Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 44

Record label: Mercury (UK) Phillips (US)

Produced: John Franz

Recorded: 1964

Released: April 1964

Chart peaks: 6 (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Dusty Springfield (v); Ivor Raymonde (ar); The Breakaways (bv)

Track listing: Mama Said; You Don’t Own Me; Do Re Mi; When The Lovelight Starts Shining Thru His Eyes; My Colouring Book; Mockingbird; Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa; Nothing; Anyone Who Had A Heart; Will You Love Me Tomorrow?; Wishin’ And Hopin’; Don’t You Know

Running time: 56.33

Current CD: Mercury 534520-2 adds: I Only Want To Be With You (remix); He’s Got Something; Every Day I Have To Cry; Can I Get A Witness; All Cried Out; I Wish I’d Never Loved You; Once Upon A Time; Summer Is Over

Further listening: The Dusty Springfield Collection (1998)

Further reading: Dancing With Demons: The Authorised Biography Of Dusty Springfield (Penny Valentine, 2001); www.dustyspringfield.co.uk

Download: iTunes

Very few British pop albums from 1964 were built to last: pop was still a singles form, and long-players seemed like little more than a couple of hits and ten other tracks. Dusty Springfield’s debut was an amazing exception, though it followed the already familiar path of including covers of contemporary hits. Springfield created an album that bore almost no resemblance to the style she’d found success with as one of The Springfields, who’d played their farewell concert only six months before this album’s release. She had already had a solo hit with I Only Want To Be With You – the first record ever to be played on Top Of The Pops – which suggested that the folky sound of The Springfields had been traded in for a zippier pop beat. But A Girl Called Dusty went much further than that. Several of the tunes were covers of black pop hits (or soon-to-be hits) which Springfield refused to mellow out in the normal manner of white cover acts. Her spirited rush at The Supremes’ When The Lovelight Starts Shining Thru His Eyes, for instance, was just as effective as the original. She sings both parts on the treatment of the Inez and Charlie Foxx hit Mockingbird without neutering the result. On You Don’t Own Me (a success for Lesley Gore in the US), she comes close to sounding like a blues mama. In tracks like these, Dusty’s reputation as Britain’s great soul voice was born. But that famous misnomer – bolstered further by the later and probably overrated Dusty In Memphis – conceals her greater talent, as a kind of ice queen of torch singing. The tracks which really stand out here are the Bacharach–David tunes: Twenty-Four Hours From Tulsa, Anyone Who Had A Heart, Wishin’ And Hopin’ and My Colouring Book, which approaches sheer desolation in feeling. Dusty was a great sufferer, and although even these songs would be surpassed by such monumental tearjerkers as I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten and All I See Is You, the record sows the seeds for her mastery of pathos. But that was some way off yet.

In 1964, this 25-year-old convent girl stared out from record racks and seemed an irresistible mix of country girl and pop diva.