Dan Gillespie (Photo credit: Christina Jansen)
Dana Gillespie explores her new album ‘First Love’ with Jason Barnard, covering its production and her connection with its songs. She shares insights into her music career and why she is devoutly old school.
We last spoke in 2020 for your memoir and you’ve got a new single, ‘Spent The Day In Bed’. That’s a taster of your forthcoming album ‘First Love’. Not only has that song got widespread praise, it’s got support from Morrissey.
Yes. I must say I’ve never personally met Morrissey because he lives in America. But of the two guys that produced the album, Marc Almond and Tris Penna, Tris is in contact with Morrissey by email all the time.
For years, I’ve always written most of my material and produced it myself. But when Marc and Tris said, “Why don’t we do an album and produce you?” I thought, “Well, why not?”. It seemed a new and fun idea. So they chose two thirds of the songs and I chose the other third. I must say I’m not somebody that sits at home and listens to much other music, except I might bung a blues album on or some Indian music. So I don’t really know what’s going on quite often.
But I really loved the lyrics of ‘Spent the Day in Bed’. Especially now, it’s so depressing to watch the news. I do agree with ‘stop watching the news because the news contrives to frighten you.’ Morrissey has hit the nail on the head. It is so timely. Although we recorded it nine months ago or something, the news just goes on and gets worse and worse.
It’s not just news, it’s bad news. What’s the latest bad news.
We’re probably going to be in the middle of world war three. But I must say Morrissey has been extremely nice. He said it’s nicer than his version. He did the cover which is great and he’s just sent wonderfully uplifting words about the song. In my day when I first started making singles in 1964, the big thing was to write the b-side even if you haven’t written it. Because you get an equal amount of royalties. Well things probably haven’t changed so I did co-write the b-side for it, ‘First Love, Last love’. But ‘Spent The Day In Bed’, well I love to spend the day in bed. It doesn’t happen as much now as it used to when I was younger. I’m older and I should be spending more days in bed but when you get older you just want to get out and seize the day and do as much as you can.
The cover, that’s a Terry O’Neill picture of you, isn’t it?
Yeah, he did lots of pictures in the old days. But the one who did the cover of the ‘First Love’ album is Gered Mankowitz. He’s known for his pictures of Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix, et cetera. He’s the only photographer that I know that has photographed me since I was 15. 60 years with the same photographer. We probably should bring out a book of those 60 years.
Terry did do quite a few photo sessions with me, but I think he’s no longer alive. I’d originally wanted a picture of me in bed, but Morrissey likes to put other people on the covers of his records, which I didn’t know was his modus operandi, but it is.
So he chose that picture. It was me in a younger era. When I look at the high heels, how on earth did I even walk two steps in those days? But, I suppose it was taken in 1972, 73, that’s 50 years ago. [laughs]
Tell us more about Marc and Tris working with you to put the album together. What was the process of getting the songs to you and your role in choosing them?
Well, they both were thinking of songs, as was I. Then we sat down together and we saw who liked what.
‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ was actually one that I suggested. I don’t really listen to Green Day, but I actually listen to lyrics of songs, and I like the lyrics. I’ve been in the music business for 60 years. The thing about that song is as I walk alone. When music is your master, your mistress, or depending on how you want to look at it, there’s one part of you that is always alone, no matter how many lovers or whatever you have, there’s always music that is there. Music is a jealous lover, and it takes up a lot of your emotions. I’ve been that way since I first started writing songs when I was 11, so I like the aspect of walking alone. Although of course I’m never alone, there’s always loads of people around, but I’m a kind of loner in one sense, as I said, because music is my lover.
The next one after ‘Spent The Day In Bed’ is me and Marc singing a duet. Marc found ‘Dance Me To The End Of Love’. I wouldn’t have thought of doing a Leonard Cohen song at all, although I used to sing in the 60s ‘Suzanne’, which he wrote. But every folkie sang that in the old days.
And as I said, I never would have thought of doing it. So the three of us sat and listened to songs and they either got a thumbs up or a thumbs down. This whole album, apart from the Green Day thing, are songs that have in a way got some relevance to my life, be it boyfriends or people I’ve worked with. And Dylan, I knew from 1965, I’ve never done a Dylan song ever.
I’ve always felt that his songs are kind of so famous. How can you do a Dylan song? ‘Not Dark Yet’, at my age, you can easily say it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there. And I love the lyrics and I like what we’ve done with it. We didn’t kind of fuck with it too much. It still has a simplistic thing to it, but I love the arrangement. Nice and simple. I think the one after that is ‘Brewer Street Blues’.
That’s an interesting song.
Yeah, of course, it’s not technically a blues, which is my area of expertise, but I think because blues is a type of music, and in this case, it means blues as in the depressing emotion feeling. Marc and I both know that whole area of Soho, red light district, women slouching in doorways, pimps, people hanging out of windows. The red light district of Soho was fun, and it was safe.
There were no stabbings. Nobody bothered to ask you how old you were, or in my case, how young you were, as you trotted around Soho. It was a great growing up, a stomping ground, and on every corner was a music venue.
I was in and out of the Marquee several times a week from the age of 13, still getting to school. So when he played me this demo, because as far as I know, it’s not on any of Marc’s albums. So he just changed a couple of words so that it fitted me more suitably. But I just really love that song. It’s just got a story. It paints a picture. When I hear it, it takes me back to the good old days of the red light district of Soho.
Bring it back! I’ve just come back from Denmark Street, Tin Pan Alley. I was there about an hour ago, and it’s so depressing. All the old places are closed down. Everything is kind of new and modern and ugly, and doesn’t bear any relation to what I remember. Anyway, the one after that is ‘Gods and Monsters’.
Lana Del Rey.
I never would have thought of doing a Lana Del Rey song. That was a suggestion of Marc’s. I can’t unfortunately see it getting too much plays on, let’s say, the BBC, because it’s got the F word in there.
When I was young, you never swore. Marc and I were on a radio thing yesterday, and they played ‘Stardom Road’, which I did a version of on my ‘Weren’t Born a Man’ album in 1973. Then he did it in 2006. But when I did it, I used the word poofs and speed. Now, girl singers didn’t sing about things like that in my day. But because I was with MainMan and the Bowie lot, you could get away with anything. I mean, there was Bowie on the cover of his album in a dress, and I was on the cover in stockings and suspenders. So I don’t see it sadly getting BBC plays.
I don’t like changing people’s lyrics. I might change the gender if I’ve taken a song that was about a she and I want to make it about a he. But I love that song ‘Gods and Monsters’. It really makes me think of California. There’s a seedy side of it, the music side of it, the film side of it, which I knew well in the 70s.
Did you go over with your music or was it acting?
Basically for music. You know there’s that ‘BOWPROMO’?
The white label.
The white label. I wrote on the front, Dana Gillespie and David Bowie. There were 400 copies, I think, printed. I’ve got one copy left. But now there’s bootleg versions of it. But it’s got to be the original. And I happened to have lunch today with a guy called Lawrence Myers who wrote a fabulous book on Bowie called ‘Hunky Dory (Who Knew?)’ .
Lawrence was with Tony Defries, our manager. He was the one that pressed up these 400 copies. And the moment we got a record deal, he threw the rest of them away! But this was 1973. He said he was so busy dealing with the New Seekers and Edison Lighthouse. So I had lunch with him today. And he said, “If only I hadn’t thrown them away.” But, that’s how things were in those days.
But you didn’t swear. But ‘BOWPROMO’, I won’t ever get a penny out of it because they’re bootlegs. So people just keep the money. So what’s next? Oh, yeah, ‘In a Broken Dream’.
‘In A Broken Dream’ was originally done by a band called Python Lee Jackson in 1970-71, and they had Rod Stewart singing on it just as a session singer. He was totally unknown, nobody had heard of him, and it was a bit of a minor hit, but the people that put it together, they were all from down under, and Rod never made reference to it before. I think he got paid enough to buy a new frying pan, somebody said, or something really silly.
A session fee or something.
In fact, somebody found all the notes of the Ziggy Stardust album and it says, I got paid nine quid for doing Ziggy Stardust. I was very honoured to do it because, of course, David sang on ‘Weren’t Born A Man’, so I had to.
‘It Ain’t Easy.’
Yeah, it wasn’t David’s song anyway. Actually, if anyone listens to the original of ‘It Ain’t Easy’, it’s a really good song, no wonder David chose it. So what comes after?
That’s ‘Can You Hear Me’, isn’t it?
It was the Bowie song Tris Penna chose for me. It wasn’t one I would have immediately said yes to, because it’s enough that Bowie wrote ‘Andy Warhol’ for me. He never wrote love songs, really. Maybe you could say ‘Kooks’ was a love song because he wrote that about his son. But he was the master at aliens, space age, Andy Warhol and abstract things.
But ‘Can You Hear Me’ I think was pretty close for a love song for Bowie to write. We did our version from the original demo that he did. Very few people have heard it, because everyone now knows it from the Young Americans album, where it’s completely different. But as I said, I don’t like to copy somebody’s version, you make it your own. We heard the demo once or twice. Maybe he sang it once on a Diamond Dogs show. I can’t remember, actually, though I saw the show. It never came to England. It was far too expensive to travel, but it was great. I was in Los Angeles then. So yeah, a Bowie song. And then I think it was the Jake Bugg song.
‘Simple As This’.
Yes. I didn’t even know who Jake Bugg was, but it was Marc Almond that found it. I said, “Who the hell is this Jake Bugg?” Somebody said, “Oh, he’s a good looking dark haired stoner from up north!” I thought he sounded really nice and I liked his songs. Then when we were in the Dean Street Studios, which is where Marc likes to work, somebody told us, “Didn’t you know that earlier today, Jake Bugg was in the studio just down the corridor.” I went, “What?” So I’ve never met him. And again, he uses the word fuck in it. So you have to be careful there.
Then it’s ‘First Love, Last Love’. Well, I wrote this with two guys, Nick Hogarth and Les Davidson. Because I’ve been on the planet for 75 years, it’s true that you never forget your first love, whether it was good or bad or indifferent.
I have a feeling that the last love is the most important. Because it’s going to be the last love that’s going to be there to hold your hand at the end. Hopefully mop you up when you’re dribbling and senile or incontinent, in a wheelchair or whatever.
So these are the two what I call bookends that are the important loves in your life. I’ve had some amazing ones in between, but I haven’t got a song long enough for that. So I just take the beginning and the end because I always write my own lyrics.
Then the last song is, for me, a kind of surprise track because Tris Penna said, “Why don’t you do a Stevie Nicks Fleetwood Mac song? Anything from ‘Rumors’, which I think is still in the charts. It’s like ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’, let’s face it, these albums are evergreen, so it’s really dangerous to take a song that everyone knows. So the only way we could do it was to make it completely different.
When I played it to a few people recently, they hear the beginning bit and it’s just voice and piano, we did it in the last half hour of the session, we just had half an hour left and Tris said, “Oh come on, let’s just try it, see how it turns out.”
So we literally did it in one go, but because it’s so stripped back, nobody recognized it until you get to the chorus, “thunder only happens when it’s raining”, which is not true actually, because I was in Italy the other day and there was thunder everywhere and not a drop of rain.
However, that’s the line that people remember and it’s a good way to close the album because it’s poignant. It’s rather a lovely song written by Stevie Nicks. Good for her. Fleetwood Mac, I used to know them in the 60s, long before she and Lindsay Buckingham joined the group. Those were the good old days.
Was it your current band that were musicians on the album?
Yeah, I’ve had the London Blues Band with me for years. A couple of members occasionally have to change if they’re doing some other big venue. I can get a stand in because actually blues is not the end of the world.
I mean, as long as they’re good, you can get some a dep in because you just send them the songs and they know what a blues is. But in this case, yeah, the four of them play with me a lot. They’re all a gem, but the piano player, Matt Gest, took over the role of musical director because he had been musical director for the ABBA show here in London.
I first met him because I booked him to take him to the Mustique Blues Festival about 15 years ago when I was running the festival there for 20 years. So they’re just great guys. We did do a couple of days rehearsals, which is almost unheard of with a blues album.
You just kind of vaguely know the key and just you play what you feel. But we rehearsed at the Temple of Art and Music, which is a venue that I think is one of the most interesting in London, and they were very kind and let us rehearse there.
So we went into the studios knowing exactly what we were going to do. The bass player is only 21. And he’d just come out of Guildhall. So they all read dots and even the guitarist who is now 25. But I think he was also at the Guildhall or the Royal Academy.
Evan, the drummer, has been with me on and off, I don’t know, about 30 years. And he reads dots anyway, because he’s a quite a well known session player as well as being live. So, yeah, they were well accomplished. It was good of Marc and Tris to trust in my judgement for the musicians, because I’m very much in touch with musicians because I see them all the time.
Down at the Temple of Art and Music, they have every week at the weekends, they do these blues jams. I might often go down there and I might hear somebody who is good. And I’ve been known to pick a musician from there in case I suddenly needed one. And if they’re good, I can go and pick them.
I’m all for encouraging young musicians to get a chance to play. Because somebody said the other day, you know, people will pay a fortune to go, obviously, to a Taylor Swift concert or to a concert where it’s three or four hundred quid. But they don’t want to spend 15 quid to go and see a local band who won’t get any better unless they get bums on seats or punters in a small venue.
I’ve spent my whole life playing in small venues as well as big venues. But the small ones are just as important as the big ones. You get just as much of a buzz. You may not get so much money, but you get the same buzz, if not more, when you can see the whites of their eyes. So I’m all in favour of small clubs being kept alive.
Will you be doing any of this new album live? I know that your show is often blues based now.
Yes, but I started to throw into my blues act, ‘Andy Warhol’, just because we can. I occasionally do, ‘Weren’t Born a Man’. I started to throw in ‘Move Your Body Close to Me’, which was my number one in Europe, but it never got released in England. The blues audience are quite surprised. I mean, I’ve done it at Ronnie Scott’s and nearly always my second to last song is a thing called ‘Om Shakti’. If you punch in my name and then you put ‘Om Shakti’ on YouTube, you will see me perform in front of more than a million people.
So I mix and match music styles. I’m at the Temple of Art and Music on May the 11th because it’s Eurovision night of all things.
You did a song for San Marino, is that right?
I did. I was asked by a company that does AI and who’d done about 10 tracks of AI music. They’d asked a lot of well known record producers to listen to it. Most of it was shite, actually. But I heard ‘The Last Polar Bear’. I didn’t write the title or the theme of what it was. But there was something in the melody. I quite liked it. The thing about AI, it’s so early days. First of all, most musicians are furious about it and don’t like it. I don’t feel that way.
‘The Last Polar Bear’ originally was not a very good version because they can’t sing properly and their phrasing isn’t right. And their lyrics may be all over the shop, but I could see something I could do with it. So I rewrote and refined it, I changed some of the words. Then they said, “Would you like to enter through San Marino?”
San Marino is a tiny municipality, it’s a pin drop in Italy, but they’re allowed to enter people into Eurovision, but they don’t have any musicians. So the other 17 people who entered, some were from Italy, but there was Spain, there was a couple of English, there was a Greek. They were from where everyone was trying to get in. I would have quite liked to have got in just because my song was so different. The one that won it was a bit like all the acts that come from Ukraine or these Balkan countries, with a bit of rapping, plenty of tattoos, bright dayglo colours, spandex and a dance troupe. That was not me.
It’s a very simple song with a really strong hook.
I think so too. So I’m going to sing it on Eurovision night just for the hell of it down at the Temple of Art and Music. I’ll probably do about three or four songs from the ‘First Love’ album because it won’t really be a blues audience that night. We’ll fling a few in just to have a little bit of fun. But they’re going to have some drag acts and it’s gonna be quite glitter and sequins and well, what more can you expect?!
Last year I was at the London party for Eurovision and I interviewed the group that were playing, they were Italians and I speak Italian. So they were playing for San Marino. I was in the dressing room, I was amazed, all the men were in skirts and makeup and the women, well, I don’t know what they were in! But anything goes on Eurovision night and it’s got a massive fan base. So I just thought, yeah, do it for the hell of it.
But I’m proud of ‘The Last Polar Bear’. If anyone says to me, oh, how can you go near AI? My view on it is this, in the future and in the very near future, AI is gonna be everywhere. It can do amazing things, but it’s got a universal consciousness and it’s exploding and expanding every minute.
While we’re sitting here, it’s taken on millions of other people’s thoughts and it’s all stored in it. So we’re gonna have to embrace it. When I was sitting with Lawrence Myers at lunch today, the guy who printed up the ‘BOWPROMO’ things, I reminded him that, first of all, he said, “You went to San Marino, with AI!” Lawrence said, “You have to remember that 40 something years ago, somebody invented a synthesiser, pressed one button and it sounded like 40 string players.” All hell broke loose in the West End theatres with people going on strike, you’re putting string players out of business. Now, everybody’s got synths or whatever the next model is.
So we slowly come to embrace it, but it’s going to be quite difficult for some people to accept. But I accept it because I accept everything. If it can be made to be good, it’ll be okay. And you can do great grooves on it. It can kickstart some songwriting, actually.
It’s a tool, when it’s used well.
Yes.
To close, is the plan to release another single, and have more live dates so you can continue to support the album?
Do you know, I have no idea. I only know that I’m an album person. In 1964, when I was signed to Pye Records, my dream was to have an LP contract, which I got with Decca. That was always the dream. After I got there, they did ‘Andy Warhol’ as a single and then they had a single of me singing something I can’t remember on one side and Mick Ronson doing ‘Slaughter On 10th Avenue’ on the other.
But actually, the world of singles hasn’t been my world. And every day, they wanted me to promote it on various social media things. I don’t look at TikTok and Instagram. People do it for me because I’m totally non techno. I drive an old diesel car that has wind down windows and a cassette machine. And I don’t see any point in buying some electric piece of shit that will break down. So I like old cars that work.
You’re old school.
I’m very much old school, yes, absolutely.
Fantastic, Dana. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you again and I’ve loved listening to the album.
Thanks so much, Jason. Marvellous, thanks for talking to me and see you next time.
Further information
Dana Gillespie – Spent The Day In Bed is out now
Dana Gillespie – First Love is released by Fretsore Records on 31 May 2024
