‘Haunted’: Dusty Springfield’s most underrated song
Pop stars come and go with the changing of the tides, but few can boast the same generation-defining impact as Dusty Springfield, the definitive voice of Britain’s swinging sixties pop revolution. That is not to say, however, that the peroxide blonde revolutionary always got the praise she so richly deserved.
It didn’t take Springfield very long to exercise her command over the pop charts. Severing herself off from the family affair folk-pop sounds of The Springfields in 1963, her debut solo single ‘I Only Want To Be With You’ became a transatlantic hit the very same year, cementing her distinctive voice as a staple of Britain’s emerging pop scene.
From then on, there was no stopping her. Countless now-iconic hits followed, and Springfield’s pop power grew to rival anybody else in Britain at that time – save, perhaps, for The Beatles.
By the end of the decade, Springfield was a regular fixture of the pop charts, television broadcasts, and sell-out world tours; the world had fallen in love with the sounds of the Hampstead-born vocalist, and the pop landscape would never be the same again. That fact was seemingly cemented by Springfield’s ultimate masterpiece, Dusty in Memphis, in 1969. Tragically, though, the following few years of her career showed just how fickle pop music had become as the world entered the mustard-brown colour palette of the 1970s.
Springfield’s, famously, career took a nose-dive in 1970, when an interview with the Evening Standard shed light on her outspoken bisexuality. “I’m perfectly as capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy,” were the words outrageous enough to send Springfield’s music career into exile for over a decade, putting an end to her run of hit singles and causing record labels to view her inarguably incredibly material as though it was commercial poison.
There is no telling just what Springfield could have achieved had she not been the victim of a homophobic tabloid witch hunt, or if popular society during the 1970s had been more accepting to the existence of bisexuality, but the 1971 track ‘Haunted’ gives us a pretty good indication. A mature, polished, and incredibly soulful track, the Atlantic Records single saw Springfield arguably at her best, developing her pop-centric sound into something timeless, exuding all the style and soul of records like Dusty In Memphis while hinting at profound developments in her output.
Nevertheless, the public didn’t respond to the track upon its release in 1971. In stark contrast to the days when Springfield’s name would ride high on the upper echelon of the pop charts, ‘Haunted’ was almost totally ignored, making it perhaps her most underrated recording of all time while simultaneously signing the death warrant of her next Atlantic LP, Faithful.
‘Haunted’ was set to be one of two singles taken from Faithful, with the other being the equally underappreciated ‘I Believe in You’, but the total commercial failure of both single releases were enough for Atlantic to abandon the Jeff Barry-produced album altogether. Springfield’s contract with the legendary label went unrenewed, Faithful was shelved, and, despite select album releases over the ensuing few years, Springfield largely faded into obscurity.
Most of the tracks recorded for that doomed 1971 album were eventually released in the 1990s, in the form of bonus tracks on an expanded edition of See All Her Faces, but it wasn’t until 2015 that the album saw a release in its own right. Although it is undeniably depressing that what could have been Springfield’s magnum opus was only released years after her death, the quality of singles like ‘Haunted’ certainly hasn’t waned in the decades since they were first recorded; even if they’re still waiting to be heard by the masses.
