As it turned out, it was the final honour of so many, but it wasn't a sad occasion. Friends of singer Dusty Springfield, who died aged 59 late on Tuesday, told last night how she smiled and laughed as she secretly received an OBE early while in the final stages of her battle with breast cancer.

She was given the honour in a private gathering at her bedside in the Royal Marsden Hospital in West London four weeks ago, and was "thrilled".

"It seems strange that someone who was so ill was in such good spirits, but she really was," said her friend and manager Vicki Wickham. "It was like a celebration." Buckingham Palace gave permission for the award to be collected earlier than yesterday's scheduled investiture and a spokesman said last night: "The Queen was saddened to hear of her death so soon after she was awarded an OBE." Ms Wickham said: "The legacy of her music is a magnificent collection and will live on. She was very proud of it."

Stars including Cher, Elton John and the Pet Shop Boys paid tribute to Dusty Springfield as one of the finest female singers of her generation. Her friend Cilla Black said: "She was an incredible artist. I'm very sad and deeply shocked." The Pet Shop Boys said they were proud to have worked with Britain's "greatest female singer". Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of the group, said in a statement: "Dusty was a tender, exhilarating and soulful singer, incredibly intelligent at phrasing a song, painstakingly building it up to a thrilling climax. She was also a very warm and funny person."

Tonight, BBC2 will broadcast at 7:30 pm a special half-hour tribute, Dusty at the BBC, featuring archive footage of her performances that won so many fans over four decades.

Dusty Springfield was a collision of contradictions. Musically gifted, loved and admired by millions, she was eternally tortured by self-doubt and uncertainty. Born with a voice that could melt the soul, she never really enjoyed singing and put record producers through misery in her attempts at perfection.

An attractive, strong-minded, intelligent, funny woman, she saw herself locked in the body of an "awful, fat, ugly, middleclass kid". And, though she was always the irreverent, high-spirited English convent girl who was born in North London and grew up in Ealing, the music she loved most was always that of black America.

The there was the matter of sex. All through her great days in the Sixties, when hit followed hit, she was dogged by rumours that she was a lesbian. It bothered her massively, so much so that in 1970, on the only occasion that she and I met, she purposely pushed me into giving her the chance to "come out".

Normally the subject just wouldn't have come up. But Dusty wanted to talk about it in public. She was very brave, possibly foolhardy. I don't know. As I took her home she wondered to me if her admission, that she was "perfectly as capable as being swayed by a girl as by a boy," would affect her career. Who can tell?

For 15 years she didn't have another hit. Then. after years in the wilderness, she came back. Finally, the music industry treasured her. This year she was awarded an OBE in the New Year's Honours List, and voted a member of America's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But yesterday, with the sad irony that mirrored her life, on the day she should have been receiving an OBE at Buckingham Palace from the Queen - it had instead been sent by the Palace to her hospital bed - her fans and the popular music establishment were mourning her death.

Cliff Richard put it very simply: "If you were to pick out one female voice that Britain has produced it would just have to be that of Dusty Springfield. She had the voice of voices, the perfect pop rock voice." Tim Rice's description was even more succinct: "She was just a wonderful singer, and I've never heard anyone say she wasn't, or that they didn't like her, because you couldn't."

Dusty probably never fully realized it, but just about everyone over a certain age loved her, not only for her beautiful voice, but for her honest courage. She was her own woman who said and did what she thought, and though undoubtedly she suffered as a result, she was never less than true to herself.

But then, she probably always was true to herself, right from the time when she was a redheaded, short-sighted dumpling of a suburban convent schoolgirl in National Health glasses in the Fifties, when her name was Mary Isobel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien. Known as Dusty because she was a bit of a scamp, she said then she wanted to be a blues singer, "whatever that means" - and set out to find out.

Her father was a tax consultant, and perhaps a frustrated classical pianist. Certainly he had aspirations. From an early age she heard a lot of music. Her father liked Beethoven; her elder brother Tom, with whom she was to form The Springfields when she was 20, preferred Aaron Copeland and jazz.

She wanted to be Peggy Lee, and it was her crush on the glamorous, American torch singer that brought about a change in her appearance. On the other hand, it might simply have been the need for a mask to cover her shyness, because virtually overnight, her looks changed.

She reinvented herself. One moment she was in a shop assistant's gown, the next, with a black sheath and chignon, her hair bleached, pale lipstick and eyeliner brushed like tar around her eyes, she was answering an advertisement to sing with an all-girl trio, the Lana Sisters.

She laughed about it later: "We played American air bases wearing silver lame little pants and pale blue tulle skirts with draw strings which we'd pull and whip back our skirts, like flashers, half way through the act to reveal these lame numbers underneath." Two years later she was famous, with her brother Tom, The Springfields, and songs like "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" and "Say I Won't Be There".

It was the beginning of the Sixties and they were the most popular group in Britain. But they knew it couldn't last. They could see The Beatles coming, and Dusty went solo.

Perhaps she was always solo at heart, certainly she was always a star. And stars are different. Immediately she was a huge success, her first solo record, "I Only want To Be With You," a worldwide hit. But she had high standards.

She'd been to America with The Springfields, listened to Phil Spector's "wall of sound" production techniques, fallen in love with the Motown records and heard what Burt Bacharach and Hal David were writing for Dionne Warwick. She knew what she wanted.

Sadly, no matter how they tried, her willing producer and arrangers at the Philips recording studios in London's Marble Arch couldn't satisfy her on their modest equipment. The acoustics of the studio made the recording sound bland. "It was like singing in a padded cell," Dusty would complain. I felt as though I was in a padded cell." Most performers would simply have accepted the situation. Dusty argued and sulked. She was a lifelong perfectionist.

Although the hits kept coming, "I Just Don't Know What To Do With Myself," "Stay Awhile," "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me" (Cliff Richard's favourite) and "Some Of Your Lovin'" (Tim Rice's), she was never satisfied. They could always have been better, she felt. She could have been better.

"I'd hang over the control board," she said, "and turn the knobs up so that the drums sounded as though the Household Cavalry had just gone past and any mistakes were buried." The danger, in her producers' eyes, was that it would also drown her voice. Perhaps that was what she subconsciously wanted.

She was consumed with the thought that her voice wasn't good enough, that she couldn't sing like Aretha Franklin. At session after session, she drove the engineers mad during recording sessions, taking a hand microphone into the ladies lavatories at the studios in search of the right echo on one occasion, recording her hit "I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten" in the corridor as the cleaners came into work on another occasion.

For four more years in the Sixties she remained the most popular girl singer in Britain, with her high spirited escapades (no pop awards ceremony seemed complete without her chucking a jelly at someone), her own TV shows and more hits, "Little By Little," "If You Go Away," "Goin' Back" and "Son-Of-A Preacher Man" (reprised so successfully on the soundtrack of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction movie a few years ago that it earned her a first platinum record).

But by the beginning of the Seventies popular taste was changing. Her records were no longer selling so well and she was wondering about her future. She didn't want to end up playing the Northern clubs for the rest of her career.

It was at this moment that we met and she began to talk about her private life. In those days to admit in public to being anything other than 100% heterosexual was considered artistic suicide for a pop star.

But Dusty had obviously had enough of the rumours. She chose her words very carefully: "There's one thing that's always annoyed me, and I'm going to get into something nasty here. But I've got to say it because so many people say it to my face. A lot of people say I'm bent, and I've heard it so many times that I've almost learned to accept it.

"I don't go leaping around to all the gay clubs but I can be very flattered. Girls run after me a lot and it doesn't upset me. It upsets me when people insinuate things that aren't true. I couldn't stand to be thought to be a big butch lady. But I know I'm perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy. More and more people feel that way and I don't see why I shouldn't.

"There was someone on television the other night who admits that he swings either way. I suppose he could afford to say it, but, being a pop star, I shouldn't even admit that I might think that way. But if the occasion arose I don't see why I shouldn't, too."

Today such comments by a rock star wouldn't raise an eyebrow. But then? It was an honest and brave thing to do. I don't know whether she ever had any regrets. As I gave her a lift home she laughed and said: "D'you realise what I've just said could put the final seal on my doom . . ." But I suspect she was actually relieved to have finally confronted the gossip.

What is interesting is that since then there have been no kiss-and-tell stories about Dusty, which must make her virtually unique in pop, her friends and, presumably, lovers, having been absolutely loyal in protecting her privacy. I think that tells us a lot about her.

Most of the Seventies and Eighties weren't kind to her. Always in love with America she avoided the pitfall of ending up on the Northern club circuit only to fall into a worse one by going to live in California. At first there were nightclubs, and no doubt the money in San Francisco or New Orleans was better than it would have been in Bradford or Doncaster, but in a career sense she lost her way. She became, in her words, a "Rent-a-Diva".

Hers was a huge talent, but one which needed cherishing. Not a songwriter herself, she needed the best songs and the best arrangers. She got neither and lost all confidence. She became, perhaps understandably, addicted to alcohol and tranquillisers. It was a difficult, lonely time, of simply not knowing what to do next.

As bright, witty and full of common sense as she was, emotionally she was wafer thin. She said later: "I lost control over my career. I felt totally alien in Los Angeles, I wasn't proud of the sounds coming from my throat, I didn't even think I could tell what the good songs were any more." And then, in 1987, it was all changed again - by a fan who just happened to be a young techno rock musician. He was Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys, and quite simply he wanted his all-time favourite girl singer to record with him.

Dusty was nervous and puzzled: "I couldn't work out what they wanted until we'd finished the session in London," she said. "Then I realized: it was the sound of my voice. It was that simple." The result was "What Have I Done To Deserve This?", a worldwide hit and a completely new beginning.

The following year another Neil Tennant hit followed, "Nothing Has Been Proved," which was used on the titles sequence of the movie Scandal. It was almost back to the beginning for her, singing over the credits of a movie about 1963, the year she went solo.

Then, just as her career was being revived, came the cancer, first in 1994 and again two years later. She approached it with typical aplomb: "I shed a few tears at the hospital when it was confirmed, but then I pulled myself together and took everybody out for what turned into a roaringly funny lunch." Dusty would have been 60 in April. She was rich, having sold the rights to her entire back catalogue of recordings to a financial company for a substantial sum, and she was loved and protected by a very private circle of friends.

Undervalued for so long, she died at her home in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, finally knowing that, whatever she thought of her abilities, her country and profession honoured her, and her peers in popular music cherished her, as did every one of us who ever filtered our own emotional frailties through that beautiful, yearning voice.

As Cliff Richard said: "Dusty Springfield - the voice of voices."

Ray Connolly & Alison Boshoff,
Daily Mail (London),
March 4, 1999