Keep the Music Playing
1991 studio album by Shirley Bassey
Keep the Music Playing is a 1991 album by Shirley Bassey. The album was recorded in the UK at the Westgreen Studios and in the Netherlands at Wisseloord Studios, Hilversum. The album is a mixture of contemporary pop ballads, such as "I Want to Know What Love Is" from Foreigner, the Jennifer Rush power ballad "The Power of Love", and the more gentle "Still" from Lionel Richie, combined with standards from the field of jazz and pop, such as "He Was Beautiful", the sweet jazz ballad from Cleo Laine. Several of the song arrangements reflect an operatic pop style influence, which may have roots in her 1984 album I Am What I Am, which she recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, and the fact that in the latter mid-1980s she started working with a vocal coach, a former opera singer. Bassey returned to the Beatles with "Yesterday", as she had previously covered "Something" and "Fool on the Hill" successfully in the 1970s, and had performed "Hey Jude" frequently live. Another previously successful formula was used for the closing track "Dio, Come Ti Amo (Oh God How Much I Love You)" an Italian original in the tradition of "This is My Life" and "Natalie". ("Dio, Come Ti Amo" was the Italian entry for the Eurovision Song Contest in 1966, performed in Italian by Domenico Modugno).
The album was a commercial success and entered the UK album charts in May 1991, peaking at number 25. At the time, Bassey was 54 years old, becoming "the oldest woman ever to chart an album of new material." The original release was on vinyl, cassette and CD, the CD was issued by Dino Records in the UK and ZYX Records in Germany.
FreeStyle Records is now defunct but this album has been re-issued on CD many times on various labels.
“Keep the Music Playing” enters the record as 1991 studio album by Shirley Bassey. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Keep, Music and Playing can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6383178. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1991, 1984 and 1966.
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This entry incorporates text from “Keep the Music Playing” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.