In January, she was awarded an OBE; next month she will join Sir Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in New York; April sees her sixtieth birthday, along with her fortieth anniversary in the business.

Overshadowing these events, however, is the bitter fact that Dusty is now fighting what seems to be a losing battle against breast cancer. She was first diagnosed in 1994, shortly after recording her most recent album, A Very Fine Love. Promotion of the record was put off for a year while she underwent extensive chemotherapy, and in mid-1995 she was clear.

"I've had so much junk put in my body, wonderful junk, that it's beaten for now," she said at the time. But the following year, the cancer returned. Since then, she has given up recording, moved to a secluded house on the Thames, and been struggling quietly with her illness. Doctors have now declared the cancer untreatable, but friends say her Irish spirit is still very much intact.

It was that earthy warmth that struck me when I first interviewed her for a biography in 1988. She responded carefully to my questions and gave me her singular personal slant on life, one that combines a flip, Goonish humour with a pragmatic appraisal of the pop world. Then she was in the process of moving back to England, and described LA (her base for more than 15 years) as "part naff, part glamorous". She went on to say that "musically, Americans get frightened if you fling a lot of stuff at them. Playing different styles makes them nervous. Besides, I've been homesick for a long time. I've been waiting for the groundswell of movement in Britain, and now seems the right time to come back."

Dusty left Britain in 1970, frustrated with a business that channelled its pop artists, once they turned 30, into the cabaret bracket. To her, panto seasons and the Talk of the Town were a living death. She was excited by newly-emerging funk and soul, and entranced by US labels such as Motown and Atlantic. "I was struggling to establish something in England that hadn't been done before, to use those musical influences I could hear in my head," she told me. "If I could do the record business all over again, I would have mixed funky R&B with something Scottish, melodic, a real Britishness. In the Sixties, no one could quite get those sounds."

When I first started work on my book more than 11 years ago, Dusty was a cult artist, a former Sixties idol appreciated by a few diehard fans, musicians in the business and the Pet Shop Boys, who coaxed her out of LA obscurity to come and sing on their 1987 hit "What Have I Done To Deserve This?"

Since then, her Nineties albums, plus a feast of Sixties reissues on CD, and her song "Son-Of-A Preacher Man", featured on the soundtrack to Tarantino's movie Pulp Fiction, have introduced her to a new generation, leading to her re-emergence as a pop cultural force.

Distinct from the other British beat girls, Dusty always had a raw soul quality and she offered a sense of living on an edge of emotion. "She was the soul singer," Sixties singer P.P. Arnold told me. "Out of all the girls - Cilla, Lulu, etc. - it was Dusty doin' it for me. She made me feel it."

From the moment Dusty went solo, leaving the Springfields, she fashioned a new style, forging a bridge between soul and the pop mainstream. An astute entertainer, she attracted a family audience as well as a cult following. And as mod culture surfaced in the Sixties with its stringent attention to fashion, Motown and television pop shows such as Ready, Steady, Go!, Dusty, panda-eyed and urbane, became Queen Bee.

Though her ascent seemed effortless, Dusty had been an understudy for a long time. Borm Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien in north London on 16 April, 1939, Dusty was an inquisitive, sensitive child, troubled by her parents' unhappy marriage.

Her mother Kay was a quick-witted Irishwoman who felt hemmed in by the social expectations of being a good Catholic mother, while her father Gerard (better known as OB), a tax consultant, nursed a desire to be a concert pianist. It was as though Dusty had decided early on to escape the cramping influence of English suburbia.

At the age of 12, she was listening to Bessie Smith, reading Hollywood writer Budd Schulberg and annoying her convent-school teachers by announcing her intention to be a blues singer. Once, Dusty sang a gravelly-voiced version of "St. Louis Blues" at the school feast day. "The headmistress and five other teachers walked out in disgust," recalls a fellow classmate. "They thought it too raunchy!"

But although she achieved huge chart success, with 17 hits in Britain throughout the Sixties, and a series of acclaimed albums such as Dusty . . . Definitely and Dusty In Memphis, she never quite got rid of her gawky alter ego, "the librarian" Mary O'Brien. Inside, she says she felt like "an awful, fat, ugly, middle-class kid" with National Health specs, an apparition she chased away with the invention of Dusty Springfield, adopting a look modelled on drag queens. With her glitzy gowns, peroxide-blonde beehive and smudgy, made-up eyes, she became a larger-than-life parody of stereotyped femininity. "My body was wrong, my face was wrong," she once said, a discomfort detected by many who have met her.

Frankie Culling, a singer with Granada TV's house band, the Granadeers, remembers rehearsing with the Springfields one night in the early Sixties: "Dusty came in with lots of Liberty bags, because she loved going shopping. She was wild, bouffant hair and thick, black, eye make-up, and she sang "Lizzie Borden, You Can't Cut Your Mother Up In Massachusetts". She seemed nervous, very jerky, and a bit distant. Having said that, there was definitely an aura about her. Highly tuned. She gave the impression she was never going to stay long."

Dusty has never slotted easily into the anodyne mores of light entertainment. Never a supplicant female, she was slung out of South Africa in 1964 for refusing to play segregated venues and in so doing provoked questions in Parliament and a crisis among Equity members. She went speeding in her sunglasses after dark, spent most of the Seventies in a haze of drugs and alcohol and was dogged by constant rumours about her sexuality.

"Without question, the lesbian issue was the icing on the cake of her 'difficult reputation'", says her friend, American songwriter Allee Willis. "It would have been fabulously scandalous if she'd been having hits, but it came at a time when she was tumbling down. She had a bum rap."

By the mid-Eighties, Dusty had become a figure of fun in the tabloids, ridiculed for her age, weight and sexual choices. After the release of her aptly-named 1990 album Reputation, she lay low for a while. By the time she re-emerged in 1995 with A Very Fine Love, the climate had changed. People were ready for a woman who was older, who embraced alternatives, who had been living a full life.

"Now the music industry is 2,000 times better for female singers," she told me - but that's partly because of her persistence in rewriting the rules.

Lucy O'Brien,
The Observer, February 21, 1999

NOTE: Lucy O'Brien's book "Dusty" will be published by Macmillan in April 1999.