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Few would question Dusty Springfield’s position as the best British female singer of the Sixties; many would claim that she is the best bar none. Until relatively recently she was seen as one of a crop of stars of the era famous enough to be known by their first names — Cilla, Sandie, Lulu and Dusty. All of them scored a string of hits between 1964 and the turn of the Seventies; all of them had their own TV series. Yet whenever a new starlet has appeared this decade, be it Amy Winehouse, Duffy or Adele, Dusty is always the one cited as a reference point.

Dusty Springfield was originally Mary O’Brien, a chubby, redheaded Catholic girl from West Hampstead. She died just over ten years ago, and would have turned 70 on April 16. Her reputation has only grown since her passing; her influence has never been more apparent. A new compilation, Just Dusty, reminds us that at the heart of her appeal is that voice. There is an intimacy and honesty to it that is sometimes almost too much to bear. Even on an overfamiliar song such as Burt Bacharach’s This Girl’s in Love With You it’s as if she is singing to you alone, pouring it all out, apologetic, humble, deeply sad. When Dusty sings “Say you’re in love with this girl, if not I’ll just die”, it makes you catch your breath — she might just be serious.

The voice came from a mishmash of influences: you can occasionally detect Peggy Lee’s subtlety and apparent effortlessness; the sleepy ease of Astrud Gilberto; the raw strength of Aretha Franklin. The influences are from all eras, all genres. This may explain the timelessness of Dusty’s voice, why it resonates, and how an overt pastiche such as the title track of Duffy’s Rockferry album can result in a million-selling album more than 30 years after her golden era ended.

Times Archive, 1972: Dusty Springfield live at Talk of the Town

The audience roared its approval, this was the stuff of show business

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• Dusty Springfield

What isn’t as easily emulated is her control. Take You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, her only No 1. There are battalions of brass, a choir to embarrass the Red Army, as much bombast as a three-minute pop song could ever take. Yet Dusty’s performance is entirely vulnerable. She’s stumbling to an understanding of where lost love has left her, and it’s an abject, lonely place: “You don’t have to stay for ever, I will understand.” A couple of years later, on Breakfast in Bed, she sang the same words, was equally convincing, but now played the cooing adulteress, giving the song an audible wink. “Breakfast in bed and a kiss or three, you don’t have to say you love me” — it’s total seduction.

Breakfast in Bed was on the Dusty in Memphis album. Released at the end of 1968, it had a breeziness and soft, soulful delivery that hadn’t been apparent on her earlier, British recordings. “It’s become a rather overrated classic,” she later said, and certainly its low sales figures at the time would have coloured her judgment.

Still, she was being too modest. This album is the touchstone of blue-eyed soul. It included perhaps her best-known song, Son of a Preacher Man, but for Dusty the process of recording in the same studio as her idols — Franklin, Percy Sledge — left her stricken with nerves. She always hated her vocal on Preacher Man and how it “seemed to move people on a sexual level where it didn’t move me at all”.

Her honesty, individuality and openness are traits taken for granted in modern singers. Echoes of her humour and modesty can be found in Adele, who recently responded to the idea of a celebrity perfume by laughing, “I suppose I could bottle my p***”. To her fans in the Sixties Dusty was sexy, tough, in control and unlike the doe-eyed Marianne Faithfull or gawky Cilla Black, she was never a puppet, never played the victim and wasn’t obviously pretty. Yet her sexuality gave her more to fear from the media than most.

Dusty’s public traumas — plate-smashing and food fights backstage, thumping the paparazzi — always made her newsworthy. While Winehouse’s breakdowns and Lily Allen’s cheek are now deemed acceptable pop-star behaviour, this wasn't the case in the Sixties, when girl singers were meant to be sweet, obedient, at all times professional. Dusty wasn’t having that. On a trip to South Africa in 1964, she had it written into her contract that she would play only to unsegregated crowds.

The result was that she arrived to “South African government [agents] standing under the wings of the plane, it was a severe embarrassment to them . . . they drummed us out of the country. I had this really naive ideal that being there would make some kind of difference,” she later told the fan-club secretary Paul Howes. “That loop-hole got closed so I didn’t do an ounce of good.”

This behaviour just wasn’t the done thing in the conservative showbiz world of the early Sixties — “I just got slagged left right and centre by Max Bygraves and people like that who were, I suppose, worried about me closing down some form of work for them,” she said.

It would be nice to think that Adele and Duffy will take on board Dusty’s artistic bravery when recording their difficult second albums. From Dusty With Love, the sequel to Dusty in Memphis, was recorded at the Sigma Sound studio in Philadelphia. This was a particularly forward-looking move — in 1969 Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff were relative newcomers with just the odd Intruders or Jerry Butler hit to their credit: three years later they were the biggest production team in soul, with hits such as Love Train, If You Don’t Know Me By Now and Me and Mrs Jones. With the classically oriented Thom Bell mastering the strings and the Sweethearts of Sigma on backing vocals, the whole of From Dusty With Love was fresh and airy, and remains her undiscovered jewel. A Brand New Me, the first single taken from it, got into the American Top 30, but it would be her last appearance there for almost two decades.

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