Penny Valentine

I have always loved Dusty's singing. I have most of her albums. So writing something about this book is very likely to be tinged with a predisposition toward liking it. Having said that, I liked it. It's a great pity that Dusty lived in a time when friends didn't take their friends to "behaviour therapists" - or something like that - who might have found that Dusty's seratonins were everywhere but where a benevolent God would have put them and who might perhaps have convinced a doctor to prescribe something like Prozac. The poor woman was tormented. Of course, such medication would be unlikely to have staved off the cancer. Neither may it have helped Dusty to be the vocal phenomenon that she was. Perhaps one needs to be tormented to be great. Vincent Van Gogh and Jack Kerouac come to mind. Whatever the real truth of the matter is, Dusty Springfield was an amazing vocalist and a quite beautiful woman.… (mere)