The Times Magazine 45tit references throughout my career. I never
took it seriously. I certainly can’t understand
women who these days want to go under a
surgical knife and stick poison in their body
just because of how they look.”
When Gillespie’s singing career really took
off, it was with the help of David Bowie and
his manager at the time, Tony Defries. Signed
to Defries’s MainMan company, she scored
a hit in 1973 with a version of Bowie’s Andy
Warhol – he wrote it for her, although his
version came out two years earlier while she
was busy with Jesus Christ Superstar – and
made her most famous album in the same
year, the glam/cabaret-tinged Weren’t Born
a Man, which featured a cover photograph
of Gillespie in a corset and suspenders that
provided many a teenaged boy with
companionship upon a lonely night.
So began a period of gilded excess:
limousines, assistants, threesomes with Bowie
and his wife, Angie. Unlike so many of her
colleagues, however, Gillespie never succumbed
to drugs. She doesn’t even drink, chiefly
because she doesn’t like the taste.
“It was first class everywhere,” says
Gillespie. “We had a whale of time, being put
up in New York’s Sherry-Netherland hotel
for weeks, with Defries’s brilliant legal mind
getting all these people to pay huge amounts
of money to fund it all. He was the captain of
the ship, encouraging us to be as outrageous
as possible. Until it all went wrong.”
Having previously heard both Angie Bowie
and Iggy Pop say terrible things about him,
I find it a surprise to hear Gillespie speak so
fondly of Defries. “I emailed Angie about this
the other day,” she says. “I asked her why she
always puts him down when we had five years
of the greatest time ever, and she replied,
‘Well, he didn’t want to handle my career
after me and David split up.’ ”
Nonetheless, Weren’t Born a Man
documents Gillespie being left poverty-
stricken after MainMan collapsed. The first
sign of trouble was when the BMW she
thought Defries had given her was
repossessed. Then in 1976 she landed the
starring role in a West End musical called
Mardi Gras, only to discover that Defries, to
whom she was still contracted, had obtained
a court order to freeze her earnings.
“Somehow I survived and every stepping
stone leads you somewhere higher,” she says
philosophically. “Weird things happened, like
Marc Bolan giving me an Austin Mini van
when he heard about me losing the BMW
and, thanks to not having any money to buy
food, I was at my slimmest when I was doing
Mardi Gras. I have always felt that if you have
bad thoughts about people it will be far harder
to settle things. Eventually Defries flew me to
LA and we did sort it out. Maybe it was how it
was meant to be. The end of an era. Angie was
instrumental in giving David confidence and
she got peanuts in the divorce. Defries gave
David 1,000 per cent and David never spoke
to him again. But he cut everyone from that
period out of his life, me included. Perhaps
that’s the only way he could move on.”
A few years before getting mired in a legal
morass with MainMan, Gillespie found herself
at the centre of one of the more remarkable
royal scandals in recent history. In 1970 she
made the first of a series of trips to Mustique
where she played the guitar and sang at the
famous beachfront hangout Basil’s Bar. She
later set up the Mustique Blues Festival there.
On one of her trips to the island she was
visited by her friend John Bindon, an associate
of the Kray twins and known around London
for a particular party trick: looping the
handles of five pint glasses onto his mammoth
penis. Gillespie and her house guests were
invited to a lunch party for another Mustique
visitor, Princess Margaret. She took a
photograph of the Queen’s sister sitting next
to Bindon, a man she later claimed never
to have met, and so began a longstanding
rumour about the royal and the gangster.
“It became a big thing because Biffo
[Bindon] was wearing a T-shirt saying, ‘Enjoy
Cocaine,’ in the Coca-Cola logo, which my
boyfriend at the time got from America,” says
Gillespie, who later gave the photograph to
Bindon’s girlfriend, Vicki Hodge, not realising
she would sell it to the papers to raise money
for Bindon’s murder trial. “Biffo did time in the
nick and there he was chatting to the sister of
the Queen, but he was very respectful of her.
He certainly never went down the beach toshow her his dick, as people have claimed,
because I would never have let him. I was
brought up in these circles. I knew how to
behave with royalty and there is no way that
Princess Margaret was ever on the end of
John Bindon’s so-called mighty marrow.”
Gillespie doesn’t take herself, or anyone
else, too seriously. Nor does she seem capable
of self-pity. It helps make her refreshingly
non-judgmental. Perhaps her acceptance of
life’s harder edges comes from combining
adventurousness with a spiritual awareness
she first developed aged five. On holiday in
Germany she fell and cracked her skull. The
pain was so severe that she took herself down
to the Rhine with the intention of drowning
herself. “As I sank deeper into the water a
strange being, dressed all in white, lifted me
up and out of the water,” she writes. “Some
may call this a hallucination, but I know that
it really happened.”
“What was really extraordinary is that
when I first had my fall there was a blazing
light in my head, like I had seen all of
creation,” she elaborates. “I didn’t put that
in the book because my editor said I would
be certified if I did. The white figure that
pulled me out of the water was something
superhuman, but I was so damaged that I
couldn’t talk for months and when I finally
could, nobody believed me. It made me realise,
from an early age that life is not as we see it.”
Gillespie’s early brush with death might
also have helped her open up to the teachings
of Sai Baba, whose philosophy she defines
as “be happy, play the game”. In other words,
deal with life as it unfolds with equanimity.
It led to a strange dichotomy in the latter part
of her career – recording and performing early
20th-century bawdy blues such as Big Ten Inch
and Organ Grinder while taking trips to Sai
Baba’s ashram in India and making albums
of devotional music.
Throughout all this, Gillespie’s one true
passion – music – has never changed, which is
why she is now making her 71st album (more
dirty blues) and her 72nd (a spiritual one). She
never wanted children, never wanted to get
married and never saw herself as a great
actress. She is at heart a blues singer in the
tradition of rambunctious Twenties characters
such as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters.
“As far as I’m concerned, music has always
come first,” she says. “The wonderful thing
about music is that it doesn’t matter what
colour you are or how you look. It is about
how good you are. Now I’m 71 and the joy of
getting older is that nobody can tell you what
to do. I’m old-fashioned and quite happy to
remain that way. I’ve lived a great life.” nWeren’t Born a Man by Dana Gillespie and
David Shasha, published by Hawksmoor
Publishing, is out nowWith Lionel Bart (left) and Keith Moon, London, 1978With Mick Jagger at the 2005 Mustique Blues Festival