History Repeating -- Propellerheads featuring Miss Shirley Bassey

[NurseJackie]

"History Repeating" is a song written by Alex Gifford and originally performed by the Propellerheads featuring Shirley Bassey in 1997. The single was a #1 hit on the UK Dance Chart, and was also Bassey's first top ten appearance on any US chart since 1973's "Never Never Never", making #10 on the US Dance Club Chart.[1]

Single release

The single was released shortly before the Propellerheads album Decksandrumsandrockandroll (their only album to date), released in 1998 by Wall of Sound in Europe and DreamWorks in the US and Japan. The Propellerheads had previously worked with the James Bond composer David Arnold on the Bond tribute album Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project, when they remixed the John Barry composition "On Her Majesty's Secret Service".

The track is a fusion of several different styles of big beat, breakbeat and jazz combined with the powerful vocals of Shirley Bassey. The sleeve cover, an illustration by Duke D. Jukes, takes its inspiration from classic album sleeve from the Capitol 1957 release Just One Of Those Things (album) by Nat King Cole.

The retro style was also continued with the video, filmed in monochrome, the opening of which is themed on a BBC TV jazz show called Jazz 1200, hosted by Roger Humphries, and clearly harks back to the serious music shows of the 1960s. Scenes from the video shoot were included in the Divas are Forever DVD.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

1. This was on their "Decksanddrumsandrockandroll" album.

They had a song in "The Matrix" called "Spybreak!", so that album was popular in the US as well (at least, if you were a teen/young adult in the late 90s).