<Trouble-Maker>

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD
WOMAN of REPUTE

CHAPTER FOUR

TROUBLE-MAKER

In 1964 Dusty found herself at the centre of a political storm when she refused to play to segregated audiences in South Africa. Strictly speaking, Dusty wasn't deported, as her return fare wasn't paid for. Nevertheless, she was in her own words, "drummed out of the country." "I wasn't making any major statement," she recalls. "I just thought it was morally the right thing to do."

". . . All through the sixties I was incredibly naive about all sorts of things, politics being one of them. Subsequently my biggest interest is geo-politics but THEN I was floundering through things and I had 'ideals'. So, in my contract I put in, in small print, that I wouldn't play to segregated audiences and it all went very quiet and I thought 'Wow! I've achieved it'. When the band and I got off the plane, the South African government people were standing under the wings of the plane thrusting these bits of paper at us to sign to say that we would do exactly as they said we would do and . . . that we had no right to come into the country and make trouble--blah, blah, blah - and that the contract as it stood was null and void. So naturally, none of us signed . . . The promoter had found a loophole that I didn't know about. It's highly technical in that mixed audiences could be allowed in cinemas if it was a live show for some reason. So, the promoter who was a good guy had sorted these venues out . . . With which . . . I don't know, I can't prove it. I imagine the South African government went, 'Whoops! We've missed this one.' It was a severe embarrassment to them at the time and basically there's no way that blacks were going to come to my shows anyway - they didn't know who I was. The odd mixed race person would have come but what happened was, when we opened in Johannesburg there were security people going round the audience counting the number of coloureds as they were called . . . Mixed race. I think there were probably about five or six, maybe ten. I don't know. I wasn't counting. They didn't say much. But when we got to Cape Town, they just put us under what I would call hotel arrest. The shows were off and as they politely put it, something like . . . '[we] withdraw the right for you to stay here for more than twenty-four hours'."

" . . . The promoter was desperately trying to sort this out and it went [on for] three or four days . . . I never want to see another tomato sandwich - that's what they kept sending up to the room. Tomato sandwiches . . . and in the end they sort of drummed us out of the country, but they didn't deport us because if they deport you they have to pay your fares. After that two things happened. The promoter gave up and moved his family to Israel . . . and that loophole got closed. So I didn't do an ounce of good. But I didn't really go there to do good. I went there to sing and I had, somewhere, this really naive ideal that perhaps being there would make some kind of a difference. Well, it didn't. For a while it made it worse and I think those were the accusations I got for making trouble and my records were taken off South African radio for years and out of the shops for many years."

Back in Britain, Dusty was criticized by some in the music business for her stand against apartheid. Max Bygraves and Derek Nimmo, salwarts of the British variety show tradition, were among those who accused her of making it harder for artists to work in South Africa.

In June 1990, Dusty recalled the incident in the British newspaper The Guardian: "What a prat," she snapped of Nimmo. "Is he still alive? Well, he's still a prat. I would say it to his face. That was such a prat-like thing to say."

Yet the South African debacle failed to affect Dusty's international popularity. In 1964 she was voted Best Female Vocalist in the prestigious New Musical Express awards - a feat she would repeat in 1965, 1966, 1967 and 1969.

In the mid-late sixties, Dusty hosted her own television series in Britain--shows which saw her introduce, chat with and at times duet with, a range of musical (and non-musical) guests who collectively as she recalls, comprised "a pretty eclectic mix." Among them, Tina Turner, Jimi Hendrix, Patti Labelle and Scott Walker.

"I had all the musical say. The guests were . . . It was what agent could get his client on whatever show was important to be on at that time. So, I mean, that's obviously why Woody Allen was on it because it was very early days for him and probably somebody said, 'There's this show . . .' You know how they get lists of shows that you ought to be on. And it was live. So, um . . . well, some of the guests were live. But I don't know . . . I had very little to do with the guests basically. I mean, I was probably just trying to remember the words for the next song . . . They're all a blur because there was so much going on . . . I just remember the noise. I remember testing myself . . . just enjoying the fact that the BBC sound engineers were going totally spare. They didn't know what to do and I said, 'What the hell'. They'd go, 'Oh, the needle's going in the red. You can't do that' and I just said, 'Turn it up, turn it up', I was just testing myself to see where my threshold of pain was for sound. It was wonderful . . . I wish I knew what show that was because there were four years of them. They get a bit jumbled up."

"There's some stuff on the old BBC shows, a track called POOR WAYFARING STRANGER which is one that I think is very touching, and on another there's MY LAGAN LOVE. It's on one of the shows . . . I actually sat on the floor and cried when I saw it a few months back. The voice was so pure and there was such courage in doing it out of the blue and then singing NOWHERE TO RUN immediately afterwards which I kind of like the idea of doing . . . I must admit I probably was the only singer who could do that at that time in this country, suddenly switch gears like that."

In 1966 Dusty reached the Number One position on the British charts with the melodramatic ballad "You Don't Have To Say You Love Me".

"YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME I heard at the San Remo song festival when it was sung, and written, by a guy called Peno de Nagio, and I went crazy for the song. I brought back a record of it and sat on it for a year and then it seemed time to find an English lyric for it, desperately hoping someone else didn't do it. So, actually, I asked Vicki [Wickham] if she could put some words to it and she and Simon Napier-Bell, I think they wrote it in the back of a taxi or something. I just knew it was time for a big Italian-type ballad and it was such a strong, strong tune. It really was. I can make a much better record of it now . . . the sound would be much better . . . but it worked."

"[Securing YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME] was pure chance. I was at the San Remo song festival and it was being sung by Pino Donnagio and I was in the audience the night he was singing it and I just knew when the audience stood up in the middle of the instrumental and applauded that this was obviously the right song to do. But it took me a year to do. I was very surprised that no one else did it, though there were no English lyrics. I just took the Italian version 'cause that's the way I first heard it and then said to somebody to write some lyrics and they did and the next day they gave me the lyrics and within a week we had recorded it."

"I thought the arrangement on [YOU DON'T HAVE TO SAY YOU LOVE ME] was so beautiful--the string arrangement. It's a gorgeous song. Those things I was really proud of because there wasn't anyone doing that kind of thing. I think they were kinda special records. They were nervy records because perhaps there was no reason that they should have been hits except that I was really visible at that time and I had a great deal of say in what I did and people could accept almost anything from me at that time."

Dusty -"There Were Threats", Record Mirror, December 26, 1964.

Foreign Office Blocked Apartheid Protest Over Singer's Expulsion, The Times, January 1, 1996.

CHAPTER FIVE

AMERICA