The Look of Love is the fifth album by singer Dusty Springfield to be released in the US, issued on the Philips Records label in late 1967. It gathered seven tracks from Springfield's British 1967 album Where Am I Going? with both the A- and B-sides of the singles "Give Me Time"/"The Look of Love" and "What's It Gonna Be"/"Small Town Girl" and became Springfield's final release on the Philips label in the US. In early 1968 she signed with Atlantic Records in America and as a consequence her 1968 album Dusty... Definitely, recorded for Philips in the UK, was not issued in the US at that time. Her next LP to be released in the North American market instead became her keynote work Dusty in Memphis. The tracks from the entire Dusty...Definitely album, the British recordings on the 1972 release See All Her Faces as well as a series of A- and B-side singles recorded in the UK between the years 1968 and 1972, were all first issued in the US in 1999 on the Rhino/Atlantic Records compilation Dusty in London.
The title track "The Look of Love", undoubtedly one of Springfield's best-known recordings, was first recorded with Burt Bacharach in January 1967 and included on the Casino Royale soundtrack album, issued on the Colgems label in the US and RCA in the UK. This Colgems issue became one of the most sought-after records of all time by US and European audiophiles (an excellent copy often selling for $300 to $500) after laudatory reviews by The Absolute Sound editor Harry Pearson and J. Gordon Holt of Stereophile. A second re-recorded version made with arranger Reg Guest in April that same year for Springfield's own record company Philips was surprisingly first relegated to the B-side of the single "Give Me Time" in both the UK and US. Despite this the song became a Top 30 hit (#22) in the US, the album was named after it, the track was later nominated for Best Film Song of the Year in the 1968 American Academy Awards, and the song is today considered one of Springfield's signature tunes.
The Look of Love album was first released on CD by Mercury Records/Universal Music in 1999, then with four bonus tracks.
Recorded in London, March 1968. Originally unissued. First release: The Look of Love (1999 reissue). First UK release: 4-CD box set Simply Dusty, 2000.
