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.