Bit of a dust up

Whether there is a mellowing of taste or it is the early onset of dementia I refuse to debate.

As a child, Dusty Springfield was a part of the background – I was too young to be too concerned with the music but it was on the radio, I heard it … and, as with all such experiences, I didn’t even notice the etching into the blank metal sheet of taste. A couple of songs I might be able to identify … with names like Cilla Black and Petula Clarke mazing themselves together under beehive hair, tight black and white dresses, and bare feet.

‘Saturday Night at the Palladium’, ‘Doctor Who’, Mars bars all swim in the background – along with a slowly disintegrating family and the first pangs of alienation from the working class housing estate I was growing on.

So, maybe it was an impulse buy, or maybe it was tightening cords pulling the drowning man down, but when a local book shop displayed the ridiculously cheap Colour Collection and I came across the Dusty Springfield disc, I bought it.

It is singing from a time when singers needed to be able to project – the lung power is there, and the vocal control. The voice is not sweet – it has a gritty quality and an edge which says ‘listen to this’ although in one of the quieter (it is only a comparative term) numbers, Mockingbird, there is a deep resonance which suggests more to it than the thump them out tracks and rough recordings display.

It is a voice you can listen to – and it is a voice you can understand the words with. Iconic pop words – all love and angst, all 60s girl pleading with boy with tears in her eyes although with the emotional distance the professional performer needs in order to hit the notes.

Arrangements are very much of their time – strings swooping and female backing vocals.

The majority of the disc will not appeal to anyone not inside the time-capsule of direct contact, but there are a number of classics.

‘Son Of A Preacher Man’ is pretty steaming and ‘The Windmills Of Your Mind’ shows the softer strength within the voice – but it is Burt Bacharach/Hal David’s Wishin’ And Hopin’ that makes you sit up and listen.

But the early ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ and ‘Little by Little’ resonate with 45-ness: Crackle, distortion and energy in equal proportions; and the trumpet introduction to ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’ must have had many a jilted teenage girl reaching for the handkerchief and noble sacrifice men will willingly exploit.

It’s a disc I’ll play occasionally when I want to remember – and that. I think is what the Colour Collection series and its like is all about – tapping memories to squeeze out the final drops of profit from the back-catalogue.