Queen of the Mods
At 74, 60s pop star Dinah Lee is still modern, still a feminist and still making music, writes Vicki Anderson.
Easing herself into a large elaborate chair, preparing to have her elegantly coiffed bob attended by one of London’s finest hairdressers, Dinah Lee saw Beatles drummer Ringo Starr sitting beside her.
It’s London, 1965, and the Kiwi singer labelled the Queen of the Mods, is music royalty worldwide.
If you can remember the 60s, it’s been said, you weren’t really there, but Lee remembers everything.
Elegantly combining sharp fashion sense with a love for obscure R’n’B, she has had 15 Top 10 hits, including her major No 1 chart successes, Reet Petite,
Blue Beat and Don’t You Know Yockomo.
A pioneer in New Zealand music, in 1965 she became the inaugural winner of New Zealand’s Prestigious Entertainment Award.
Lee toured London in the mid 1960s with a young mod called David Jones, who later changed his surname to Bowie.
“He was a beautiful boy,” says the 74-year-old wistfully from Sydney.
There were parties, oh so many parties.
She and her friends hung out with Marianne Faithfull, met the Small Faces and Mick Jagger, among others.
Lee recorded with Chris Blackwell, who went on to own Island Records, and who forged the careers of artists such as Bob Marley, Grace Jones and U2.
Lee remembers visiting Manchester and an audition for the show Ready, Steady Go.
“I had to go down into a basement with a piano player and I hated it,” she declares.
In London in the Swinging Sixties, Lee lived in a block of flats “filled with gangsters”. Her flatmate was Millie Small, who had the world’s first ska hit, My Boy Lollipop.
“You know,” says Lee, breaking into song by way of explanation: “You make my heart go giddy-up.” She still has a fantastic voice.
Before the wild parties in London, Lee went to the United States, and was the first New Zealand artist to perform on the Shindig TV show.
“I sang with Ray Charles, the Righteous Brothers... I did a duet with Glen Campbell,” she recalls.
She toured and performed with the Bee Gees, Gene Pitney and PJ Proby.
“It was all happening.”
At 22, she performed in 1966 and 1967 for troops during the Vietnam War.
“It was so memorable. I was not paid to do it, I just put my hand up and said I’d go and entertain our troops. I was so young, they were so young, Kiwi and Aussie guys, my age, at war.”
She remembers trying to sing above the sound of gunfire.
“We had to be locked away because the Viet Cong were trying to get at the artists to break morale. We heard gunshots and we said, ‘What’s that?’ They said they were just letting off a round of shots but they were trying to protect us,” she says. “We were right in the front line of it all.”
In Saigon, she met legendary American actor John Wayne, who drawled: “Howdy ma’am. Would you care for a drink?”
The Australian government awarded her the Logistics and Support Medal for her contribution.
In 2016, New Zealand Governor-General Sir Jerry Mateparae choked back tears as he presented medals to a handful of Kiwi Vietnam war entertainers, including Lee, at Auckland’s Government House. The ceremony marked the first time New Zealand had recognised wartime entertainers with medals.
Every Anzac Day, Lee pins on her medals and marches. And she still keeps in touch with the soldiers she met 50 years ago.
“A lot of the guys still send me photographs of the trenches and things like that; unbelievable.”
NARROW ESCAPES
She didn’t get shot at in Vietnam but she did in New South Wales.
“I was on stage and a bullet came through the floor right beside me,” she recalls. “Some guy tried to get in to one of the shows I was doing and came back with a shotgun. He fired it and it went up through the floor.”
It prompts the memory of the time a group of students kidnapped her in Adelaide and held her overnight for ransom.
“It was when students did pranks,” Lee says, matter-of-factly. “They had to pay money to get me out. Now the stars are well protected with bodyguards. Then we had to make our own way and do our own image and things like that.”
At 74, Lee is still recording and performing as enthusiastically as ever. “I can still move across the stage,” she says. “I’m just a bit slower.”
She has plans to release a new album this year and has been busy, recording and mixing it in her home studio.
“I have all the latest technology,” she says, rattling off a list of drum sounds she’s working with. “It’s incredible how easy it is now compared to back then. You’ve got to keep up with it, be in the race.”
She doesn’t like to talk about the past because she’s the sort of woman who prefers to look to the future. I’ve interviewed Lee several times over the past five years and it’s a theme she has returned to several times during out meetings.
“I prefer to live in the now,” she’s often repeated, in a no-nonsense voice that is all class, as I have attempted to mine her memories. “I’m not much of a girl who lives in the past, I live for the now and what’s happening now.”
When we spoke in 2015, for example, she surprisingly steered the conversation to American heavy metal band Disturbed and declared she “loved” their cover of Sound of Silence.
In 2016, when we chatted, she was poised to release a new EP. Then aged 70, she released a new single in 33 countries. Her fans are just as dedicated as ever, even if the media haven’t kept up.
That EP included a song called Cathedral Square, a collaboration with Exponents frontman, Jordan Luck, who wrote the song in a Christchurch flat around the same time he wrote Victoria.
But it’s harder to get people to play your music when you’re a woman in her 70s.
“They put us in these little boxes and to find your way out of it is not easy,” says Lee. “The beauty of getting older is you can say whatever you want and I’m loving that. I don’t care what anyone says, I do what I want to do.”
THE LORDE OF HER DAY
In many ways, Lee was arguably the Lorde of the 60s. Lee sees echoes of herself in the young star.
“Lorde’s come out with her own look, which I did back in my day. When I see the way she moves her arms on stage I think, ‘Hello, I did that too.’ What will she do next? I like her.”
You had to have a backbone of steel to be a female in the music industry in the 1960s.
“The female artists back in those days were considered a fill in, the pretty fill in between the male stars,” says Lee. “That wasn’t me.”
Lee wasn’t a “pretty dolly”. She was a feisty feminist who won an army of teen fans with her rebellious look and non-conformist approach.
“No, no, I picked that apart and gave them heaps. It was the 60s and the world was changing... we took the bull by the horns and went for it.”
She’s thrilled by the #MeToo movement.
“It’s fantastic, just fantastic that women are standing up again. I saw others, in my time, who experienced things... the casting couch, I guess you could say. It didn’t happen to me – I think they were scared, intimidated by me and my bold look.”
Lee is a genteel woman with immaculate manners so her next words should be read in the strong voice with which she uttered them: ”You just couldn’t take any crap in those days, you just stood up and did it.”
What would our music scene now look like for our women if pioneers like Lee hadn’t “stood up”?