Monitor: All the News of the World: Dusty Springfield

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD

Tributes to the pop singer Dusty Springfield, below, who died on Tuesday from breast cancer

The Daily

Telegraph

THERE ARE few people who would deny that Dusty Springfield was the finest female pop singer that Britain has ever produced. In fact, the only person who would have questioned that fact was Dusty Springfield herself. The apparent self-assurance which she brought to her performances in the Sixties on stage - and on the foremost pop music programme of the day, Ready, Steady, Go! - was a total facade. All her life she had felt the need to be someone else. Dusty Springfield was always an act. But it was a good one. (Mick Brown)

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Evening

Standard

UNLIKE HER peers and rivals in Britain - singers like Cilla Black, Lulu and Sandie Shaw - Dusty, influenced by the sounds of Phil Spector and Motown when she toured America, chose material that included ballads, soul, gospel, and rhythm and blues - material generally reserved for black singers at the time. In Britain she swiftly attracted a following for her regular appearances on the TV pop show Ready, Steady, Go! generating much adolescent interest in her miniskirts and knee-high boots. Dusty Springfield may have died just two weeks before she was due to go to New York to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, but she had long been a member of the pantheon of pop legends. (Tim Cooper)

The Mirror

IN THE showbiz hall of fame, Dusty Springfield will hold a special place. She was a remarkable singer with a voice that many imitated but none surpassed. The promised years of pleasure after her career was revived have been tragically snatched away. But her voice will live on.

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Daily Mail

was a collision of contradictions. Musically gifted, she was eternally tortured by self-doubt. She died at her home 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)