44 The Times Magazinehere is no polite way of putting
it, so we’d better get it out of the
way. From a young age, Dana
Gillespie has driven men to the
brink of sexual insanity. Here is
a woman who has made more
than 70 albums, everything from
delicate folk to Bowie-esque glam
rock to innuendo-laden blues,
starred as Mary Magdalene in the
original London production of Jesus Christ
Superstar and been a devout follower of the
Indian spiritual leader Sai Baba for four
decades. In her early teens, Gillespie was
four-times British junior water ski champion.
At the age of 15, she was buried in an avalanche
during a skiing holiday in Klosters and thought
she was dead. She survived only because one
of her skis stuck out of the snow and marked
her place of entombment. She has led an
incredible life. Reading her hilarious and
rather moving memoir, Weren’t Born a Man,
however, one thing sticks out. All the time.
When Gillespie was ten, having recently
moved into a grand house in Thurloe Square,
South Kensington, after relocating from the
countryside, the family gardener lured her
into the shed and whipped out his penis.
A year later, “already a big-busted girl”, she
would be cycling along on her paper round
when men would greet her by exposing
themselves in their morning glory. When she
was 12 the French film director Roger Vadim
awarded Gillespie a prize for a singing contest
at Klosters with the assessment, “Quelle
poitrine!” (“What a chest!”) Then there are her
lovers: David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Page,
Michael Caine, Keith Moon, Sean Connery,
Roman Polanski, Mick Jagger...
“It never bothered me,” says Gillespie, 71,
when I ask her about living with the effects of
all-conquering sexual magnetism from such a
young age. “I’m so fed up with all these people
saying, ‘He touched my breast 40 years ago.
My life has never been the same. Send him to
jail.’ Come on! MeToo has nothing to do with
me. I was honoured when my drum teacher
Frank King tried to grope me at the end of
each lesson [she was 13 at the time] because
it meant I got a chance to learn from the best
drum teacher in London. All my life, people
have judged me on how I look. It is a bit of
a pain, but I judge people by the things you
can’t see, like heart and soul. And music has
guided me from the beginning.”
Gillespie is speaking from her house in
South Kensington, which is around the corner
from the one she grew up in. Her German
father, Hans, known to all as Dadster, was a
Harley Street radiologist who had countless
affairs, at one point installing his mistress in
the family home. Her aristocratic mother,
Anne, came from a family of philanthropists
(her great-great grandfather, Sir ThomasFowell Buxton, campaigned to abolish
slavery). By Gillespie’s account, they viewed
their daughter’s sexual awakening in the mid-
Sixties with the liberalism of the age. When
she was 14, she sneaked out to the Marquee
Club to see Davy Jones and the Manish Boys.
After the gig their lead singer, the future
David Bowie, came up to Gillespie, started
brushing her hair and asked if he could spend
the night with her. The following morning her
father, having initially thought he was a girl
because of his long blond hair, shook Bowie’s
hand before he went on his way.
“What girl would have said no?” she asks.
“I had to say yes, even though I was so young.
It was the first time I took a man up to my
bedroom, two floors up from my parents’
room, but I didn’t think of the consequences
because with people like Bowie I’ve always
said, ‘Have fun horizontally, get that out of
the way and then you can go back to talking
about music.’ And nobody thought Bowie
was going to be a massive thing back then.
We were growing up on black and white
television, early Ken Russell films and so on,
so it was quite innocent really.”
Then there was Bob Dylan, whom she slept
with after sneaking her way into his press
conference in 1965. “I was just 16 when that
happened, so I can’t put him in prison,
although I definitely could have put Bowie
in there,” says Gillespie, who at the time was
launching her own career as a winsome
acoustic folk singer. The raw and dirty blues
for which she is known came later.
“Dylan was fabulous,” she says. “Just sitting
at the side of the Royal Albert Hall and
watching him do his thing brought a huge
buzz. I was out of my depth, especially when
the Beatles and the Stones were around. But
when it was just me and him in a hotel suite
I found him very attractive, chiefly because
he was bright. To find a man with a brain
and spiritual leanings that he’s not afraid to
acknowledge... Hallelujah! I’d rather have a
one-legged humpback with a sense of humour
than some muscle man covered in tattoos and
piercings. Years later, Dylan came to my house
in South Kensington and went straight for the
bookshelf. It was so refreshing because men
who read are few and far between.”
You do wonder if Gillespie welcomes at
least some of the changes in sexual mores that
have come about since the Sixties. In 1966 she
went to the Dorchester in Park Lane for a
breakfast meeting with the famed American
record company boss Ahmet Ertegun in the
hope of getting a new recording contract.
She was about to dig into a bowl of porridge
when Ertegun pulled out his member and
started chasing her around the room, before
ejaculating into the porridge. As she writes
in the book, “I left in disgust. And I didn’t
even get to eat my breakfast.”That can’t be a good way to go about
business, can it?
“If someone acts inappropriately, well, hey,
I had it all my life and it didn’t mess me up,”
she says in hoarse, plummy, no-nonsense
tones. “The Ertegun story was typical. My
main struggle was people not taking me
seriously and groping me when I was trying to
talk about music, but I’ve got so little interest
in what people whinge about these days.”
There was also, for much of the Seventies,
an obsession with Dana Gillespie’s breasts. A
review of the Othello musical Catch My Soul
from the Manchester Evening News in 1970
focused on “a lady in the chorus with the
biggest boobs Manchester has ever seen”. One
newspaper said of her part in the 1977 movie
The People that Time Forgot, referred to by
Gillespie as The Movie that People Forgot,
“The sight of Dana Gillespie’s boobs makes
one regret the invention of the bra.”
“It was literally everywhere,” she says of
Britain’s fixation with her cleavage. “Even
when I was in Jesus Christ Superstar, one of
the headlines consisted of just one word:
Superbust. When my book’s co-writer, David
Shasha, was going through the press cuttings,
there were so many mentions that we were
thinking of doing a separate book of all theT
In The Lost
Continent, 1968‘IT WAS FIRST CLASS
EVERYWHERE. WE HAD THE
GREATEST TIME EVER’
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