Dana Gillespie was born Richenda Antoinette de Winterstein Gillespie in 1949, the second daughter of a London radiologist descended from Austrian nobility, and grew up in a house where both her mother and father lived with their significant others. She was British Junior Water Ski Champion four years running before she was old enough to smoke or drink, and was making records by the same age.
What followed is one of the more improbable careers in British music. She recorded her first single with Jimmy Page producing, cut her debut album Foolish Seasons in 1968, and recorded with Elton John. She knew David Bowie from her teens and the friendship ran for a decade: he wrote Andy Warhol for her, she sang backing vocals on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, and he produced her 1973 album Weren’t Born a Man with Mick Ronson. For a time she lived with David and Angie Bowie in their New York hotel suite, in a flat that had been Iggy Pop’s, and had her portrait done by Warhol’s Factory. She spent time with Bob Dylan, hung about his hotel suite with the Beatles, and had wild times with Keith Moon, Michael Caine, Sean Connery and most of the rest of 1960s rock royalty.
She was the original Mary Magdalene in the first London production of Jesus Christ Superstar and the Acid Queen in Tommy, took leads in the West End and at the Edinburgh Festival, and performed Shakespeare alongside Sir John Gielgud and Arthur Lowe. She has acted in fourteen feature films, among them work for Nicolas Roeg, Ken Russell and Mai Zetterling, and appeared opposite most of the great British comic actors of the period — Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Terry-Thomas, Kenneth Williams, Spike Milligan. British television took her from Till Death Us Do Part to The Bill, with pantomime in Eastbourne along the way.
Then she turned to the blues, and stayed. She has shared stages with Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, played with the Austrian Mojo Blues Band and her own London Blues Band, been voted Top British Female Blues Vocalist, and been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. For twenty years she launched and ran the Mustique Blues Festival at Basil’s Bar, where the regulars singing along included Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood and Princess Margaret. Alongside all of it runs a quieter thread: the teachings of the Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba, a string of albums of Sanskrit bhajans, a performance in India to an audience of a million people, and years spent travelling the world to share what she found there.
She has made more than seventy albums and is still touring blues festivals and concerts across Europe. Weren’t Born a Man is her first full memoir, written with David Shasha and carrying more than 150 photographs, most never published before. It takes its title from the album Bowie produced, and it tells the lot — the avalanche she survived, the ghost that saved her from drowning, the gangster she introduced to royalty — in the voice of someone who has had, as she puts it in the opening line, an incredible life.