A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “Son of a Preacher Man” by Dusty Springfield

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week I’m posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey ? (more…)

This episode is part of Pledgeweek 2024. From Tuesday through Saturday this week, I'm posting some of my old Patreon bonuses to the main feed, as a taste of what Patreon backers get. If you enjoy them, why not subscribe for a dollar a month at patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey. Before I start this episode, and out. This episode deals with mental illness, self-harm, drug abuse, domestic abuse, suicide

attempts and cancer. If you might find discussion of those topics upsetting, you might wish to read the transcript or skip this one rather than listen to it. It's sadly difficult to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the early life of Dusty Springfield. We do know that she was born Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien in 1939. The daughter of parents who had married late and left having children until later. Her mother was nearly 40 when Mary was born. But almost all of her memories of her childhood were contradicted or denied by her elder brother Tom, and it seems that she had a tendency to exaggerate or make up stories

to make her childhood sound more dramatic than it was, while he had a countervailing tendency to play down his family's eccentricity and not want to wear their dirty laundry. This may also have had something to do with her often stated belief that her elder brother could do no wrong while she received little or no affection from her parents. Certainly though, it seems that the O'Brien's

were at the very least an eccentric and mismatched family and that only their deep-seated Catholicism kept Dusty's parents from splitting up. And many of the odd behaviours which became associated with Dusty, in later years, like throwing crockery and food at the walls, seemed to be habits she picked up from her mother. But her parents did encourage their children's interest in music,

and their father in particular was a jazz fan, and young Mary grew up listening to the music of people like Jelly Roll Morton and Ella Fitzgerald. Young Mary's first recording came at the age of 12, a version of Irving Berlin's when the Midnight Choo-Choole leaves from Alabama, which, depending on which saw she read, was either recorded at a local record shop or using a tape recorder

owned by her father. Several biographers have said that the influence of black music can be heard clearly on this recording. But in truth she sounds more like she's doing an impression of Judy Garland, who had performed it in the film Easter Parade a couple of years earlier, possibly with a little Al Jolson thrown in. When that midnight you two

leaves for Alapham, mouth be right there suit, two time, port a man. I'll grab it, that's where you see. Entertaining was the one way that young Mary managed to stand out. She was too short-sighted to do well at sports, didn't have the strength of religious conviction to become a nun, as she considered for a while, and thought of herself as fat and ugly.

She was also only an adequate student, passing four row levels and failing two, a stark contrast to her brother, who spoke nine languages and worked as a Russian translator for the Intelligence Corps. Mary and her brother always had what she later described as an ambiguous relationship, but they connected over music and started performing as a duo in various clubs around London. Mary soon decided that she wanted to go professional though, and answered an ad placed in the stage newspaper by two professional singers looking for a third to join a new act,

the Larner Sisters, who were in an attempt to cash in on the popular group, the Beverly Sisters. Mary changed her name to Shan Larner, and the other two members of the group taught her the basics of stagecraft. She spent two years with the group, who were managed by Adam Faith's co-manager, and thus managed to get a lot of exposure on shows like Six Five Special, and Brian Matthews's Saturday Club, as well as releasing several singles. But her heart wasn't in the material they were doing. Probably the closest thing to the material she liked was a version of Marve Johnson's, You Got What It Takes, co-written by Barry Gordy, and thus a tantalizing link to the Motown music she would love a few years later.

But the Lana Sisters version is a million miles away from Johnson's hard R&B. The group were moderately successful. They were voted seventh favourite British vocal group by the readers of Melody Maker. But Mary was increasingly unhappy making the music they were making.

Her main musical idol was Peggy Lee, and she wanted to make music with something of the Latin flavour of some of Lee's hits. She was thus delighted when her brother asked her to quit the Lana sisters, who went on to a minor career under the name the Chantels, or in the US, the Chantels of London, to avoid confusion with the more famous group, and join a folk duo he'd formed with his friend Tim Field.

Not only was Tom writing music that was closer to what she wanted to be doing, but it was also approval from the Big Brother who her parents adored. The new group decided they were going to try to sound like they were Americans, and chose to call themselves the Springfields, because As any fan of the Simpsons knows, Springfield was widely considered the most commonplace name in the USA, though actually there are some names that are more common. Tim kept his own name, but Mary's brother, who had been Deanne O'Brien, became Tom Springfield, and Mary became Dusty Springfield, dying her red hair blonde because she hadn't liked how dark it had looked on TV when she was a Lana sister. Vicky Wickham, later Dusty's manager and close friend,

described what she thought the process was in choosing the name. I'm quite sure Dusty and Tom sat around thinking of these stupid names, came up with Dusty Springfield, giggled themselves silly, and thought it doesn't really matter. What I'm saying is that I don't think there was any great philosophical thought to it or anything. It was just something that sounded silly and fun at the time. The new group were making music that was very like the more clean cut end

of the American folk music scene of the time. And while their first record, Dear John, wasn't a hit, Their second single, Breakaway, written by Tom, made the top 40. The record that made the biggest impression, though, was their fifth single, a version of the Wonder Jackson country song, Silver Threads and Golden Needles, which didn't chart in the UK, but became a surprised top 20 hit in the US, becoming the first record by a British group to get that high in the American charts. Though, by the time it charted, Tim Field had left the group and been replaced by Mike Hurst.

The song's success took them to the US, where Dusty became fully acquainted with R&B for the first time. In particular, she heard two records that changed her life. The first was Tell Him by the Exciters. And the second was Don't Make Me Over by Dionne Warwick. Both records pointed her in a direction that was totally different from the folk pop music the Springfields were making. The group stayed together for another year and had their two biggest UK hits in 19, but Tom had always said he would only give the group three years, when it was also blatantly obvious that musical styles were changing. Tom and Mike went on to do other work behind the scenes,

some of which I discussed in the Patreon episode on The Seekers a while ago, and Hurst will turn up in future episodes, but Dusty was going to go on to a solo career, and she was helped in this by the group having appeared on the pilot episode of a new TV series called Ready, Steady Go. The producers of the series had promised that every act on the pilot would get to appear on the series proper if it was picked up and when it was, as the Springfields were no longer performing together Dusty was invited on as a solo act. She fit the style of the new show perfectly

with her love of the black music that the show's mod audience also admired and she also became very close with Vicky Wickham, the show's associate producer. She fit the show so well, even before she had any solo hit, that she was a regular co-presenter in its early years. They called the Quarrymen. Oh, you rugged character. Oh, John, listen, listen, do you have false teeth as they always look so evil?

Even? No. Even. They're all chipped and battered. No. Girls, would you say his teeth were chipped and battered? No. No!

They're rather beautiful. No, the real. Lovely teeth. Is it true that when you were a kid you were shot at for stealing up? Yes, sir. Is that what these beautiful marks are? No, they're scabs. Let's have a look.

Show them these scabs. There's nothing there at all, he's got a beautiful. Let me see your scabs. Hey. 1963 was a year of huge changes for her. As well as the year she left a group, it was, according to some biographies,

the year she had her first physical relationship with another woman. The biographies don't mention who, except that she was a famous singer and black, and her acceptance of her own sexuality. She was bisexual but homeromantic, only ever having long-term relationships with other women, led to her also rejecting the Catholic Church,

a decision which caused her a great deal of emotional pain over the years. Her first solo single, I Only Want to Be With You, was produced by Johnny Franz and arranged by the song's co-writer Iva Raymond. But by all accounts, Springfield was the mainuteur in the studio on this and most of her future records, and pushed for a sound that was modelled on Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, with her own vocal rather buried in the mix as a result. The record made the top five in the UK and top 20 in the US,

making Springfield the second British invasion artist to chart in the US. As 1963 ended and 1964 began, Dusty also started one of her longest-lasting friendships, with the American soul singer Madeline Bell. Bell and Springfield would often sing backing vocals, on each other's recordings, and a lot of Springfield's phrasing came from her paying close attention to Bell's vocals. Springfield, like many great singers, was well known as a great imitator, and if you listen to Bell's 1964 B-side, don't cross over to my side of the street,

you can hear exactly what she learned from Bell. Springfield's second single, Stay a While, was a less successful attempt to follow up I Only Want to Be With You, written by the same songwriting team. It made the top 20, but was very much a typical second hit. That wasn't the case for our next hits, though. Here, her US and UK discography's split, but in both cases she had a hit with the Baccarac and David song. Bird Bac had heard our album track, Wishing and Hopin, a cover version of a Dionne Warwick B-side,

and had pushed for it to be released as a single, which it was in the US, making the top ten. Baccarac had also been impressed enough with Springfield to meet her when she was in New York and pitch her some more of his obscure songs. She was so moved by Tommy Hunt's version of I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself, that she burst into tears.

And so while wishing and hoping was making its way up the US charts, her version of I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself was making the top ten in the UK. What to do with myself? I'm so used to do. And now that... I just don't know what to do with my time. The Ronet's, and the Bullets, and the Searchers, also on the Bill.

She became very close with the Motown Act, especially Reeves, who were so close that there were rumours that the two were lovers, though Reeves always denied that. The Vandellas would sing backing vocals for Springfield set. Springfield would fill in for the occasional absences of some of the Vandellas, singing the missing part from the side of the stage, and she would join them to sing backing vocals from Marvin Gay. Ronnie Spector, on the other hand,

thought that Springfield's habit of throwing crockery when she was frustrated was a little too bizarre for her, especially since Springfield was sharing a dressing room with the Ronnettes. And it was on this trip that she began what would be a slow descent into substance dependence. She had for some time been dealing with psychosomatic throat problems, brought on by stage fright and perfectionism, which would plague her all her life and cause her to often cancel gigs. And one of the temptations suggested she have a swig of vodka before going on stage

in order to soothe her throat. she all too soon became reliant on it and was also supplementing it with cocaine and downers. Towards the end of 1964, she also made her biggest political statement. She was booked to tour South Africa, but insisted she would not play to segregated audiences, and was eventually deported from the country partway through the tour,

with her music being banned there as a result. This and the subsequent deportation of Adam Faith for the same reasons, they'd a huge amount to bring international attention to the horrors of apartheid. She was strongly criticised by entertainers like Max Bygraves, Derek Nimmo, and Peter and Gordon, for making life more difficult than British performers playing there. But she had the support of Ringo Starr, who said, Good for Dusty, I would have done the same thing. It's stupid to have segregated audiences, and of 15 MPs who signed an early day motion in support of her.

The Searchers, the Zombies and Eden Kane, who were all, represented by Dusty's agent Tito Burns, also cancelled planned tours of the country. In 1965, Dusty also hosted what was often called one of the greatest hours of British TV history when she presented the Sound of Motown. This was originally meant to be a Dusty Springfield TV special, with Martha and the Vandallas as special guests. But as the Motown review was touring the UK, it eventually expanded to a showcase for the entire touring party. Barry Gordy ensure that that the Supremes got more time than the other acts, much to Reeves as annoyance, but it was Martha and the Vandellas who got to perform with the show's host,

with the Vandela's backing Dusty, and Springfield and Reeves duetting on Wishing and Hopin. By this point, Springfield was acting as a mentor to a whole group of session singers who were coming up. While on her early singles, the breakaways had backed her, as they did almost every big British performer who needed female backing vocals. By 1965, Dusty had a seat. assembled a team consisting of Madeline Bell, Doris Troy, Kiki D, and Leslie Duncan, and she would give them label credit, which helped all of them become known in their own right and go on to successful careers. She was still having hits in the UK, but not so much in the US,

and this was limiting her opportunities somewhat, as the UK touring circuit was still largely based around the chicken and a basket northern working men's clubs, which were hardly the ideal venues for someone like her. The Labour MP, Joe Ashton, later recalled seeing her play Greasbrew Working Men's Club. The chairman introduced her with the words, Before the show starts, I have an important announcement. Would the man who urinated against the front wall pack it in? Now he has Dusty Springfield. Dusty creased up, unable to sing. Only to be told by the grumpy host, get on with it, love or I'll cut your fee. 1966, though, brought her biggest hit. She'd first heard the song, E.O.K.

non-vivo senzate, a year earlier, at the San Remo Song Festival, where it was performed by its composer Pino Donagio. She'd instantly decide that she needed to record it, but she needed an English lyric and there wasn't one. She first turned to her brother Tom, but he couldn't come up with anything, and eventually she asked her friend Vicky Wickham for help. As Simon Napier Bell told the story, sometime around 1965, with all that alcohol spilling around,

it was difficult to know what year it actually was. I met Vicky Wickham. She was in charge of booking all the acts on Ready Steady Go, the pop TV programme that served as High Church to the Swinging London cult. We became good friends, and she said I ought to get into the music business. I agreed it sounded like a good idea, but what did I have to do? She said she wasn't sure, but probably not much. A few days later she phoned me and said, Here's your chance, Dusty Springfield wants some lyrics. I hadn't actually written lyrics before, but it sounded easy enough.

I came up with a few while on the phone, but Vicky said they'd have to be fitted to a melody. Dusty had picked up an Italian song at the San Remo Music Festival and wanted to record it in English, so she'd suggested to Vicky, why don't you and Simon write the lyrics? An ordinary day in Swinging London was based around a good dinner. This would start at around 9pm and run until midnight,

then it was a quick drive to the ad lib, the Scotch of St James, or the Cromwellian, for some heavy drinking. The evening Vicky phoned me there wasn't time to work on the lyrics before dinner, but if we rushed the brandy and got to the ad lib half an hour later than usual, we might just fit in some work between the two.

So after we'd finished our crepe Suzette, we took half an hour out of the evening and drove back to Vicky's flat, where we sat listening to a scratchy old acetate singing at us in Italian. I said, it's from Italy. The words have got to be romantic. It ought to start off, I love you.

Vicky shuddered at the thought. How about, I don't love you, she suggested. I thought that was a bit extreme. No, it's going too far the other way. Why not? You don't love me. That was more dramatic, more Italian, but a bit accusatory. So we softened it a little.

You don't have to love me. But that didn't quite fit the melody. So he added two more words. You don't have to say you love me. Great, that was it. We could do the rest in the taxi. When we got to the Adlib Club, the song was all but finished, yet we only arrived ten minutes later than usual.

Even so, I remember telling Vicky, I don't like this lyric writing business, it messes up the evening. As you can tell from that anecdote, nobody was hugely impressed with Wickham and Napier Bell's lyric, but married to that melody, and with Springfield's vocal, it became a massive hit. Dusty hated the lyric, and also hated the echo on her voice. She ended up singing it in a stairwell to get the right vocal sound,

and took 59 takes, of which Take 53 was used. The track went to number one in the UK, and also went to number four in the US. But that was a rare US hit for her, and she was getting more and more annoyed at her labels lack of promotion in the US. The UK, though, was a different matter. She hosted her own TV show for several seasons,

which included everything from performances with Bert Baccarac to interviews with Woody Allen to duets with Jimmy Hendricks. For much of the mid-60s, she continued releasing solidly successful but not earth-shattering hits in the UK, while in the US she continued to have little success, with one rare exception being The Look of Love, which Baccarac and David had written for her as a theme tune for the James Bond comedy spoof, Casino Royale.

The song went to number 22, and became one of her most well-known performances. That track had been one of the first, where Springfield tried a new, far more intimate vocal sound, one that she would soon use on her most well-regarded recordings, but it was something of an outlier in her discography at the time, which was generally a mixture of bombastic ballads in the style of You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, and cover versions of American Soul records which were dear to her heart,

like her version of Irma Franklin's Piece of My Heart, recorded as an album track shortly after Franklin's singles release. And it was that love for soul which guided her next move. when her contract with Phillips in America ended, and she was able to move to Atlantic Records. She very clearly stated, The Atlantic deal is no reflection at all on Johnny Frans or anyone at Phillips in Britain,

and the agreement was that she would record for Phillips in the UK and for Atlantic in the US, with the two labels cross-licensing each other's releases. Her last record released on Phillips in the US was, I close my eyes and count to ten. That made the top five in the UK, her first record to do so in two years. though she'd been having smaller heads throughout that time, but did nothing in the US,

but she had big hopes for the Atlantic deal. It may seem odd for Atlantic, a label which, after all, was almost exclusively known for records by black people, to sign a white British artist like Dusty Springfield. Odd, but not of course impossible. Armet Ert Euttegan, at least, had already seen which way the wind was blowing, and within a short while would be signing and working with everyone from Led Zeppelin to foreigner. But to be produced by Jerry Wexler was a different matter. Wexler was a man who knew what he liked, and what he liked was soul, the bluesy end of jazz, and R&B.

His idea for crossing over to a white audience, rather than just signing white bands, was to get black artists to record cover versions of rock hits. As he said himself, we signed people whose music we liked. There were two requisites. We had to really like it, and we had to. to imagine it could sell. I call that column A. Later on a column B came in, music which we didn't necessarily like, but had to deal with to stay alive. And although I was instrumental in signing much of

this other kind of act which we thought would sell, I never produced it. I never went into the studio unless the music spoke directly to me. As a result, if you look at my dossier, you'll see I dealt with very, very few rock and roll artists. But of course, Wexler was not under the impression that only black people could make the music he loved. After all, while the vocalists he worked with were almost exclusively black, the musicians he used when he recorded in Muscle Shoals or Memphis were mostly white players,

and unlike many white people attempting to sing soul, Dusty Springfield never tried to sound like a black person, something Wexler appreciated, telling Springfield's biographer later, there were no traces of black in her singing. She's not mimetic, whatever she gets from black is transmogrified with her own sensibility.

She has a pure, silvery stream. It was decided that Dusty would record an album in Memphis, produced by the same team who were producing Aretha Franklin's current hits, and featuring many of the same musicians, and the sweet inspirations on backing vocals. Works that described the process of selecting the material, I began an intense hunt for songs that I could believe in, and that I prayed would please her.

With the help of my assistants, Jerry Greenberg and Mark Myerson, we spent several months amassing a cornucopia of leaves, sheets, lyric sheets, and acetate demos. Cassettes had yet to appear. In my zeal to provide her with the widest possible choice of material, we wound up with 70 or 80 songs. I thought it would be comfortable for her to come out to Great Neck, where we could work without the distractions of a frantic record office. Dusty showed up at my door and we went into my living room. We soon found ourselves as deep in acetates, on tables, chairs, shelves, the floor. As I played her song after song, I was hoping for her response. Would you like this one? If not, how about.

the next one. Most of the day and well into the night, I became first fatigued, and then, and here he used as an abelist slur, as I moved from floor to player, then back to the shelves, the chairs and the tables, in what turned eventually into a ballet of despair. After going through my entire inventory, the box score was Wexar 80, Springfield Zero. Out of my meticulously assembled treasure trove, the fair lady liked exactly none. But then, a few months later, she came back to listen to more material. Wexler didn't have anything else he thought would be suitable for her, so he'd just played her 20 of the songs she'd rejected before, and this time she loved all of them. The songs chosen were actually largely the same kind of material that she'd been recording in the UK,

even by the same writers. Four tracks chosen were by Goffin and King, who had regularly been sending Springfield demos and getting tracks on her records. There was also another Baccarac and David's song, the land of make-believe, for which Arif Mardin said he modelled the arrangement after Ravel, though adding a sitar, because of course this was 1968. There were also two songs from Mandy Newman, another writer she'd recorded before. While the material was Springfield's normal material, the musicians were very different. These were the Memphis Boys, the musicians who played on all the great R&B and country tracks coming out of American Sound Studios. As Arif Marden described the recording process,

with Dusty, this is what happened. Jerry Wexler would play the demo. If we had lead sheets, fine. If not, they would write their own lead sheets, the five musicians. Then they would start to play, would start to get a groove. It's a family affair, almost like a soup, it's being made. And we are there, keep that lick, add two beats here, that kind of thing. But what she didn't do, despite travelling to Memphis to record the album, was actually record any vocals with the musicians, despite it being normal practice for the Wexler, Dowd and Marden team to have their vocalists sing live with the instrumentalists. As she explained later,

I got destroyed when someone said, Stand there, that's where Aretha stood. Or stand there, that's where Percy's Ledge sang when a man loves a woman. I became paralyzed by the ghosts of the studio. I knew that I could sing the songs well enough, but it brought pangs of insecurity that I didn't deserve to be there.

I just knew that Aretha's drummer was going to say, ain't she a piece of shit? It's the most deflating thing you can say to me that somebody I adore and worship actually stood there and probably delivered an effortless performance while I'm slogging away trying to get it right. They meant well, but they didn't realise what they were doing. Instead, the vocals were recorded in New York,

though even there her perfectionist nature and worry about working with people who had worked with her idols, meant that her psychosomatic throat condition came back in full force. The tracks often had to be recorded phrase by phrase and line by line. But when they were, there were some of the best vocals she ever recorded. She said later, they worked with me until they got it out of me. Probably the irony of those whole sessions was that I was so crippled with laryngitis

they could only record me two or three words at the time. Yet there are notes on the album that I'd never sung again. They're stratospheric, they're so high. I'd be revving up and I'd just go for it. When I didn't make it, I'd do it again until I did. It was rough. Part of the problem was also that Springfield had always liked to have a voice buried on the records,

going for a sound that was an approximation of Phil Specter's wall of sound. while Wexler, Marden and Dowd, pushed from much more stripped-down arrangements, highlighting her vocals. According to Wexler, she insisted on having the backing track so loud in her headphones that she couldn't hear her own voice while singing, but he was amazed that she was nonetheless always perfectly on pitch. The song from those sessions that would become most identified with her was one that was originally intended for Aretha Franklin, but as we heard in the most recent main episode, Franklin turned it down because she thought it would be disrespectful to her father. Dusty Springfield herself was never happy with her performance on that track.

She thought that in the session in New York she had been too inhibited and sounded too British, and she wanted to redo the vocal in the UK. But it was released as a single before she had the chance. She said later that it seemed to move people on a sexual level, where it didn't move me at all. Part of that dislike came in retrospect, because as we heard in the most recent Teresa Franklin episode, Franklin cut her own version later,

when Springfield was intimidated by what she perceived as Franklin's superior performance. Indeed, the song became something of a standard for great female vocalists of the time, and was also recorded by Franklin's sister Irma, by Ike and Tina Turner, and by Bobby Gentry. Yet despite what she may have thought herself,

and despite the track being covered by some of the best singers in the business, Springfield's version remains the definitive one. It went top ten in both the UK and the US, but it would be our last UK top 30 hit for nearly 20 years. As the industry was increasingly focusing around albums, Dusty's career, which had always been based around singles, started to stagnate. Dusty and Memphis didn't do very well on the charts, making the top 20 in the UK, but only numbered 99 in the US, though it later became recognised as one of the great albums of the decade, regularly making lists of the

all-time greatest albums. There was one final consequence of the Memphis sessions. While she was there, she recommended to Atlantic that they investigate a new English band, formed by some session musicians she knew. They respected Dusty's taste enough that they signed the band largely on her say-so, and not only that, they put out an in-store promotional album, with one side consisting of tracks from Dusty and Memphis,

and the other tracks from the group's debut album. That promotional record was, of course, called Dusty Springfield Led Zeppelin. She did have one further hit in the US after the Memphis album, with a track from her next LP, which was recorded with the songwriting and production team Gamble and Huff, who would soon go on to become the major forces in the Philly Soul Sound, the revolutionised black music in the 70s. Brand New Me, the title track for the album,

released in the UK as From Dusty With Love, was written by Gamble with Tom Bell and Jerry Butler, and made the top 30. For the next couple of years, Dusty's career seemed to be stagnating somewhat because her personal life was falling apart. She still had the admiration of many of the new stars of show business. She was particularly good friends with Elton John, and she sang backing vocals on his album, Tumbleweed Connection.

John loved her, and would often travel to places like Batley Variety Club to see her perform, but she was performing in places like Batley Variety Club. The audiences there wanted the big ballads, not for her to do the soul music that she wanted, and she was drinking a huge amount. A reporter at that venue wrote in the Daily Express that she had three marries, of champagne and a bottle of vodka in her dressing room. Her personal life was also in turmoil,

her girlfriend of the time, Norma Tanega, the American singer-songwriter who had had a hit with Walking My Cat Named Dog, had moved back to L.A. because they'd been fighting so often, and so Dusty ended up travelling regularly to America to visit her, and couldn't help noticing the difference between L.A. and Batley. She moved to the US, but her recording career was drying up. And while she started out playing the seemingly glamour, hotel lounge circuit, playing big venues throughout the US to massive audiences.

She soon realised that this was not, in actuality, very different from the chicken and a basket venues she'd been playing in the UK. More lucrative, but no more artistically satisfying. All her singles from 1970 to 1973 flopped in both the US and the UK. The closest she came to a hit was a cover of The Rascals How Can I Be Sure, which made number 36 briefly in the UK in 1970, and she didn't release anything at all from 1973 through 1978. She spent most of that time with her mental health deteriorating quite badly. She was regularly self-harming at this point, an alcoholic and a drug addict, and she started making occasional suicide attempt. In the US, she was largely cut off from the social circle she'd had in the UK, and retreated into herself,

and kept making decisions that were bad both for her personal life and her career. The few old friends she remained in touch with did try to help. Elton John tried to persuade her to record a duet with him in the middle of the decade, but the only thing she did was some backing vocals on The Bitch's Back. She had such difficulty getting that backing vocal part down that she rebuffed John's offers to duet with her, and his talk of producing an album for her. She was furious with herself when shortly afterwards John had one of the biggest hits of his career,

with Don't Go Breaking My Heart, her duet with Dusty's old backing singer Kiki D. By the end of the 1970s, after a five-year gap, she was recording again, but the albums weren't selling, and her mental health was as low as it had ever been. She made several suicide attempt, and was regularly getting hospitalized for psychiatric problems, and found herself actually preferring the hospital to being on the outside.

People would look after her, and she didn't have to take responsibility for herself. She would check in under her birth name, to avoid publicity, and at least once, when a friend came to collect her after a hospital stay, the hospital said that they couldn't let Mary O'Brien out because she was still unwell. They'd heard her telling people she was a famous singer. The music from the late 70s and early 80s did contain some real gems, like Softcore, from her 1981 album White Heat. But none of drugs in the early age.

Can't seem to understand your love. I want to shout. But none of it sold in any appreciable numbers. Her personal life hit Utter Rock Bottom in the early 80s. She was briefly married. Not a legally binding ceremony because same-sex marriage was still not legal, but a marriage in every other sense. To someone who physically abused her so badly,

she had to have plastic surgery and would never look quite the same again. To make matters worse, Dusty was on food stamps her career was going so badly. And because she was not a citizen, she needed to go and visit her abusive ex-wife in prison to get her signature on the forms. Her only source of income by now came from lip-syncing to a couple of her old hits at gay clubs, for what amounted to pocket change. She had to lip-sink because her voice was shot at the time. She started to pull her life together a little in the mid-80s,

and her financial situation improved when the British nightclub owner Peter Stringfellow, who was starting his own record label, gave her a £100,000 advance for a one-off single, which flopped. She got off alcohol, and at least cut down on the more damaging drugs, and got her voice back into shape. And then in 1987 the Pet Shop Boys came calling.

They had a song which they wanted her to duet on. What have I done to deserve this, became a second biggest hit ever, reaching number two in the UK and the US. The Pet Shop Boys went on to write two more singles for Dusty, in private and nothing has been proved, the theme for the film scandal, both of which also made the UK top 20 in the late 80s.

And the album, Reputation, which the Pet Shop Boys co-produced for her, started a career renaissance for Springfield, and she finally seemed to be putting her demons behind her. Her mental health was better than it had been for decades, Her substance abuse was more or less under control, and she moved back to the UK, where she was now regarded as one of the great singers of her generation. Son of a preacherman also had a renewed burst of popularity,

when Quentin Tarantino used it in a crucial scene in his hit film Pulp Fiction, and it was included on the multi-million-selling soundtrack album, giving her her first platinum record more than 35 years after she started her career. but her work on her new album in the early 90s ran into trouble. She was having her normal vocal problems, but they seemed somehow worse. It turned out she had cancer. By this point, Vicky Wickham was managing her, and she persuaded the record label to hold back the release

until Dusty was well enough to promote it. They did, and it finally came out in June 1995, when she was in remission, and it was promoted with a TV special featuring several celebrity fans singing her praises, and with appearances on later with Jules Holland, where she performed with backing vocals from a group including Alison Moyet and Sheneid O'Connor. Sadly though, the album wasn't very good and didn't sell well, and it would be her last.

Not long after its release, the cancer came back. She fought it for several years, but eventually succumbed to it on March 2nd, 1999, just before her 60th birthday. A few weeks earlier, she'd also been given the OBE, and had she been well, Well enough, the day of her death was the day she would have gone to the palace to receive her medal. But as it was, Wickham had made the journey for her in advance, and collected the award for her, and they'd shown it round the hospital together. One of the last things she did, a few weeks before she died, was to have her hair died.

She insisted, I'm going out as a blonde. Dusty Springfield had a tragic life in many ways, with nearly two decades of bad relationships, bad career moves, and bad mental health, in what should have been the pre-being. of her life, only to become terminally ill just as she was starting to get her life back on track. But she did at least live long enough to see herself receive the honours she deserved, and to know how beloved she actually was. Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Rod Stewart and Tom Jones sent flowers to her funeral, as did her old friend Elton John, who said of her,

She was enough to turn gay boys straight, and, I just think she was the greatest white singer there has ever been. Every song she sang she claimed as her own. Though the last words should probably go to her when she was asked about being a legend. A legend? I suspect I am to some people, but frankly it's nothing special.