(born April 16, 1939, London, Eng.—died March 2, 1999, Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire) British vocalist who made her mark as a female hitmaker and icon during the 1960s beat boom that resulted in the British Invasion.
The daughter of a tax consultant, Springfield grew up in prosperous Hampstead in North London. After success in the early 1960s with her brother Tom in the British country-music trio the Springfields, she went solo and made her way into the heart of “Swinging London.” Part cartoon, part unresolvable desire, part bruised despair, she peered through heavy mascara and a stack of peroxided hair while singing with breathy sensuality. Bringing a fragile uncertainty to her cover versions of songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David that had been hits in the United States for Dionne Warwick, Springfield had a string of British hits. The high point of her career, though, was the ballad “You Don't Have to Say You Love Me” (1966), which reached number four on the American charts.
In the late 1960s she began to take herself seriously as a soul diva, signing with Atlantic Records and cutting her Dusty in Memphis (1969) album in the famed
with producers Jerry Wexler and Arif Mardin. It brought her an international hit with “Son of a Preacher Man,” but her career trailed off into a slurry of drug and alcohol abuse. By the mid-1970s she was a session singer in Los Angeles. Repeated comebacks failed until she teamed up with the
Pet Shop Boys in 1987 on “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” and the soundtrack for
Scandal (1988), a film set in the pre-Swinging London of her earliest success. By the 1990s she was a camp icon. Resettling in England, she battled cancer and in 1998 received the Order of the British Empire. She was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.
Peter Silverton
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