The Burt Bacharach Discussion Forum

I knew Mao Tse-Tung worked at a pub in Ealing for a while, but Dusty too!

Apparently Dusty was brought up in High Wycombe, a market town about twenty-five miles northwest of central London, before she moved with her family to Ealing in west London in the early 1950s when she was aged around eleven or twelve. By all accounts she was a real tomboy who loved to play football with the boys on the backstreets of Ealing and acquired the nickname 'Dusty' because her clothing would be covered in dust after she was repeatedly knocked to the ground. Her elder brother Tom with whom she formed the group The Springfields and who became well-known for writing The Seekers' hits I'll Never Find Another You, The Carnival Is Over and Georgy Girl, died in July this year at the age of 88.

Here are The Springfields in 1962 performing Tom's song Island Of Dreams live on TV. Tom is to the right of the screen.

The third member of The Springfields featured in that video is Mike Hurst who after the trio broke-up became an in house producer at Decca and their offshoot label Deram, for whom he discovered and produced Cat Stevens. In the late 60s he formed The Mike Hurst Orchestra and recorded instrumental versions of some of the hits of the day, including this lush arrangement of The April Fools.

When Dusty Springfield got her own TV series with the BBC in the late 60s the two things that immediately became apparent were her slightly wacky sense of humour and her musical versatility. I've heard her sing in French before but this is the first time I can remember seeing this clip of her singing in Spanish.

Here's something I haven't heard before and it's Dusty Springfield performing Wives And Lovers with Dudley Moore at the piano. This is an audio only excerpt taken from the BBC TV series made by Dudley Moore and his comedy partner Peter Cook in the mid-60s called Not Only...But Also:

Performed decades before the term 'political correctness' came into common usage and when women singers regularly sang 'Wives And Lovers' without batting an eyelid, or more in keeping with the language of the times, their pretty little eyelids.

Although Jimmy Radcliffe had the hit in the UK with 'Long After Tonight Is All Over', which must have been played around a million times on the dance floors of the Northern Soul scene, I actually marginally prefer Dusty Springfield's recording of the song for what I consider is its more exciting arrangement. This version recorded for her BBC TV series sticks pretty closely to that arrangement and her vocals are every bit as soulful as they are on the record. In her introduction to the song Dusty pays a nice tribute to Bacharach & David:

Here's Dusty Springfield performing another Bacharach and David classic which she never got round to recording. This is taken from a late 1964 edition of the BBC radio show Top Gear which was known for featuring specially recorded sessions by established artists. It was presented by British broadcasting legend Brian Matthew whose dulcet tones are heard at the beginning of the clip introducing the performance. The arrangement sticks closely to Lou Johnson's original recording of the song rather than Sandie Shaw's UK chart-topping version and Dusty's interpretation is as effortlessly soulful as you'd expect of her from around that time. This wasn't included on the CD compilation of Dusty's radio sessions for the BBC, so it's a bit of a rarity: