Ev'rything's Coming Up Dusty

by Bruce EderDusty Springfield's second British LP was roughly equivalent to the American You Don't Have to Say You Love Me album, which appeared ten months later in the United States and had the title hit and one other song ("Little by Little") added, and three of the U.K. edition's songs stripped off. The British version also appeared as a gatefold, filled with a series of beautiful photographs and extensive notes. More to the point, this second album presented a more mature Dusty Springfield, doing songs by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, Randy Newman and co., although all of the material here -- even "Who Can I Turn To," from the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint -- still has a soulful edge. Moreover, she scales new heights of passion on Rod Argent's "If It Don't Work Out" and the ethereal "That's How Heartaches Are Made," and seems close to bursting her lungs on Gerry Goffin and Carole King's "I Can't Hear You." A little more than half of this album -- mostly the up-tempo numbers -- was recorded with her on-stage backing group the Echoes, and they have a nice, lean band sound that was also a departure from the lushly orchestrated, outsized production of her early singles sides. The whole record comes off as perhaps the greatest Motown album that was never made by Motown, and has a pleasing unity in its British form that the U.S. version lacks. Ev'rything's Coming Up Dusty has been reissued twice on CD, first in 1990 from BGO Records and again, in 1998, from Philips Records in England, augmented with eight bonus tracks, all songs that she recorded in September of 1964 with producer Shelby Singleton and arranger Ray Stevens, most of which turned up in America on the Ooooooweeee! album, but three of which were unreleased in England until the issue of the Philips CD.