Dusty Springfield: A Life in Music

Dust jacket notes: "When shy, frumpy, unhappy schoolgirl Mary O'Brien decided that she must 'be miserable or become someone else' and reinvented herself as glamorous Dusty Springfield, she also liberated a remarkable singing talent. this new biography follows the development of that talent from early music-making at home to a brilliantly successful professional career. The sixties were Dusty's decade, a time when - musically, at least - she could do no wrong. But there was a price to be paid. Dusty's relentless quest for perfection and her refusal to compromise, together with the daily pressure of having to live out the role she had created for herself, took their toll. When her career lost its way in the seventies, she descended into drug and alcohol abuse, and she was dogged by speculation about her sexuality. But throughout it all her musical reputation and the loyalty of her admirers remained undiminished; and in the 1980s, after a long, hard struggle to re-establish herself, she enjoyed a period of success - only to be deprived of it by breast cancer. Dusty Springfield looks beyond the tired cliches and journalistic shorthand to offer a detailed and rounded portrait of a deeply complex woman, and provides the first major assessment of the musical career of a singer whose reputation is higher now than it ever has been."