Dusty Sklar

Dusty Springfield was the finest female vocalist of her era, a performer of remarkable emotional resonance whose body of work spans the decades and their attendant musical transformations with a consistency and purity unmatched by any of her contemporaries. This wonderful collection compiles her complete surviving BBC sessions onto one CD for the very first time.

Ev'rything's Coming Up Dusty is the second studio album by singer Dusty Springfield, released on Philips Records in the UK in 1965. Springfield's 1964 debut album, A Girl Called Dusty, sold well enough to make her Philips Records' top-selling female artist. For this, her second album, Philips presented it in a gatefold sleeve and included extensive liner notes. While including a number of fairly standard "pop" songs, Ev'rything's Coming Up Dusty also saw Springfield venturing more into show tunes like "Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me)?" as well as the soul music for which Springfield became so well known for singing. "Doodlin'" and "That's How Heartaches Are Made" were minor hits for Baby Washington, one of Springfield's personal favourite singers. Springfield also included the song "La Bamba", which was a popular concert number for her, though not in step with the general style of the album. The album gave Dusty another chart success peaking at No.6 on the UK Charts and No.4 on the NME charts that following month.

In 1990, after almost a decade's absence from the new-release lists and an even longer time away from the charts, Dusty Springfield re-emerged with Reputation. A partial collaboration with the Pet Shop Boys, it proved to be her most satisfying record in 15 years and sold better than anything that she'd released since the '60s. The late-'80s synth pop sound melded perfectly with Springfield's still very expressive, powerful, and soulful singing – Dan Hartman handled the producing chores on four of the cuts, Andy Richards on one, and the album has a unified sound, at once airy and dense, soaring and deep. The best cuts, however, are the five produced (and, in all but one case, written) by Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe of the Pet Shop Boys.