Just afterwards, with admirable restraint, she said, "I just think people should be allowed to hear me sing irrespective of colour, creed or religion." Twenty years later, with somewhat less restraint, she lunged for a white hotel employee who had prohibited a black friend from the tennis court, and had to be physically restrained. Springfield, no longer listened to the way she once was, had gone from making a difference to making a ruckus.

The singer's "authorised" biographers, music writer Penny Valentine and music manager Vicki Wickham, spend nearly 300 pages excusing her downward spiral from the queen of white soul to gay pop icon. They tell us that poor "Dust" was in pain when she hurled sardine cans, chocolate cakes, bottles of brandy across the room.

The diva could be "charming", they insist: she bought presents, champagne, houses for others. It was insecurity and the added pressure of being a closet lesbian that drove her to drink and drugs and self-injury, and to spending hours applying her signature pancake-layers of make-up. (What more dastardly demon drove her to spend hours at Heathrow watching the planes come and go, we are left to guess.)

Don't read Dancing With Demons if you have not first listened to Dusty in Memphis, the singer's most salient contribution, listed in 1997 by Rolling Stone as one of its essential collection. Musicologists, and her friends, say that Springfield had perfect phrasing, perfect pitch, and an uncanny talent for investing words with heart-and-bone-breaking emotion. Some hail her as the first coming of lyrical feminism, a trailblazer for all the Whitneys and Mariahs to come, a woman who learned to speak--or at least, sing--for herself.

The first is true. The way her voice breaks off from the low protests of "I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten" ("It has nothing to do with the wine, or the music that's flooding my mind . . . ") and songbirds up into a helplessly devoted declaration ("It's the way you make me feel, the moment I am close to you") says more about the exact moment you know, and can finally say, you're in love, than any song I know. And just try to imagine The Thomas Crown Affair without "Windmills of My Mind", Pulp Fiction without "Son of a Preacher Man".

But, spirited as her singing was, Springfield's living was the opposite. Within a week of each other in 1964, Springfield and The Beatles debuted on the American charts--the former with "I Only Want To Be With You", the latter with "I Want To Hold Your Hand". Forty-five years later, both Springfield (posthumously) and Paul McCartney were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. Meantime, McCartney had moved on and up, avoiding self-parody. Springfield--despite brief comebacks in the 1980s and 1990s, and an OBE--had gone from dueting with Jimi Hendrix to lip-synching her own hits in Los Angeles gay bars. [NOTE: This is a reference to an appearance Dusty made in the mid-1980s. It is misleading to assume that this one-off event somehow typifies her entire latter career. It was prior, for instance, her highly successful 1987 "comeback" with the Pet Shop Boys and her critically-acclaimed 1990 album Reputation. Paul McCartney himself has expressed great respect for Dusty and would, I'm sure, similarly find this reference misleading and offensive to her memory--MJB].

Although the singer's voice had the rarest ability to make classics of potential cliches like "You don't have to say you love me", the performer herself-- arriving perennially late, cancelling dates, making desperate late-night phone calls to anyone who would listen to her troubles--became the biggest cliche of all: the gracelessly aging rock star. Still, we learn, Dusty did love cats. (NOTE: This reviewer clearly did not read those parts of the book that documented Dusty's later career and the grace and courage she displayed, especially in her dealing with renewed fame in the 1990s and her struggle with cancer--MJB]

This book is depressing not just because it is an apologia by two friends trying to rescue a passed-on pal (as they had when she was alive, repeatedly retrieving her from near-fatality), but because it is so badly written. In the prologue, Valentine, who used to cover Dusty regularly, says: "If she'd had a boring couple of weeks we'd spend the hour or so embroidering stories round a tiny element of truth so that I had something to write for my paper." Valentine and Wickham have done the same for their book.

Wonder where Dusty Springfield--born, in London, Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien--came up with that name? Mary, "fighting with the fumes and the burning sensation from her scalp as the ammonia hit, went blonde and became Dusty". Hmmm. And, the authors point out, there are a lot of Springfields in America.

The book is full of might haves, would haves, and probably dids, such as: "Dusty probably envied (author) Vicki's energy level." She definitely would not have envied Vicki's ability to tell a convincing story. I tried to read it with Springfield playing in the background. That didn't help. When I got to the section where they describe her self-mutilation (and note that even Diana, Princess of Wales, talked about "cutting"), it took all my willpower not to give up and go back to the more appetising descriptions--of high-seas cannibalism--in my other current reading ("The Custom of the Sea" by Neil Hanson, excellent). Thankfully, sailors don't have hangers-on to forgive their sins.

Holly Finn
Financial Times, London,
August 20, 2000