Her classic debut single, I Only Want To Be With You, submerged Dusty’s voice under the American-influenced, Phil Spector-style ‘wall of sound’ distortion she was eager to achieve.įor a few brief years in the mid-Sixties it seemed that music was at the centre of the universe, and that Dusty Springfield was at the centre of music. Immediately, Dusty launched herself as a platinum blonde solo star.ĭusty with her brother, Tom, and mother, Kay, at Bognor beach She quickly found fame, first with her brother Tom in folk-pop group The Springfields, who were one of the top groups in Britain in the early Sixties, before splitting as U.S.-influenced rock ’n’ roll groups like The Beatles and the Rolling Stones flooded the charts. ‘There is a sadness there in my voice,’ Dusty once said. Her precocious, strangely adult, slightly eerie voice was already in evidence on her first amateur recordings in the mid-Fifties, recorded when she was still petite, plain, auburn-haired Mary O’Brien, raised in an unhappy home in High Wycombe in the Forties and Fifties and nicknamed ‘Pudge’ by her family. The image of Dusty, shuffling and confused, seemed a terrible epitaph to a fabulous, trailblazing career that lit up the Sixties.ĭusty Springfield was one of the greatest female singers Britain has ever produced, the voice of her generation – and a woman always ahead of her time. Just two years later she was admitted to a locked psychiatric ward at New York’s Bellevue Hospital after one more in a long line of suicide attempts. She finally sobered up, but her mental health problems persisted.
The result was that her face looked partially frozen, and she lost the characteristic, animated smile that had always seemed to light her up. Borrowing some money, she hired a cheap plastic surgeon to repair her mouth. Her fight with Bracci that day had serious consequences. That day, Dusty fled from the apartment clutching her mouth and was admitted to Cedars-Sinai hospital with her face swollen and blackened and her front teeth missing – a sight that reduced those who visited her to tears. Her moods often swung wildly between harming herself and harming others. She had spent 11 years in Hollywood, struggling for much of that time with alcoholism and mental illness as her fortune and career ebbed away.
To see someone like that was quite an education,' said Kiki Dee
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