Shirley Bassey - As If We Never Said Goodbye (1995 TV Special)

1995 (Audience With Shirley TV Special)

Shirley recorded and released this song on her 1993 CD titled, 'Shirley Bassey Sings The Songs of Andrew Lloyd Webber'

ABOUT The Musical, Sunset Boulevard:
Sunset Boulevard is a musical with book and lyrics by Don Black and Christopher Hampton and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Based on the 1950 film of the same title, the plot revolves around Norma Desmond, a faded star of the silent screen era, living in the past in her decaying mansion on the fabled Los Angeles street. When young screenwriter Joe Gillis accidentally crosses her path, she sees in him an opportunity to make her comeback to the big screen. Romance and tragedy follow.

When Lloyd Webber saw the film in the early 1970s, he was inspired to write what he pictured as the title song for a theatrical adaptation, fragments of which he instead incorporated into Gumshoe. In 1976, after a conversation with Hal Prince, who had the theatrical rights to Sunset, Lloyd Webber wrote "an idea for the moment when Norma Desmond returns to Paramount Studios"; Lloyd Webber did no further work on the play until after 1989's Aspects of Love.

At that point Lloyd Webber "felt it was the subject [he] had to compose next", though by February 1990 he had announced plans to turn Really Useful Group private so he could "make movies rather than musicals."

In 1991 Lloyd Webber asked Amy Powers, a lawyer from New York with no professional lyric-writing experience, to write the lyrics for Sunset Boulevard. Don Black was later brought in to work with Powers; the two wrote the version that was performed that same year at Lloyd Webber's Sydmonton Festival. This original version starred Ria Jones as Norma. It was not a success, though a revised version, written by Black and Christopher Hampton "met with great success" at the 1992 Sydmonton Festival.[6] Lloyd Webber borrowed several of the tunes from his 1986 mini-musical Cricket, written with Tim Rice, which had had an acclaimed run at Windsor Castle and later at the Sydmonton Festival

LYRICS:
I don't know why I'm frightened
I know my way around here
The cardboard trees, the painted seas, the sound here...
Yes, a world to rediscover
But I 'm not in any hurry
And I need a moment

The whispered conversations in overcrowded hallways
The atmosphere as thrilling here as always
Feel the early morning madness
Feel the magic in the making
Yes, everything's as if we never said goodbye

I don't want to be alone
That's all in the past
This world's waited long enough
I've come home at last!


And this time will be bigger
And brighter than we knew it
So watch me fly, we all know I can do it...
Could I stop my hand from shaking?
Has there ever been a moment
With so much to live for?

I'm coming out of make-up
The lights already burning
Not long until the cameras will start turning...
We'll have early morning madness
We'll have magic in the making
Yes, everything's as if we never said goodbye

Yes, everything's as if we never said.....
Goodbye!