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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gifted and Talented, October 8, 2008
This review is from: Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods (Hardcover)
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What is the meaning of Dusty Springfield's success? This book seeks to explain it. It is wonderful. Her name was Mary O'Brien. Her sixty years of existence are associated with the music of the sixties. She had a role in creating and defining British soul. The book studies the music and the career of Dusty Springfield. She was a cultural icon of the 1960's. There was a late 1980's revival. The author's fifth grade teacher dressed like Dusty Springfield, although she didn't realize it at the time. There was a ready audience for American soul among the British mods. Dusty Springfield died in 1999. She was a model of self-transformation emerging from the folk group, the Springfields. Her look was a form of drag. She was camp, a lie that tells the truth. Dusty's favorite performer was Tina Turner. She was the actual producer of her own records. She was a fan of Spector's 'wall of sound'. Black American music invented the back beat. Soul in Britain was a new genre. Madeline Bell, a singer for Alex Bradford's BLACK NATIVITY, and Dusty influenced each other. (DUSTY IN MEMPHIS was a case of fissure. The album was produced in a manner contrary to Dusty's usual practice.) Through soul and melodrama, the pop aria was developed, a Dusty Springfield speciality. Dusty had a soul voice and a melodramatic body. Her gestures are compared to melodramatic poses in the book by means of photographs detailing the similarities. Physical gestures doubled her voice's impact. In the early 1970's Dusty moved to California. There she had less contact with British and Italian composers. U.S. managers and producers did not view Dusty's virtuosity in multiple genres as a positive attribute. British fans grasped the singer's emotional range. One appendix lists record releases and events. Another has a list of significant people. Finally, notes, index, and bibliography complete this excellent book.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Portrait of an extremely talented artist and highly influential figure in the history of rock and roll., September 27, 2008
This review is from: Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
"Dusty was the leader of a gang we wanted to be part of." This quotation from Dusty Springfield's long-time friend and backup singer Simon Bell from page 102 of "Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods" seems to sum up quite nicely how British teenagers viewed their feisty heroine during the peak of her popularity in the mid 1960's. While I was certainly aware that Dusty Springfield was an extremely important figure on the pop music scene on both sides of the pond in those halcyon days I really had no idea just how influential she really was in Britain during this period. Author Annie J. Randall does a spendid job of transporting her readers back to this highly fertile period in the history of rock and roll. In addition to being an exceptionally entertaining read I was astounded by how much new information I discovered in this book. What a great find! Now I must confess that over the past few days my reading of "Dusty!" has evolved into a multi-media study of this beloved artist. Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this book is Annie J. Randall's discussion of Dusty Springfields's complex musical roots which Randall essentially boils down to a synthesis of American soul and European melodrama. According to Randall, it was Dusty who was primarily responsible for the genre that would come to be known as the 1960's Pop Aria as best exemplified by her 1966 worldwide hit "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me". Equally engaging is the author's inclusion of a series of side-by-side photos comparing Dusty's live performances with an 1882 acting treatise. The similarities are remarkable! Now at a certain point in Chapter 3 the author suggests that if possible her readers listen to a number of Dusty's songs as she points out certain charactoristics of each tune. That is when I pulled out my highly prized copy of the 1994 CD release "Goin' Back: The Very Best of Dusty Springfield." Doing this certainly made the points being made much easier to understand. Earlier in this review I made mention of the fact that my reading of "Dusty!" would ultimately evolve into a three day multi-media study. Although I have been studying the history of popular music for more years than I care to remember I had never really heard too much about Dusty Springfield's pivotal role in introducing England to the Motown Sound. That story is quite compelling and you will find it covered in significant detail in the book. The "Ready, Steady, Go! special known simply as the "Sound of Motown" was aired in Britain on April 28, 1965. Hosted by Dusty Springfield this incredible show featured Stevie Wonder, The Temptations, The Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Martha Reeves and The Vandellas and Motown's legendary house band Earl Van Dyke and the Funk Brothers. I had never even heard of this show but Annie J. Randall boldy suggests that in England this program was roughly the equivalent of the Beatles first appearance on the Ed Sullivan show. This statement really piqued my curiosity and I spent a solid hour watching the original broadcast on YouTube. What a historic hour of television! Much of the rest of "Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods" is devoted to Dusty's rather complicated personal life. Annie Randall spends a considerable amount of time discussing her close personal and professional relationship with the American singer Madeline Bell as well as the aforementioned Simon Bell (no relation to Madeline) and her long time companion singer/painter Norma Tanega. After recording her highly acclaimed but commercially disappointing album "Dusty In Memphis" in 1968 Dusty's career seemed to hit the skids. She moved to California in the 1970s and would record sporadically but no one seemed to care. Dusty Springfield finally returned to the pop charts in her 1987 collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" But her legendary voice was just a shell of itself, ravaged by time and alcohol and cigarettes. We lost Dusty Springfield to breast cancer in 1999. She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame later that same year. I was really quite pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed reading "Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods". This is an extremely well written book that will leave you wanting to know even more about this most fascinating individual. Highly recommended!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Real Dusty, September 30, 2008
This review is from: Dusty!: Queen of the Postmods (Hardcover)
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Finally, an un-sensationalist look into the life and music of Dusty Springfield. Which was the real Dusty? The `White Queen of Soul'; the Britpop diva; the over-the-top camp performer with the beehive hairdo, overdone mascara and melodramatic hand gestures; the studio perfectionist who didn't like to work alongside musicians while recording and who took outrageous numbers of tries before being satisfied with a recording of her vocals on a track; the lesbian who never outright denied her sexual persuasion but who was cautious about admitting it? All of these sides of Dusty are examined in Randall's thoughtful book. Also looked at are aspects of the singer's life some may not have heard about before, such as the time she took a defiant stance against the government of South Africa when they wanted her to sign a statement saying she would not perform to mixed race audiences while touring in their country. And we get a glimpse of the mentally unbalanced side of Dusty - she was bipolar and possibly suffered from a kind of multiple personality disorder, `Dusty' maybe being a character that exploded out of the more staid psyche of Mary O'Brien, a middle class English lass and one-time convent girl. Randall is a professor of Musicology at an American university, and while most of her book is something that can be read and appreciated by lay people, she slips into dull academic speak in the section where she deconstructs the `establishing shots' in the openings of some of Dusty's `pop arias.' It's hard to imagine who will gain any insight or appreciation of Dusty's music by knowing how many seconds into a certain song we are given a clue about its ultimate emotional intent. However, that same chapter contains the most entertaining part of the book, where Randall makes a connection between the varied and always dramatic hand gestures Dusty used while singing with the similar motions employed by 19th century opera singers and actors. The photo figures which compare some of Dusty's moves with those of actress Sarah Berhnardt's are both hilarious and convincing. It would be great to read a book on Dusty's music by someone with less of a scholarly leaning. But as a serious exploration of the complicated character of one of the great pop and soul singers to have ever held a mic, this is quite effective.
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