Dusty Springfield: Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 10:10, 8 February 2006

Dusty Springfield OBE (April 16, 1939 – March 2, 1999) was a British popular singer whose career achieved the most success in the 1960s. She is regarded by many as one of the finest soul singers of all time, and it is notable that she was held in high esteem by the many black American singers (such as Martha Reeves) whom she emulated and idolised.

Early life and group career

She was born in Hampstead, London as Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien, and was a fan of Peggy Lee from an early age.

Her first professional musical experiences was with the group Lana Sisters, a British vocal group she joined in 1958 and recorded several singles with over the next two years. In 1960, she and her brother, Dion, and Tim Feild formed The Springfields, a folk trio. Mary took the name Dusty Springfield after forming the group, and her brother Dion took the name Tom Springfield. They soon became a popular act in Britain with singles such as "Breakaway", "Bambino" and their biggest hit "Island of Dreams". By 1962, the Springfields had some success in the United States with "Silver Threads and Golden Needles".

During a tour of the United States, The Springfields travelled to Nashville, Tennessee. Dusty became so enamoured of the Motown sound she heard in the States, particularly the girl groups such as Martha & The Vandellas. Dusty was keen to escape the controlling influence of her older brother and gain full command over her music, so she left The Springfields in late 1963 to establish herself as a soul singer. Tom meanwhile moved into songwriting and production, scoring major hits in the UK, USA and Australia as producer and main songwriter for the UK-based Australian folk-pop band The Seekers.

Solo success

Her first single was "I Only Want to Be With You", which was a success in both Britain and the United States. This was followed by a series of classic and successful singles, including "Wishin' and Hopin'", "Anyone Who Had a Heart"', "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself", "Stay Awhile" and "All Cried Out". Springfield recorded a number of Bacharach-David compositions, including "The Look of Love" (from the 1967 movie Casino Royale, which was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song in 1967.) She also released such classic singles as "Losing You", "Your Hurtin' Kinda Love" and "In the Middle of Nowhere", culminating in her biggest hit, and her first UK #1 single, "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" -- which was in fact an English-language adaptation of an Italian song Dusty had discovered, with new lyrics hastily co-written by Vicki Wickham.

By 1964, Springfield was one of the biggest solo artists of her day. She created a controversy when she refused to play in front of a segregated crowd in South Africa. She was often a featured artist on the British music show Ready Steady Go, produced by Vicki Wickham, who would later become her manager (Dusty and Vicki also became lovers for several years). Dusty's huge UK success led to her starring in her own musical variety series, Dusty (1967), which also featured many leading stars of the day as guests. One of the most memorable was Jimi Hendrix, who duetted with Dusty on "Mockingbird". Regrettably, the videotape of this memorable appearance was later erased, although a brief fragment of Hendrix's performance on the show, filmed directly off the TV screen by a fan, has survived.

Because of her interest in Motown music, Springfield was selected in 1965 to host The Sound of Motown, a special which introduced Motown and American soul music to British audiences. (In the 1997 video biography, Dusty - Full Circle, several of the musicians that participated, most notably Martha Reeves, credited the media exposure, and Springfield's advocacy of the music, with helping them to break into the British pop charts.)

Like so many other solo singers who did not write their own material (such as Tom Jones), Dusty's recording career was dependent on the quality of the material she could obtain, and by the end of the decade top-notch material was becoming harder to find -- Carole King, who had written "Going Back" for her, was embarking on a solo career, and the chart-busting Bacharach-David partnership was foundering.

Dusty's status in the music industry was further complicated by the gradual fracturing of the formerly homogeneous "pop" market into many distinct musical genres in the late 1960s. She found herself becoming "unhip" at a time when hipness was crucial for musical success, and in addition her performing career was becoming hopelessly bogged down on the mudane UK touring circuit, which at that time largely consisted of down-market working men's clubs.

Hoping to revive her career and credibility and wishing to return to her soul roots, she signed with Atlantic Records, home label of her idol Aretha Franklin, and she began recording an album in Memphis, Tennessee with producers Jerry Wexler, Arif Mardin and Tom Dowd. The Memphis sessions were marred by Dusty's infamous perfectionism, which masked her deep insecurity and her very real anxiety about being compared to the soul greats who had recorded there. In the end, the Memphis tracking sessions were completed without any major work being done on the vocals -- in fact almost all her vocals were cut some weeks later in New York with Tom Dowd -- who later revealed that he had to dodge "a flying ashtray" hurled at him by an angry Dusty.

Despite the problems with its production, the album, Dusty in Memphis became her magnum opus and is still regarded as one of the best soul albums of all time; it has landed on several "best of all time" lists, including lists complied by Rolling Stone magazine in the United States, and Q music magazine in Britain. The album is best known for "Son of a Preacher Man", which was a hit in both the United Kingdom and the United States, though the album itself was a commercial disappointment. The song enjoyed a significant revival in the 1990s thanks to its inclusion on the best-selling soundtrack for the film Pulp Fiction.

"Son of a Preacher Man" also ecapsulates some of the ironies of Dusty's career. It had initially been offered to Aretha Franklin, but she turned it down so Dusty recorded it for her own LP. Yet, although it became one of her signature songs, Dusty later repudiated her own version after hearing Aretha's later version. Disappointed with a small part of her own phrasing of the chorus, Dusty thereafter always performed the song with the phrasing Aretha had used.

Career and personal struggles

Dusty was a bisexual. She had been raised as a strict Catholic and she kept to her faith to the end of her life, although she reportedly never went to confession as an adult. The conflict between her conservative religious faith and her bisexuality was one that affected her deeply. She also had bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder. Dusty engaged in self-injury, cutting herself to relieve emotional pain and stress.

In all aspects of her career, but especially in the studio, Dusty was emotionally rigid - a notorious perfectionist and, rightly or wrongly, she was soon labelled as "difficult", a "prima donna". In hindsight, much of this can now be seen as a sexist reaction from hidebound male colleagues who, in a very male-dominated industry, were wholly unused to women taking control in the studio. As many of her colleagues have attested, Dusty's musical ear was very finely tuned and she was totally intolerant of anything less than perfection. She was notorious for her agonisingly painstaking vocal sessions, during which she would often record short phrases or even single words or syllables, over and over again, to get the precise feeling and musical quality that she wanted.

But as her career unwound in the Seventies, her personal demons took over and her behaviour degenerated; she became infamous for repeated "no shows", tour cancellations and wasted recording sessions, and she often erupted into violent tantrums, accompanied by searing verbal abuse and destruction of property.

However, as noted in her biography, much of her "difficult" behaviour stemmed from her dysfunctional family background and her deep insecurity, which manifested itself from childhood. Her mother, although bright and outgoing, was prone to violent rages and when in this state she would typically throw whatever came to hand -- a trait which young Mary soon adopted. Her accountant father, conversely, was quiet and withdrawn, and it is evident that, at least in part, her mother's violent "acting out" was an attempt to gain her husband's attention. Dusty's growing insecurity was heightened by her parents' blatant favouring of her older brother Dion (Tom).

In her early career much of Dusty's odd behaviour was carried out more or less in fun -- like her famous food fights -- and it was at the time dismissed as merely "eccentric". One story related in her biography tells how, when Dusty first performed in America, she was too nervous to meet the other performers on the bill, so she found a box full of crockery and hurled it down a flight of stairs in order to bring the other performers out of their dressing rooms.

But as Dusty the Star became more and more famous, the more demanding and intolerant she became. She was indulged, pampered and spoiled, and with nothing to check her descent into chronic drug and alcohol abuse, her behaviour become commensurately worse. Later in life, with her career in the doldrums, she began to internalise her violent behaviour, resulting in many serious incidents of self-harm.

One small but fascinating factor that influenced the course of Dusty's career was that she was extremely short-sighted, as she revealed in a TV interview in the Sixties -- without glasses she could barely make out her own fingers at arm's length. She had worn glasses at school but abandoned them as soon as she began performing and (like John Lennon) she found the old-fashioned hard contact lenses that were then available were far too uncomfortable for regular use.

Because she was unable to move freely about the stage for fear of tripping or falling, Dusty evolved a unique performing style, and she was notable for her use of stylised hand and arm movements to dramatise her performances. Happily, this contained yet highly emotive style worked brilliantly on television. In part, it was pure theatre -- like much of her "look", it was a performance device she picked up from watching "drag" acts and female impersonators -- but it also cleverly incorporated a cunning trick that helped Dusty get through TV and concert performances. Her extreme myopia meant that she was unable to read cue sheets, so Dusty reportedly often wrote lyrics on the backs of her hands to prompt herself, disguising what she was actually doing with the hand flourishes that became her trademark.

The Seventies and Eighties: "The Lost Years"

A Brand New Me (1970) was just as unsuccessful commercially, though also a critical darling. It was one of the first works produced by the Gamble and Huff production team, who would go on to great success in the R&B genre. A third album for the Atlantic label, produced by Jeff Barry, was abandoned due to unsuccessful single releases. Similarly, her next album, See All Her Faces (1972), released in Britain, followed the same pattern. In 1973 Springfield signed to the ABC Dunhill Records label which resulted in the album Cameo in (1973). Still unafraid of controversy, Springfield also began speaking openly in interviews of her bisexuality in the early 1970s.

The following year she began to record another album for the label titled Longing, to be produced by Brooks Arthur, who had produced several hit records by singer-songwriters like Janis Ian; however, the project had to be abandoned due to the vocalist's failing mental health. (Much of the material from Longing was later released on the compilation Beautiful Soul.) Springfield put her career on hold during the mid-1970s, though she did sporadic work with fellow artists like her friend Anne Murray and (after a typical false start) she also performed backing vocals on the Elton John hit "The Bitch is Back".

For much of the Seventies, living in Hollywood, Dusty alternately partied and battled with her mental health and substance abuse issues. Riven by insecurity, insulated from reality by her money and fame, and torn by the conflict between her Catholic faith and her sexuality, Dusty's drinking and drug use escalated, as did the seriousness of her increasingly frequent acts of self-harm. During this dark period she was hospitalised on numerous occasions and she reportedly attempted suicide several times.

She continued to release critically lauded but commercially unsuccessful albums and singles throughout the late 1970s for the United Artists Records label, resulting in the albums It Begins Again (1978) and Living Without Your Love (1979). During this time Springfield rarely charted and soon drifted from popular view. She ended this period by releasing two final singles for her British label Mercury Records. She was virtually forced to do so due to the lack of success of her previous albums. The singles were "Baby Blue", a disco number that charted in the top 70, and "Your Love Still Brings Me to My Knees", the singer's swan song for a company she had been with in various forms for 20 years.

In the 1980s, Springfield wanted to forget the 1970s and start afresh. She signed a deal with 20th Century Records, which resulted in a flop of a single, a cover of "It Goes Like It Goes" from Norma Rae. She then began to record an album for Casablanca entitled White Heat (1982). The album was a departure from Springfield's sound, and featured music and lyrics that were similar in style and substance to the New Wave genre. The album was critically acclaimed; however, the LP was put on limited release in the USA and Canada only. (Not long after its release, the Casablanca label also folded.) Springfield tried again in 1985 by signing to Peter Stringfellow's Hippodrome Records label, which resulted in a single called "Sometimes Like Butterflies" and a disastrous appearance on Stringfellow's live TV show. The song was released against Springfield's wishes with a practice vocal recorded while she had laryngitis. The singer left the label in response.

A return to popularity

Springfield's fortunes finally changed in 1987, when the Pet Shop Boys, who were fans of hers, asked her to add a vocal to a song they were recording. The resulting track, a duet called "What Have I Done to Deserve This?", was a smash hit. The song charted all over the world and renewed interest in her music. She capitalised on this success by releasing a new album, Reputation, which was a best seller. The album was partially written and produced by the Pet Shop Boys as well as other contributors like Dan Hartman. She was also asked, in conjunction with the Pet Shop Boys, to contribute a track to the soundtrack of the film Scandal, about the British political scandal known as the Profumo Affair. That track, "Nothing Has Been Proved", was also a modest hit.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer shortly after releasing A Very Fine Love in 1994. The cancer was in remission for a time, but reappeared a few years later, and Springfield lost her battle with the disease in March 1999 at the age of 59, just ten days before she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Shortly before her death, she was awarded an Order of the British Empire for her contributions to music, although she was by then too ill to attend the award ceremony.

External links

@@ Line 31: / Line 31: @@
 == Career and personal struggles ==
-Dusty was a closeted lesbian. She had been raised as a strict Catholic and she kept to her faith to the end of her life, although she reportedly never went to confession as an adult. The conflict between her conservative religious faith and her homosexuality was one that affected her deeply. She also had bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder.  Dusty engaged in self-injury, cutting herself to relieve emotional pain and stress.
+Dusty was a bisexual. She had been raised as a strict Catholic and she kept to her faith to the end of her life, although she reportedly never went to confession as an adult. The conflict between her conservative religious faith and her bisexuality was one that affected her deeply. She also had bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder.  Dusty engaged in self-injury, cutting herself to relieve emotional pain and stress.
 In all aspects of her career, but especially in the studio, Dusty was emotionally rigid - a notorious perfectionist and, rightly or wrongly, she was soon labelled as "difficult", a "prima donna". In hindsight, much of this can now be seen as a sexist reaction from hidebound male colleagues who, in a very male-dominated industry, were wholly unused to women taking control in the studio. As many of her colleagues have attested, Dusty's musical ear was very finely tuned and she was totally intolerant of anything less than perfection. She was notorious for her agonisingly painstaking vocal sessions, during which she would often record short phrases or even single words or syllables, over and over again, to get the precise feeling and musical quality that she wanted.