A Girl Called Dusty

I close my eyes and count to ten . . . Dusty Springfield is dead.

Promotion of her most recent album, A Very Fine Love, was disrupted by the initial diagnosis of her breast cancer at London's Marsden Hospital in 1994. There was surgery, followed by months of gruelling chemotherapy and radiotherapy, after which she was declared clear. But by mid-1996 the cancer returned. Further treatment failed. In a last interview she told Daily Mail writer Sarah Oliver, "my family was from Ireland, and I believe the Irish fighter is better than the person who feels victimised. Why me? Why not?"

Her best work might have been done as long ago as the '60s with an essential add-on in the late '80s and although she was out-of-sync with much of the time in between, Dusty Springfield never lost her uniqueness. Her myth of the great lost artist persisted, and will persist. Cliff Richard once called her "the white negress". P.P. Arnold confided to Dusty's biographer Lucy O'Brien* that "she was the Soul singer. Out of all the girls—Cilla Black, Lulu, Sandie Shaw—it was Dusty doin' it for me. She made me feel it." And Mary Wells, no less, wrote on a Dusty album sleeve that "no other white person ever sounded so coloured. It's frightening!"

She leaves a life-story that's a gift for those who seek to trivialise isolation and aloneness into camp Diva theatricality. But it's wrong to remember Dusty as a colour-by-numbers panda-eyed make-up chart for overweight drag queens. Sincere as such tributes may be, she deserves more.

Remember her for her voice.

Dusty was born Mary Isabel Catherine O'Brien in West Hampstead, London (16th April, 1939) into a second-generation expatriate Irish-Scots family, the daughter of Gerard, a tax accountant, and Kay, a mother destined to die of lung-cancer. Within this unhappy marriage Dusty, a plain, dumpy and bespectacled girl, was educated at St. Bernard's Convent, High Wycombe and St Anne's Convent High School, Ealing where, according to legend, she listened to Bessie Smith records and got herself banned by the nuns from performing a hip erotic version of "St. Louis Blues".

By age 16 she'd begun working at a record shop, then switched to a position with a large Are You Being Served?-style department store, while kitchen jam-sessions at home graduated to family musical evenings in a front-room furnished with primitive built-in amp and microphone. After answering a trade-press small-ad in The Stage, she endured her first near-encounter with fame in a brief and unsatisfactory stint singing close-harmony with The Lana Sisters. She made her pro-stage debut with them at the Savoy Cinema in Lincoln in 1958, then made her vinyl and TV debuts too, appearing on 6.5 Special promoting the Sisters' cover of the abysmal novelty song "Seven Little Girls Sitting On The Back Seat". Rival Popsters The Avons scored the hit version leaving it to Timmy Mallett to do the sad '90s revamp.

Meanwhile, infected by older brother Dionysius' enthusiasm for Folk and Latin American rhythms, she learned guitar and began playing a local folk club. Dion already played there as a duo with friend Tim Field. So inevitably, they recruited her too. Dion became "Tom Springfield", she became "Dusty Springfield" and collectively, as The Springfields, they swiftly charted with "Bambino", an old Neapolitan carol adapted by Tom.

Tim Field was soon replaced by Mike Longhurst-Pickworth (aka Mike Hurst), and as the title of their album Kinda Folksy indicates, the resulting sound was a soft-pop commercial take on traditional music. They wore neat suits with Dusty in sensible flared skirts and unobtrusive make-up, ideally suited to cosy old black-and-white BBC TV. Tom astutely rewrote "Au Clair De La Lune" as the hit "Say I Won't Be There" and went on to write "Island Of Dreams" which took The Springfields soaring into the Top Ten on Dusty's yearning vocals. Before the inevitable split The Springfields had become pre-Beatles NME poll winners, and one of the earliest British acts to record in Nashville, doing sessions there to produce the heavily countrified "Silver Threads And Golden Needles" which hit both the US Pop and Country Top 20s.

As a solo artist, Dusty Springfield's debut single, "I Only Want To Be With You", was the first record to be performed (as in lip-synched!) on the first ever edition of BBC's new Top Of The Pops show. Charting a few positions below the Beatles' "I Want To Hold Your Hand", it was an instant irresistible hit, and the first of a run of classics that would see her clear through to the end of the decade. The Springfields had given her a name, and a polite media presence. But she wanted more. "Be miserable, or become someone else," she decided.

So she re-invented herself into the "Dusty look"—a dream-factory of peroxide-blonde, back-combed, beehive, bouffant hair, and elaborate, black, bruise-smudged eye-shadow. She re-booted her career, powered up her vocal style, and achieved more than she could ever have believed possible. She once confided to an interviewer "it's marvellous to be popular, but foolish to think it will last". To brother Tom, such reticence was absurd: "No, the only person who had any doubts about Dusty . . . was Dusty!"

It's a fact frequently overlooked that teenage girls bought a disproportionately huge percentage of 1960s pop product. The theory ran that they fantasised romance with Paul McCartney, but when their real-life love-lives went awry and they needed some girly-bonding commiseration, they sought solace in languid heartbreak at 45rpm. Hence girl singers were programmed on a diet of tears. "Anyone Who Had A Heart", "Always Something There To Remind Me"—Dusty did her share.

And few '60s hits retrospectives get far without "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me", the ultimate in submissive, self-abasing, grovel-pop melodrama, lushly wrapped in the frenetic sawing strings of Ivor Raymonde's Italianate orchestration. It's consummate sob-stuff, and a natural for every heartbeat-style nostalgia soundtrack, although the lyrics were famously jotted down casually in the back of a taxi by Simon Napier-Bell, who later used it as the title for his kiss-'n'-tell autobiography.

Yet Dusty could take such throw-away heartbreak and invest it with a beguiling and passionate intensity, making it faultlessly heart-rending, each breath living on the very edge of emotion.

Yet, for me, the poised frozen crescendos of "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself" or the breath-catching "I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten" are better still, near-transcendental moments that never fail to get me every time. They were pop hits. But they weave darkly tragic spells of deep longings and repressed fragile desires.

However, her essential instincts now lay more with Motown, Soul and R&B than they did with teeny-pop. Listen to the rhythmic propulsion of "In The Middle Of Nowhere" or "Little By Little" for prime slices of UK Detroit at its best, snap handclap-driven rhythms punching out superbly assured vocals closer in spirit to the Vandellas or the Supremes than to pretty much anything else around at the time.

Dusty had the strength and guts to equal the very finest of American black music imports, drawing on the likes of Madeleine Bell, Doris Troy, and Lesley Duncan for vocal back-up. For when she leaned on the blues, it leaned right back at her. And she had an emotional maturity to interpret the songs with a greater sophistication than any of her Beat Girl contemporaries. "I was struggling to establish something in England that hadn't been done before," she explained, "to use those musical influences I could hear in my head."

As Lucy O'Brien's book tells it, youth Mod culture came to a head in the '60s with its stringent attention to fashion, Motown and television pop programmes, and Dusty Springfield, panda-eyed and urbane, emerged as Queen Bee. In March '65 she even got to host a groundbreaking Motown TV Special (through Rediffusion) showcasing the Supremes and Martha Reeves, plus the Miracles, Temptations and Stevie Wonder, providing a first-opportunity for many European audiences to see such raw new American R&B genius.

Meanwhile, as an essential ingredient of the '60s, Style-Mafia Dusty became a fixture on ITV's cult Ready Steady Go!, trading fashion-tips with Cathy McGowan and Sandie Shaw, while Rave magazine—the Mod Bible—tried to manufacture a romance between her and Gene Pitney. And sure, she could do the gossip-column stuff, the cheesy showbizzy duets with Cilla or Tom Jones on TV Variety shows, or open her own series (18th August 1966) with a guesting Dudley Moore, while throwing in her natural talent for Goonish humour and comedy voices as a bonus. But she could also interpret Burt Bacharach or Carole King songs with a fine and flawless sensitivity indebted, perhaps, to Dionne Warwick, but never less than her own uniquely personal styling.

"Wishin' And Hopin'", an American chart hit for Dusty (no. 6 in November 1964), or "The Look Of Love" done for the soundtrack of the James Bond spoof-movie Casino Royale, show her doing breathy-Bacharach as good as it would ever get. And while the Byrds do a fine version of Carole King's "Goin' Back", Dusty does it better. Elvis later charted with "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me". UB40 & Chrissie Hynde also high-charted Dusty's . . . In Memphis track "Breakfast In Bed". Then both the Bay City Rollers and Annie Lennox (as The Tourists) took "I Only Want To Be With You" back into the Top Ten. And David Cassidy mangled "How Can I Be Sure". But Dusty did them all first. And Dusty does them better.

As the '60s ended, finally free of a contract with Philips that had endured since the Springfields' first signing, Dusty Springfield inked with the legendary Atlantic label and travelled to Memphis to record at Chip Moman's American Group studios with Aretha Franklin's production team of Jerry Wexler, Tom Dowd and Arif Mardin, plus the cream of Southern Stax/Atlantic musicians.

For Dusty it was a career peak. An ambition achieved. The sessions for Dusty In Memphis (April 1969) flowed pure and natural, with few re-takes or overdubs. They were wrapped up in less than a week, gliding on smooth southern funk, glistening rhythms perfectly adapted to her sinuous vocals. The results are now critically-rated her finest-ever album, including "Son Of A Preacher Man", most usually quoted as her best-ever single. Yet at the time it was her first album not to chart, while the single barely scraped the bottom of the twenty.

It was only then that her certainty faltered, the doubts resumed, and she seemed to lose direction.

The hits stopped.

But Dusty never fell. Instead, she opted out. The problem was how to opt back in again. She quit, bored with Britain, just as NME's Keith Altham was hailing her "this country's unchallenged finest female vocalist". And sure, Cher and Madonna are now able to ride the changes with apparent ease. But the music industry was less sympathetic to strong female ambition then. And she'd never been easy. Dusty rewrote rules, she didn't bend to them. She was expelled from South Africa for refusing to play to segregated audiences. She headlined a tempestuous, feuding, fist-fighting American tour with jazz drummer Buddy Rich. And now she was frustrated with petty-parochial showbiz formula-restrictions that offered only more Talk Of The Town seasons, pantomime, and the long-term career-prospect of eventually, perhaps, hosting something like Blind Date.

That was not for Dusty. Her obvious way forward had been Dusty In Memphis, an evolution both organic and natural where new intercepts old with immaculate precision, but when that proved commercially unacceptable, where were the alternatives? She had no precedents. No role models. So she simply became mythic.

The following album, From Dusty With Love, is a fine example of early '70s soft and mellow saccharine-sprinkled soul, recorded in Philadelphia with a Philly-Soul writer/production dream-team of Thom Bell, Kenny Gamble & Leon Huff. And it spawned a lovely single in "A Brand New Me". But it failed to ignite the interest it deserved—pop had already moved on, and the album arrived around the time Dusty was finally and decisively quitting Europe to live at ground-zero visibility in Los Angeles.

But although she subsequently faded from view, her reputation did not. Her new reclusive lifestyle of self-imposed exile reduced her to a snooze-inducing soundbite minimalism obscured by a haze of drink and drugs binges. Stories of her long-suspected bisexuality, or lesbianism, also filtered through, initially leaked in veiled admissions to a London Evening Standard interviewer. They could have provided the kind of frisson that Madonna or Bowie use to intrigue and tantalise, but for Dusty—in a career doldrum of depression and weight problems—it merely seemed further evidence of a once-great artist lost in confusion.

There were stories of back-up vocal sessions for the likes of Anne Murray, close liaisons with tennis player Billie Jean King, and a variety of temporary contracts to Mercury, 20th Century, Dunhill, Allegiance (resulting in a duo single with Spencer Davis of Soul standard "Private Number"), Casablanca (Donna Summer's label, producing a US-only dance album White Heat), and even Peter Stringfellow's short-lived Hippodrome label.

Then, suddenly, she was "re-discovered", if that's the word, in the late '80s. "Son Of A Preacher Man"—undervalued and misunderstood at the time of its release—finally found its audience as part of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. And she arrived back in both the US and European Top Threes with her subdued, understated, but effective contribution to Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant's "What Have I Done To Deserve This?", the unlikely pairing of effete electro-dance duo and lost diva icon oddly providing Dusty with her most sensitive and sympathetic collaborators since the Wally Stott or Peter Knight orchestrations of the 1960s.

It led inexorably to "Nothing Has Been Proved", with Dusty as a perfectly apt choice to theme-song the movie-story of '60s sex-celebrity Christine Keeler—a Monica Lewinsky to politician John Profumo's Clinton in Scandal. It was a return emphatically vindicated by her powerful appearance with the Pet Shop Boys at the BPI awards bash at the Albert Hall, while a third single, "In Private", was hitting a high of no. 14 in December 1989.

She even moved decisively back to England as her career renaissance accelerated—first to live in a converted granary in Oxfordshire, but then, as the cancer that would kill her was declared untreatable, she finalised a settlement with Prudential Insurance for £6.25 million for the rights to her 275-song back-catalogue, and used it to move to the even greater seclusion of a secretive Thameside mansion circled by high turn-of-the-century walls.

Now, I close my eyes and count to ten . . . and Dusty is dead. Her life a gift for those who seek to trivialise isolation and aloneness into camp theatricality. But she deserves more.

Remember Dusty Springfield for her voice.

* Dusty by Lucy O'Brien (Macmillan Books, published in April 1999)