Just Dusty

A documentary with conventional structure and narrative, but it is a moving portrait of this great British singer who definitely defied conventions, with sincere testimonies by friends, colleagues and critics that discuss her voice, her talent and creative input in times when women were hardly given that option; who brought Motown music to Europe, refused apartheid in South Africa, and who was ahead of her times speaking frankly about her sexual orientation as a bisexual woman. Recommended. A cult figure and a true icon of the swinging 60s in London.

This well-told documentary of British singer Dusty Springfield alternatively made smile and then made me sad. Her heyday was the 1960s when she made the majority of her famed music. There are funny details of how she was acutely short-sighted but still insisted on doing her own make-up. We see the unflattering image of how she was originally and then the glamor of the often just one-named persona known as Dusty. We hear how she felt disassociated with that image but of course many artists create an image that isn't really them. British pop artists of the 1960s tried to sound American but her singing seemed to naturally sound that way. She recorded a big hit 'Son Of A Preacher Man' in Memphis after Aretha Franklin had turned it down. When she tried to make her career in the US at the end of the 1960s it failed because a ready-made category couldn't be found for her varied style of music. She ranged from the Motown across-the-beat singing to a soft breathy lounge style that has been likened to Peggy Lee. She became broke after her career failed and she was stalked by the media to openly declare her sexuality. The closing part of the documentary is very sad as we hear about her illness and the ironic story of the day of her death.

It was one of her most devoted colleagues who summed her up as a "Glorious Fake". And many more of these commentators - overwhelmingly supportive - confirm the duality of Dusty Springfield, one of them referencing someone else's hit-song from her heyday 'Behind a Painted Smile'. As a fifteen-year old at the time of Dusty's debut, I had picked up on this myself, responding badly to too much beehive and eyelashes. "What's underneath?" I wondered - a question that still remains largely unanswered by the world's music-lovers.

But there was no doubting the impact of her songs on the burgeoning sixties. First, those wonderful soft harmonies drifting across her 'Island of Dreams'. Then 'You don't have to say you love me', more intrusive, dominating every corner of the scene, impossible to mistake for anyone else.

At the beginning, of course, she was in her family group, The Springfields, and every girl singer knows how her smile carries more impact when she's got a man on either side (as Judith Durham, singing Tom Springfield's songs, would have known well). But in real life, there were no men at her side, however hard her two rather defensive women managers try to insist that she was bisexual. Lezzie is what she was, and uncomfortably so, especially after America lured her into drug addiction, causing so much chemical imbalance that part of her lacquered hair suddenly snapped off like a chunk of plaster. And there were a lot worse casualties and damage too, having to be carefully concealed for the sake of her career.

Perhaps it was this wretched concealment that added poignancy to her songs about tragic loss, contributing some shade to the over-bright image, in case we thought her life was just one long strawberry ice-cream.