Dusty’s publicity-shy brother composed a string of global hits for the Seekers
Tom Springfield, who has died aged 88, earned the title of the ‘‘fifth Seeker’’ for writing a string of memorable hits for the group, including Georgy Girl, The Carnival Is Over, I’ll Never Find Another You and AWorld of Our Own.
Yet it was a mark of how jealously he guarded his privacy after retiring from the music industry that, when Seekers singer Judith Durham died early last month, no-one was aware that Springfield had died days earlier, until the news emerged in a post on the official Facebook page for his late sister Dusty Springfield.
The surviving members of the Seekers, Athol Guy, Keith
Potger and Bruce
Woodley, subsequently posted an online tribute that read:
‘‘Tom was our fifth
Seeker and we could not have done it without him. He was our creative heart and soul. A truly gifted songwriter, guiding light and powerhouse.’’
Springfield’s almost total disappearance from the public eye after 1970 was remarkable for throughout the 1960s he was a prolific writer of hit songs not only for the Seekers but also for Frank Ifield, Ken Dodd, Frankie Vaughan, Anita Harris, Jose Feliciano and the Springfields, the trio in which he performed with Dusty.
He wrote further songs for his sister in her solo career and accompanied her on guitar on Top of the Pops and in concert before dropping out of view. The only public sighting of him in later years came in 1999 on his sister’s death, when he took her ashes to Ireland and scattered them.
He was born Dionysius Patrick O’Brien in Hampstead, north London, and adopted the stage name by which he was known in 1960 (and formally changed it in 1977). His father, Gerard O’Brien, was a tax accountant who had been raised in British India, and his mother, Kay (nee Ryle), came from County Kerry, southwest Ireland. His sister Mary – later known as Dusty – was born in 1939 and recalled that in childhood her older brother was always in search of a rhythm or making some kind of noise, ‘‘either thumping our coal bin or smashing up my toys’’. She described him perfecting what has since come to be known as ‘‘human beatboxing’’, or what Dusty called an ‘‘Irish-Scottish Latin American mouth music in which he managed to sound like an eight-piece rhythm section all at the same time’’.
Educated at the Royal Grammar School in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, he was called up for National Service in 1952 and assigned to the Intelligence Corps, where he learnt Russian. As part of the course he learnt to sing Cossack folk songs, one of which he later adapted as the melody for the Seekers hit The Carnival Is Over.
A talented pianist and guitarist, he played jazz in an armed forces band and founded a vocal group called the Pedini Brothers. On his discharge he briefly worked as an insurance broker before forming the folk duo the Kensington Squares with Tim Feild.
At the same time his sister Mary was performing with a group called the Lana Sisters. When the group folded in 1960, her brother invited her to join him and Feild in a folk-pop vocal trio. They became the Springfields, though the inspiration for the band name was never explained: he adopted the stage name Tom while Mary became Dusty, a nickname she had acquired when playing football with the boys in childhood.
Mike Hurst later replaced Feild and, over the next three years, the Springfields had five Top 40 hits, including Island of Dreams, written by Tom, which reached No 5 in the UK in 1962.
When the group broke up the following year, Tom chose to concentrate on songwriting and production while living a quiet bachelor life in Chelsea. His sunny, upbeat songs proved perfect for the clean and wholesome image of the Seekers, who arrived in Britain from Australia in 1964.
The group scored an immediate No 1 UK hit with their first single, Springfield’s I’ll Never Find Another You. The song also made No 4 in America, where despite the group’s Antipodean roots they were regarded as part of the ‘‘British invasion’’.
A second UK No 1 followed with Springfield’s The Carnival Is Over and, in partnership with Jim Dale, he also wrote the Seekers’ 1966 international hit Georgy Girl. The theme song of the film of the same name, starring Lynn Redgrave and Alan Bates, earned him an Oscar nomination for best original song composed for a motion picture.
Away from the Seekers he composed the themes for the TV shows The Troubleshooters and George and the Dragon. He was persuaded to return to recording towards the end of the 1960s when he released two solo albums.
Fittingly, his final single, Morning Please Don’t Come (1970), was a duet with his more famous sister. –