<IT BEGINS AGAIN?>

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD
WOMAN of REPUTE

CHAPTER NINE

IT BEGINS AGAIN?

At the end of the seventies, Dusty launched a comeback with the albums It Begins Again (1978) and Living Without Your Love (1979). Of her two late '70s West Coast albums, It Begins Again is the most thematically consistent as in a fragile and much softer voice, Dusty explores, analyses and ultimately rejects various dimensions of her experience of California - one night stands ("Love Me By Name"), image-making ("Hollywood Movie Girls"), superficiality and lack of purpose ("Sandra").

In his 2001 book The Complete Dusty Springfield, Paul Howes notes that with It Begins Again, "Dusty set out to make an album which showed the feminist point of view." Howes also observes that no track on the album does this more than the Gaille Heidemann-penned "Hollywood Movie Girls". "The song explores the frustrations of chasing a dream and never quite letting go, despite repeated rejections," writes Howes. "One feels that Dusty is very much making a personal statement . . . [the song] reveals a new Dusty, one who was acting a song rather than just singing it. The recording has a hazy ambience, like a photo shot through gauze, and Dusty's high voice and the even higher ethereal strings capture a feeling of both hope and despair."

"IT BEGINS AGAIN is the first LP I have liked on first hearing -I hope that's not the kiss of death! My singing has changed - I don't wince as much or yell and I don't try to overcome my vocal limitations. I knew what they were before but I didn't pay any attention. I was always singing songs I wasn't equipped to do and the result was that two hours later my voice had gone."

"I'd say I was into them [one night stands] mentally rather than physically. It was an attitude of whether anyone would accept the part of me that's Mary O'Brien rather than the person I'd created, Dusty Springfield. But if you set out to create a Dusty Springfield then you ask for problems."

Musically, both It Begins Again and Living Without Your Love reflected the soft-rock sounds of California where they were produced, yet neither were of great commercial success. Graham Locke writing for New Musical Express in 1979, lamented Dusty's predicament: "Why didn't she stay with soul? Why does she seem so lost? Maybe it's because when you're a forty-year old female pop singer, there's really nowhere to go. She's working in the dark - no other woman singer has followed a similar career, there's no example to follow."

In February 1978, Dusty returned to Britain to promote It Begins Again. Her arrival at Heathrow Airport was marked by a skirmish when personnel from her record company unsuccessfully tried to rush her past waiting reporters and photographers. A few days later a press conference was held at the Savoy Hotel where, displaying both wit and wisdom, Dusty answered questions and addressed topics ranging from her recording "comeback" to her views on marriage. At around the same time she gave an in-depth interview to Gay Times magazine wherein she blasted the homophobic Hollywood establishment and answered a number of very personal and pointed questions with both honesty and insight.

"People can draw their own conclusions and I don't give a damn. I'm not going to commit myself to being homosexual or heterosexual because people are going to write what they want about me - they always have . . . "

"Today I live alone. All my life I've surrounded myself with other people for the wrong reasons. Now, for the first time, I am discovering that it is possible to be a whole human being, however imperfect, even if you are not partnered by another person. So, though I want a permanent relationship today, I would never try to make any relationship into something that isn't there and never could be . . . I realise now that you can't make a person into the ideal you want them to be, to conform to your needs."

". . . People are always trying to link me with someone. One of the reasons that people always wonder if I'm gay or not is because I'm not married. That's my business. I was never encouraged to get married even though I came from a Catholic background. My mother got married late in life and had a damn good time beforehand. I was never made to feel that I hadn't achieved something because I hadn't got married or that I'd missed something. Marriage is a state of mind, not a legal thing. . . my idea of marriage is feeling at one with somebody who you're with, it doesn't matter who. It's really a state of mind."

"I have an enormously strong gay following and I'm grateful for it. I love gay people. I'm comfortable with them. I respect gay people. That doesn't make me one and that doesn't not make me one. I'm me. I have a gay following. I'm grateful for it. I want to keep it."

"There is a strong anti-gay feeling in Hollywood which is extraordinary in a business and an industry which is 75% gay. The closet quality of Hollywood and Los Angeles show business is overwhelming. You can sit at a dinner party where you know that at least 12 of the 14 people there are gay and listen to incredible anti-gay crap. And they play that game because a few industry heads are very anti-gay and it's very tough for most gay people and it's very difficult to speak out. There are a few brave people and there's a growing number of enraged people, both straight and gay, who are not going to put up with it anymore, and it's a very wonderful thing to watch emerging . . ."

" . . . It's an outrage what has been going on in America with the Anita Bryant anti-gay thing and now there's a tremendous solidarity to fight it . . . It has nothing to do with being straight or gay - it's just a solid feeling of rage! There are some very big, important people doing things . . . people like Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda . . . Julie Harris . . . an incredible number."

"What's the worst thing [that could happen to me]? To lose myself along the way just as I nearly lost myself before trying to hang on to that part of me that is Mary O'Brien as opposed to that part of me that is Dusty Springfield. And they are different. I still don't know who Mary O'Brien is but I know it's a decent human being. To lose sight of that would be the worst thing."

Later that year Dusty embarked on her first British concert tour in six years - highlights being her dazzling performance at London's Drury Lane Theatre Royal and at the Royal Albert Hall. Though regional dates for the tour had to be cancelled due to poor ticket sales, Dusty's London appearances and morever, the tumultuous reception she received from her fans, were encouraging moments during a period marked by the disappointing commercial success of her two Californian albums and by the personal loss of her father who died of heart failure in 1979--just three years after her mother's death from lung cancer.

Reflecting on her mother's passing, Dusty would later relate the following: "She looked like one of those horror masks, all sunken. Her eyes were glassy from the drugs, but suddenly she reached up this claw and tweaked my nose. I don't remember her ever doing that to me before. And then, suddenly she passed out again. The next day I had to return to the States but I called and said 'How is Mrs O'Brien?' And they said, 'Oh, she passed away.' It was such a shock because it was so matter-of-fact. So the tweak was important. And it was horrific too. I did come unglued then. I handled it very badly. Partly guilt. I wasn't there . . ."

CHAPTER TEN

WHITE HEAT