I really don’t know why I didn’t read it sooner, it was a book that many people recommend to me, but there was a little voice inside me that was murmuring, “it’s not possible that a book that is so liked from so many people, it’s actually a good romance, people don’t really like romance”. Cool, yes, but no cooler than Ms Bassey.Elisa_rolle If someone wants to read the best funny romance ever, than they has to read Almost Like Being in Love.
Imagine how cool it would be if Sade, Tracey Thorn or Paula Morelenbaum took this arrangement and recorded it today. It sounds just as exquisite and ambiguous as I remembered. So here it is, miraculously preserved, with its chiming vibes and pattering congas, hovering strings and 12 bars of beautiful Getzian tenor saxophone (Tony Coe, maybe?), and a bitter-sweet vocal performance that hints at layers of emotional complexity beneath Mr Lerner’s words. I hadn’t heard it from then until now, more than 40 years later, but it always stayed in my head as the way the song ought to be sung. They recast the song in a minor key, with slightly modified melodic and harmonic contours, setting it to a languid, understated Latin rhythm. On this occasion, however, she and her musical director, Arthur Greenslade, did something different. Shirley Bassey has sung it throughout her career, and on YouTube you’ll find several versions in conventional upbeat, ring-a-ding-ding arrangements celebrating the singer’s delight at half-concealing the rapture of love. It was a hit for Frank Sinatra, and became a standard. “Almost Like Being in Love” was written by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner for their musical Brigadoon in 1947. One evening in the late ’70s I was at home watching The Shirley Bassey Show on BBC1 - not such a terrible idea, since she presented some interesting guests, from Mel Tormé and Janis Ian to Stan Getz and Johnny Nash - when something Bassey herself was singing stopped me in my tracks.
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