Ritual cleaning and smutching took up much of Dusty Springfield's life; she may have been a "dirty girl" in the manner traditional for popular chanteuses but she was meticulous amid riot, aptly remarking when awarded an OBE, "Isn't this the award they give to cleaners?"

For her, "throwing a party" meant a party of throwing--sardines, cream-cakes, crockery--and, as Penny Valentine writes, "strangely, she loved cleaning up afterwards, too". The only strange thing here is Valentine's need to add "strangely" but perhaps she has not heard of Lady Macbeth or read Mary Douglas's "Purity and Danger."

In her darkest days in the US, the singer would cut her own arms and then, as the expressive phrase goes, "section herself" into the comparative safety of a psychiatric ward. Her friend, Madeline Bell, met her after one of these lacerating binges: "All she knew was that she could never wear short sleeves any more and it made her really sad."

She was "practically phobic" about being seen as "un-feminine" and sought the appearance of perfection she craved through "bizarre crash diets: cauliflower and ice cream washed down with Diet Coke".

Born Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien, she was a Catholic and a martyr though not a Catholic martyr. Penny Valentine is in search of a scapegoat for Dusty's failure to live a life of unperturbed normality. She doesn't reflect on the fact that unusual talents are usually at least intermittently a torment to those who possess and are possessed by them. She inclines to blame the parents and drops unspecific hints of physical and emotional abuse, and then, of course, there was the O'Brien Catholicism, a blight so crippling we should marvel that Dusty could even feed herself, let alone sing.

Dusty was a lesbian and "her sexual preference went against everything the Catholic Church had taught her." Everything? I had not previously heard that lesbians were committed by their desires to greed, injustice and hating their neighbour. Though the social conformity which masquerades as Catholicism doubtless hurt the singer, as it does all who don't fit its mould (and most who do), such evidence as there is in this scrappy book suggests that neither her actual family, nor the idolised family of Christianity did her only or especial harm. Her parents were "outgoing people, their home constantly open to Dusty and her friends at any time, day or night"--on Christmas Day, for instance, when, after attending midnight mass, she would get hugely drunk with them while one of her gay friends, dragged up in a beehive and gown he'd borrowed from her, sang "All I See is You" to general acclaim.

She once said: 'If there's one thing that inhibits good singing, it's fear." In the days of her fame, she had less to fear from priests than from her fans and the journalists who tried to photograph her dying of cancer. She remembered that when her parents quarrelled, "I'd sit there with my hands over my ears, trying not to hear and yet being fascinated at the same time", as Penny Valentine reports; she also remembered, as Penny Valentine does not report, that her early days singing with the Springfields in Belgravia nightclubs provided "good training in being able to tune out idiots".

She was an expert in close disharmony, and the tough frailty of her musical phrasing sounds out of a constant dynamic between self-protectiveness and the lyricism of honesty. Mary O'Brien with her hands over her ears as her parents raged is the same person as Dusty Springfield who recorded her vocals on the classic Dusty in Memphis with "the backing track turned up so loudly she could not possibly hear her own voice at all."

She brilliantly described the Springfields as "jolly as hell" (she was an excellent talker as well as a great singer) and those words of hers perfectly fit the entertainment industry with its gruelling euphoria and mirage of togetherness. The great British public is as cruelly exacting (and as false) a god as the Pope.

Eric Griffiths
Evening Standard, London
August 20, 2000