MY AMAZING LIFE... WITH NO REGRETS
Dana Gillespie tells Garry Bushell about acting, singing... and her busy romantic life
drummer couldn’t do the Wembley Arena date,” she says. Luckily old friend Roger Taylor from Queen came to her aid. “He learnt the whole set in three days. I tried to pay him and he refused to take a penny. He’s such a gentleman.”
Dana was making records before she was old enough to drink. She is now mixing her 71st album. Most controversial was 1973’s Weren’t Born A Man. On the album sleeve she wore a boudoir corsage, black stockings and a feather boa. Feminists saw red.
“It was my decision to do the picture,” she says. “Nobody ever forced me into anything I didn’t want to do. I never let myself be exploited.
“If I’d looked like the back end of a bus I wouldn’t have had these problems. That cover is tame compared to today – J-LO was naked on hers.”
Some of the tracks were written and produced by Bowie whose management Mainman took over her career and moved Dana to New York. She wasn’t keen: “I like English accents and I don’t like hotdogs.”
She lived with the Bowies in Manhattan until David’s relationship with Mainman boss Tony Defries ended in acrimony.
Back home she signed to Ace Records and recorded Blue Job, an album of rude vintage blues. “Blues is for people who wear jeans and know how to get out of
OLD PALS: Angie Bowie and Dana in 2017. They lived together in New York them at the end of the night,” she says. “People who love life and love loving. Give me Howling Wolf over chart music any day.”
Dana’s incredible life nearly ended at 15 in Davos when she was caught in an avalanche that left her plagued with decades of knee pain: “I’m reborn now I’ve got my new knees – second one in 2019, I’m totally bionic.”
She was close to Lionel Bart and worked with Elton John – when he was still Reg Dwight – on 70s compilations of Top 20 hits re-recorded by session singers.
Dana read about Sathya Sai Baba in the 1980s and says his teaching inspired her to became a volunteer at the Royal Marsden Hospital. She has also recorded albums of Bhajan music, singing in Sanskrit.
She has spent seven years writing her autobiography, Weren’t Born A Man. It’s frank but not salacious; honest, but never apologetic. “I don’t have regrets,” she says.
“I never wanted to be Mrs Bowie or Mrs Moon or anyone else I’d been horizontal with. I never wanted to be an appendage on their arm. I was just having fun. I got exactly what I wanted from all of them.”
She is starting the second volume now. Lockdown irks her. “I’ve swum every morning for the last 30 years,” she says. “I’m miserable without a swimming pool.”
But, she vows, “I’ll do the blues until I croak. And when I do, I’ll go knowing that I have lived an amazing, charmed life.”
Weren’t Born A Man by Dana Gillespie (Hawksmoor, £19.99)
Juliet Stevenson
Locked in isolation, we can only dream of fantasy dinner parties, but Steven Carl Mccasland’s immensely moving play imagines Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas hosting Agatha Christie, Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker at their Alpine home in 1940 as the Nazis take control across France.
Effectively and intimately filmed from the actors’ homes, Linda Bassett’s Stein is the beating heart, sparring with prickly nemesis Hellman (Juliet Stevenson) and finding solace in her love for Catherine Russell’s gentle Toklas.
The conversation centres on a desperate plan to smuggle out Jews and expands into a meditation on oppression, art and courage. It bursts with clever quips and weary wisdom, a reminder that every generation has its own tragedies and desperate hopes. All we have left is our humanity and what we choose to do with it.
The play tells us: “It’s not the tragedies that kill us, it’s the little messes, the little wars.” Do we have the courage to fight them?