young woman singing “This Is My Life” is making a promise. Shirley Bassey singing it is presenting evidence.
And there is the matter of what it replaced. A singer so identified with the grand themes of other people’s fictions — the spies, the jewels, the show tunes — might have been expected to define herself by those borrowed glories forever. Instead, the song her industry chose to sum her up, and the song she chose to close her evenings with, is the one that describes nothing but herself: no character, no film, no plot, just a woman and the life she is answerable for. That is a rare kind of signature — not a trademark but a testimony — and it is why, when the arena lights fall and the orchestra finds the opening of “This Is My Life”, audiences who could not name the Sanremo Casino or Bruno Canfora still understand exactly what they are hearing.
She went to Sanremo in 1968 as a guest interpreter of somebody else’s song, in somebody else’s language, at a festival that crowned somebody else. She left with the anthem she would spend the rest of her career proving. The trophy went to “Canzone per te”. The life went to Bassey.