Page 40 Daily Mail, Friday, August 30, 2019by Lucy
O’Brien
a
S SHE surveyed the
audience from the stage
of the royal albert Hall,
at a charity performance
attended by Princess
Margaret, chanteuse Dusty
Springfield was thrilled to see that
so many in the crowd were plainly
her own fans — flamboyantly gay
and outrageously camp.
With a sly nod to Her royal Highness,
Dusty quipped, ‘It’s nice to see that the
royalty isn’t confined to the box.’ In other
words, the place was full of queens.
The way that Dusty loved to tell the story,
Princess Margaret made her displeasure
clear at the aftershow party. Shaking hands
with all the performers, the haughty royal
arrived at last at the night’s big star — and,
ignoring her, marched out.
Worse was to come. a typed letter arrived
the following day from Kensington Palace,
containing a pre-written apology for Dusty
to sign and return.
That was 1978. But Dusty Springfield never
was accepted by the establishment. In her
music, her sexuality and her wild lifestyle,
she defied every convention. Bravely open
about her string of lesbian love affairs, she
was decades ahead of her time.
Now her courage and cussed-
ness are being celebrated in a
film about her life, set at the
height of her career and starring
Gemma arterton.
What even her most
ardent fans rarely
guessed was that the
hedonism and the pro-
miscuity, the diva posturing
and drug-fuelled partying, was all an act — put
on to overcome her crippling insecurity.
aged 16 in 1955, North London convent
schoolgirl Mary O’Brien believed she was dull-
witted, boring and destined to be an old maid
working in a library.
She had a chubby tomboy’s face with short,
mousy-red hair and round NHS spectacles. Her
battered gymslip and school tie emphasised
how gawky and uncomfortable she appeared.
Within the next ten years, she would meta-
morphose into a glorious parody of femininity,
with a blonde beehive wig and heavy layers of
mascara. She burst into a pop world that had
never seen such a reinvention — long before
Ziggy Stardust or annie Lennox’s androgynous
figure in a suit, Dusty transformed herself.s
HE was born in april 1939, in West
Hampstead, to a vivacious mother
who had been a flapper in the
Twenties and a father, known to all as
O.B., who was the parliamentary reporter for
the Irish Times. Her parents argued constantly
— her father was a ‘lazy sod’ with ‘a great deal
of anger,’ she later said.
Disturbed by the fights, little Mary took to
harming herself, clutching on to the radiators’
hot pipes till her skin was blistered and burned.
Her inner distress deepened after a bout of
measles, aged seven, left her overweight: ‘I got
fat and horrible.’ It was an upbringing filled
with repressed emotion, but
something happened that neither
her parents nor the school could
have foreseen: Mary discovered
american music.
at a school talent show to
celebrate Saint Stanislaus’s feast
day, Mary formed a band, playing
guitar and singing U.S. folk songs
with two friends. The nuns enjoyed
standards like Scarlet ribbons,
but when the girls performed the
raunchy St Louis Blues, six of the
staff walked out in disgust.
Mousy Mary had discovered how
to be her real self. She called the
creation Dusty Springfield.
Her brother, Tom, four years her
senior, was making a living as a
nightclub musician, and Dusty
started lying about her age to join
him on stage at drinking dens in
Chelsea and Belgravia. It was a
brutal way for a convent girl to pay
her dues as a singer. By 1959, aged
20, she was part of a girl group, The
Lana Sisters.
a year later she joined her brother
again, as the star of a band bearing
her name — The Springfields.
When the group fell apart three
years later, Dusty was determined
to shake off her folksy image. In
November 1963, as the Beatles
topped the charts with She Loves
You (Yeah Yeah Yeah), she released
her first solo single, I Only Want to
Be With You.
Dusty was an instant star. She
was also an instant diva. Some
now acknowledge that she was a
woman standing up for her music
in an industry that was
overpoweringly male. Others,
including her songwriter Clive
Westlake, insist to this day that
she was simply a ‘bitch’ and a
‘cow’. Either way, no one evercalled Dusty easy to work with.
Folk singer Julie Felix, Dusty’s lover
in the late Sixties, says: ‘She was
such a musician. She knew exactly
what she wanted. In those days,
women were so disrespected.’
Her passion for perfection and a
habit of being overcritical of her
own work made studio sessions a
gruelling trial. She felt claustro-
phobic in the recording rooms: ‘It
was like singing in a padded cell. I
had to get out of there.’
More often than not, she would
end up in the ladies’ toilet because
the acoustics were right. Her 1968
hit, Close My Eyes and Count To
Ten, was recorded at the end of a
corridor. The vocals didn’t come
easily either. after the rhythm
track and orchestration were done,
she would gather her courage, have
the volume levels in her head-phones cranked up ‘to a level of
pain’ and then sing. This was how
she forced herself to perform at
that pitch of exhilaration.
and as the hits rolled out —
Wishin’ and Hopin’, I Just Don’t
Know What To Do With Myself,
You Don’t Have To Say You Love
Me — she built a unique following,
with many listeners much older
than the average teeny-pop fan.
One audience for whom she had
no appeal was the conventional,
the old school. Shockingly, when I
Only Want To Be With You was in
the charts, the ITV family variety
show Sunday Night at The Palla-
dium booked the Beverley Sisters
instead to perform the number. It
was a snub Dusty never forgave.
Part of the reaction against her
stemmed from the timbre of her
voice. Dusty sounded black. Thesame prejudice that had made the
nuns walk out when she sang St
Louis Blues now counted against
her in the pop world. Even her
friends didn’t always help: in a
well-meaning but clumsy tribute,
Cliff richard referred to her affec-
tionately as ‘the white negress’.
Defiant as ever, Dusty flew to
New York to play 12 nights in an
all-star r&B roster, including
Martha and The Vandellas and
The Temptations. Martha reeves
became one of her closest friends,
and she shared a dressing room
with the ronettes — ‘It was hot,
like 104 degrees, and all our bee-
hives were colliding constantly.’
One night, when she was suffer-
ing from a sore throat, one of The
Temptations told her to numb the
pain with a slug of vodka. The glass
he offered her was 88 per cent