CULT HEROES
“THAT’S THE thing about old age,” reflects Dana Gillespie. “You can get away with anything. If you don’t like it– naff off.”
Feisty in conversation, on-stage and in song, it appears that she’s always done what she has wanted. And what escapades this 75-year-old descendant of Austrian nobility and Norfolk landowners has experienced, from taking drum lessons in London’s redlight zone of Soho in 1962 aged just 13, before frequenting the area’s blues clubs (she first saw The Yardbirds, “or was it The Action? It was a long time ago”) and releasing her first single Thank You Boy in 1965. She now has over 70 albums under her belt, most in the rambunctious idiom of the blues.
“I must thank my liberal, intelligent parents,” says the woman born Richenda Antoinette de Winterstein Gillespie. “But if they had forbidden me, I’d have done it anyway.”
Her action and people-packed life is newly documented on First Love, an album of covers (bar the self-penned First Love, Last Love) made with friends/co-producers/instigators Marc Almond and Tris Penna. “It’s such a different record for me,” Gillespie notes. “I’d never have thought of covering Lana Del Rey or Leonard Cohen. But it was wonderful to hand over the reins after writing and producing 90 per cent myself since the ’70s.”
Whilst singer Almond and record label veteran Penna also suggested the likes of Fleetwood Mac’s Dreams and Morrissey’s Spent The Day In Bed (“We’ve never met, but Morrissey wrote to me saying, ‘Your version is far better than mine!’”) to reflect Gillespie’s personality, her own choices include Can You Hear Me and Not Dark Yet, written respectively by friends/lovers Bowie and Dylan.
“First Love, Last Love is partly concerned with men that I’ve known,” she says, “some who played a part in my musical evolution.” She first met Bowie at the Marquee in 1964, and Dylan in 1965, “back when record companies held receptions.” She sang backing on It Ain’t Easy from The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust And The Spiders From Mars, and Bowie famously wrote Andy Warhol for her, “though I still don’t know why, it’s about as abstract a lyric as you can get.”
Gillespie joined Bowie at manager Tony Defries’ starmaking MainMan organisation, but she wanted
