It was in 1960 that Shirley Bassey reached number two in the charts with the torch song, As Long As He Needs Me.

Ironic, then, that Sonia Swaby, who'll be singing it in Bradford this summer, has spent her whole life trying to avoid the comparison.

"Even as a child, people told me I was going to be another Shirley Bassey," she says. "My barriers went up immediately."

She looks indignant. "I can't help looking and sounding the same."

Miss Bassey may have had the hit single, but she never starred in the musical from which it came. Sonia, on the other hand, has built a career on it.

Six nights a week, plus matinees on Wednesdays and Saturdays, her performance of the song stops the show. She's sung it in the West End and now she's touring the country.

"For me, it's an audience-actress moment," she says, with due theatricality. "Fantastic song, fantastic orchestration - it's perhaps the most powerful moment of the whole show."

The show in question, of course, is Lionel Bart's Oliver! The impresario Cameron Mackintosh revived it triumphantly in December, 1994 and turned it into a hit all over again. It went on tour having gained the distinction of becoming the longest-running show in the history of the London Palladium.

As Long As He Needs Me is the deeply affecting lament of the pitiful Nancy, bruised yet loyal mistress of the dreadful Bill Sikes. It's a tribute to Bart's skills both as storyteller and songwriter that Dickens' relentless saga of lives in the poorhouse should ever have become a musical.

"Darkness is at the root of it, of course," says Sonia, "but it's also wonderfully uplifting."

The same could also be said of its composer's career, which, after a string of successes in the Fifties and early Sixties, became sodden in drink. Bart was forced to sell his interest in Oliver!, but when he revived the show, Cameron Mackintosh paid him anyway.

"He's fine now. He's AA, he's completely clean and it's great to see that," says Sonia. "I do admire him though, because he says he wouldn't change anything that happened - it was just the way his life went. He doesn't moan."

For her, Nancy is the latest in a long line of musical heroines in such shows as Cats, Fame and Miss Saigon. "I've jumped from musical to musical," she says. "I love them."

It's a long way from the modest Midlands dance school she had planned to open when, as a teenager, she set off to theatre college in Epsom.

"I wanted to teach children to dance, that's all - and that's what I went away to train for," she says.

"I just wanted to go back home to Leicester, open a little school and I'd have been quite happy.

"But I thought the experience of auditioning for a big musical would be useful, so at 19 I went to an open audition for Cats. And I got the part."

Her parents, she says, thought her new job was "weird". It was, they pointed out, less down to earth than their own (dad worked in a biscuit factory and mum was a dinner lady).

Sonia was not born when Oliver! was originally staged, nor even when the much-loved and multi Oscar-winning film version was released in 1968. "I saw the film as a little girl, but all I remember about it is Nancy's red dress. The songs have always been familiar, though."

Her Nancy has now outlived four Fagins - Robert Lindsay, Barry Humphries Russ Abbot (twice) and Jim Dale - and she's currently "breaking in" Gary Wilmot, with whom she will bring the show to Bradford in June.

The Alhambra engagement will mark the end of the current tour, and she doesn't know yet what she'll do next - but she does have one idea always up her sleeve.

"If my musical career goes downhill," she says, "I could put on the spangly frock and start doing Shirley Bassey's act after all."

l Oliver! begins a seven-week run at Bradford's Alhambra theatre on June 29. Tickets are bookable on 01274 752000.

David Behrens

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