WOMAN of REPUTE
CHAPTER TWO
SIXTIES ICON
CHAPTER TWO
SIXTIES ICON
"READY, STEADY, GO! . . . was pretty difficult but that's what gave it its atmosphere. It was the immediacy. It was the first show that was done almost like a documentary. It was quite extraordinary and with warts and all - that's what worked . . . The camera angles were strange and they were always the most unflattering . . . everyone was so incredibly busy. . . you'd stand on these little daises and they [the audience] were so close they used to goose you and I was really incredibly shy and to have to perform with people in your face was so totally unnatural. Besides, they all wanted to be on camera more. You know the audience was what it was all about, to hell with the act. It was . . . 'How's my dress and how's my hair?' They were more worried about that than probably I was. But the whole thing was innovative . . . I mean it was incredible for its time . . . It has more immediacy than any of the gloss ones."
Yet even in the 1960s notes music critic Simon Frith, "Dusty Springfield was the object of an oddly furtive adolescent interest." Dusty, he argues, "seemed too old for straight mod stardom, for mini-skirts and knee boots, for her black, black mascara and pale lipstick. Her image, like her hair, was brittle; the crack in her voice suggested a crack in her star masquerade. Her songs
hinted at unspoken, desperate truths about sexuality that weren't there for discussion by little boys."
Like her image, Dusty's voice was both unique and subversive. From her earliest days, she was drawn to the strong rhythms of black soul music resonating from the urban centres of the United States. In time Dusty's love of black musical styles, and especially the Tamla-Motown sound, enabled her to be an instrumental force in getting black American artists such as the Supremes and the Temptations, known and respected by British audiences.
Dusty's voice was unlike any other female singer's of Britain in the sixties. Husky and evocative, her vocal style was frequently mistaken for being both American and black. Dusty was delighted with the confusion her voice caused: "I have a definite and deep affinity with black musicians," she said. "They
put much more expression and feeling into their music than whites. I like to think that I do too."
"The biggest high I can think of was the first time I heard DON'T MAKE ME OVER by Dionne Warwick. I was in Nashville. It was about 1962 and I had to sit down very suddenly because I thought: 'That's what I want to do.' It changed my life. I thought: 'That's . . . that's changing music.' Nobody can sing Bacharach and David music like her. Nobody. Because it's gossamer. Total gossamer . . . I think Bacharach and Hal David . . . changed the course of pop music probably more than anyone else . . . more than the Beatles . . . but it was subtle. . . the construction was so sophisticated, [Bacharach] was using time signatures no one had used in pop music and so I sat down suddenly. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven! I'm not a musician per se. I don't read but I knew that I hadn't heard that before and in fact in pop music, it hadn't been done before . . . and Cissie Houston's voice on the top there . . . Those were incredible sounds."
Commenting on both Dusty's distinct 1960's look and sound, writer and social critic Patricia Juliana Smith notes in her 1993 essay "'You Don't Have To Say You Love Me': The Camp Masquerades of Dusty Springfield", that Dusty "paradoxically expressed and disguised her own unspeakable queerness through an elaborate camp masquerade that metaphorically and artistically transformed a nice white girl into a black woman and a femme gay man, often simultaneously. In doing so, this individual, who had placed herself outside mainstream British society, subverted fixed ideas of identity by assuming the personae of two oppressed and excluded groups. Thus consciously or otherwise, Dusty Springfield blurred the distinctions of race, gender, and sexuality just as she did those between life and art and those between reality and artifice."
Accordingly, notes Smith, "blended into the banal and irrelevant information typical of 1960s publicity notices and fan magazine journalism, several basic 'facts' are repeatedly emphasized on the covers of virtually every album Dusty Springfield released before her 1968 masterpiece Dusty In Memphis. The public is reminded, for example, that Dusty was a member of the wholesome Springfields, is the product of a middle-class family and a Catholic education, and that her real name is Mary--which calls to mind, not only the Blessed Virgin, but also all that is safe and pure. At the same time, her publicists go to great lengths to extol her 'eccentricity'--a term often employed in explaining away what might otherwise be identified as queerness. Dusty, we are told, is a lovable goon who keeps a pet monkey, slides down banisters, plays practical jokes, and vents her pent-up anxieties by smashing cheap dishes. In light of such odd yet thoroughly trivial peculiarities, her penchant for rhythm-and-blues--as well as the much noticed absence of a 'boyfriend'--could be dismissed as more of the same. This would, presumably, reassure the public that Dusty, despite her newly acquired soulful vocal style and her radically artificial 'feminine' appearance, was still a 'nice' if adorably eccentric white girl--and therefore a harmless one."
