However, Tennant and Lowe were apparently put off by Springfields painstaking approach to recording, which was caused by her own nagging self-doubts telling her she was a fraud.

D Dusty Springfield is a pop star whose place in music history is assured.

These days, she is remembered as an icon of the Swinging Sixties, and her 1969 album Dusty in Memphis, containing her immortal version of Son of a Preacher Man, among other beautifully performed songs, is recognised as a pop-RB masterpiece.

Springfield made her name with sophisticated pop ballads that were complemented by her ultra-glamorous image (Credit: Alamy) During this period, she released one very powerful album, 1990s Reputation, which turned 30 last week.

It returned her to the charts for the first time in 20 years: no mean feat for a singer whose career was widely thought to have been in irreversible decline and who was dismissed as a nightmare when men-of-the-moment the Pet Shop Boys told their record label they wanted to work with her.

During her 1960s heyday, after she left folk trio The Springfields to become a globally famous solo artist, she cultivated an ultra-glamorous image that complemented the sophisticated pop ballads she sang so beautifully.

She wasnt a songwriter, but she was a brilliant interpreter of pop and soul songs, and probably had the best voice of any British singer during that era, says Martin Aston, author of Breaking Down the Walls of Heartache: How Music Came Out.

She sang the words and not just the notes, Marni adds, which is why I think she connected with so many people.

By 1987, before What Have I Done to Deserve This, she was almost a forgotten idol Martin Aston Springfield looked and sounded flawless, but behind her instantly recognisable beehive hairdo and panda-eyes make-up was an incredibly complicated person who battled serious depression, deep-rooted self-doubt and acute substance abuse.

Though she bravely came out as bisexual in a 1970 newspaper interview by saying I know that Im as perfectly capable of being swayed by a girl as by a boy, she struggled to reconcile her serenely feminine public persona with a private life defined by long-term relationships with women including one, with singer-actress Teda Bracci, that reportedly became violent.

Nobody was saying stuff like that at the time, particularly not young female pop stars, says Jonathan Harvey, writer of Dusty The Dusty Springfield musical.

But tellingly, Springfield prefaced her 1970 revelation about her sexuality by saying: Id hate to be thought of as a big butch lady.

Featuring five songs produced by the Pet Shop Boys, including the top 20 hits In Private and Nothing Has Been Proved, it completed a remarkable chart comeback that the synth-pop duo had kick-started three years earlier by inviting Springfield to sing on What Have I Done to Deserve This A deceptively peppy electro-pop song about an unlikely love story the man is a pathetic feeble wreck and the woman is meant to be a major capitalist, Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant said it peaked at number two in the US and the UK, becoming Springfields first major hit since Son of a Preacher Man nearly 20 years earlier.

Between 1970 and 1982, Springfield released six albums, but none sold well or produced a significant hit single.

In 1985, her career hit rock bottom when she signed a record deal with Peter Stringfellow, a British businessman best known for running a London strip club.

The only single she released on Stringfellows Hippodrome Records, a cover of a Donna Summer B-side called Sometimes Like Butterflies, stalled at number 85.

Springfield later told The Sun newspaper that working with Stringfellow was one of the incidents that made me feel so fed up with the business, I nearly gave up for good.

Springfield began her career as part of folk trio The Springfields, before they disbanded in 1963 (Credit: Alamy) A month after the singles release, she was admitted to the psychiatric unit at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, New York after calling paramedics to say shed accidentally cut herself.

I think she was both a manic depressive and an addict, Springfields manager Vicki Wickham says in Karen Bartletts biography of Springfield, Dusty: An Intimate Portrait of a Musical Legend, adding: The combination was absolutely lethal.

Doing a whole album with Dusty would probably give you a nervous breakdown Neil Tennant Because of all this, it felt like a minor pop miracle when Pet Shop Boys Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe resuscitated her career just two years later.

When the duo first approached Springfield with the duet in 1985, she turned them down a glaring example of her self-sabotaging streak in action but Wickham and the songs co-writer Allee Willis managed to change her mind.

According to Aston, collaborating with Tennant and Lowe during their imperial phase brought her back to the forefront of British pop.

Like Tina Turners return to the charts earlier in the decade, Springfields appeal was predicated partly on her public image as a great survivor.

She still had the big hair and make-up that people remembered her for, and crucially she still sounded great, Aston adds.

Spooky Dusty Springfield