DUSTY SPRINGFIELD
A VERY FINE LOVE


The rejuvenated "white queen of soul", now singing live with carefree panache, has made an album far more satisfying than her last pop venture, Reputation (1990). In A Very Fine Love, Springfield plays exactly to her strengths: harnessing an older, knowing, cigarette-grained voice to some powerful lyrics by top songwriters; rejecting synthesisers for class Nashville musicians; and getting personal again. Shorn of cloying sentiment, she uniquely delivers cracked regret, vulnerability, cynicism and the dissipated fake cheer which overlies despair.

"Honey, don't ever start singing country," K.T. Oslin told Dusty, "or we'll all have to leave town." Ironically, this album isn't marketed as country, yet its most smashing songs seize the idiom by the throat and may most excite discerning New Country fans. Try "All I Have To Offer"'s dirty low-down vocal, the gut-tugging highlight "Where Is A Woman To Go", her rousing, catchy "Roll Away" (the obvious single?) or the powerful "You Are The Storm". A huge pity the whole album didn't go for the jugular, for three predictable "adult contemporary" arrangements waste this singer in the middle of the road. Her triumphs came from innovation, and from dragging songs to the edge.

This album, plus the UK release of the exciting disco album White Heat, should restore Dusty much of the standing she lost with the public, though never ever with her fellow musicians.

Sarah Nelson
(The List, 30 June, 1995)


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