BY ALESSANDRO CINELLI

Today my brother and I had the pleasure to join Dana Gillespie for tea.

On the trip to get to her house, we noted down some questions to ask her.

Dana is a highly enjoyable person and I am very fond of her company. Indeed, I have known her for a while now. Not many know that when her regular drummer Evan Jenkins can’t make it to play in a show, I am the next one on the list. 

Since 2016, I had the pleasure to drum for Dana Gillespie quite a few times today so I got to know her, for instance, a bit better than my brother does. 

She just wrote her biography and published it with the name Weren’t Born a Man, just like her 1974 album. If you hover on that name you might find a direct link to buy it (just 15 quids on Amazon) in case you want to dig deeper. Anyways, I got the book signed from Dana and I read it voraciously in a few days. Weren’t Born a Man is the story of her life, told from her cheerful point of view. Boy, did she have quite a life!

Great part of the book essentially is a snap shot of what I have always liked to be told about England in the 60s and 70s, a place whose fame vaguely echoes today and this society of overacting humans, all distracted by socials and cheap thrills of consumerism. 

In the frame of a rocking and rolling London, where Eric Clapton was just a lad with a soon-to-boom career, David Bowie a companion to go to open mics with, where you could hang with Bob Dylan in some Soho bar (with the possibility of encountering the Stones or the Who), Dana thrived and forged her ultimate shape. The British diva of Jazz and Blues counts more than seventy albums published, plus a rather successful career both as an actress and as a singer. In fact, she played Mary Magdalene in the first London production of Jesus Christ Superstar in 1972. She has been around the music business for more than half century, travelling the world and performing on some pretty bloody amazing venues too. 

All of that she inked down the pages of her biography with a style that is unmistakable if, like me, you know the character a bit. Dana speaks what to me seems to be a close-to-perfection English for eloquence and vocabulary, definitely due to her noble origins and education. What I think is funny, is that she is capable of literally spewing out expressions that only someone who frequented rockers, punkers, bohemian poets, harlots, junkies could know. 

When asked what instrument she would learn if she could go back in time, she didn’t hold back saying that on of them must definitely be the electric guitar, as the guitar is the extension of your dick in terms of sensuality of the instrument. 

Dana is a concentrate of epic quotes and flares of wisdom. Every time I get to chat with her, I always regret not having set a recorder in order to learn all of her expressions so this time I decided to film our chat with my brother’s phone and I sort of edited the video to make it look like an informal interview. 

The three of us sat on the sofa of her living room, trying to stay as close to each other as possible in order to get in the frame. She served tea and my brother got the mug with the writing UNT on it and the handle acting as a big ‘C’ before it. 

We had many questions prepared even if we knew that she would set the conversation in a way that we would not manage to ask them all.

As soon as we sat down, she declared that she would never reply to questions like who was her favourite artist or who or where she got her inspiration from etc. because, in fact, it is very silly to ask this to a woman like Dana Gillespie, who loved every man she slept with and got a little inspired by every soul she came across. I looked at my brother -who by the way, was becoming as red as a tomato - and I nodded to take off at least half of the questions that might disagree with Dana’s instructions. 

I believe if it was not the heat that got my brother red, it must have been the presence of Dana. She doesn’t look at you, she scopes down and makes you feel like a little thing. Yet, she makes you feel at ease. She loves to talk but she also loves to listen to what somebody has to say. Her voice is low and placid, sturdy as her English in opposition of us two little Italians who where there to impress. She even treated us with some Latin. 

Then the phone rang in the middle of the conversation and she picked up the receiver. I hadn’t seen a receiver in years now.  We thought it would be fun to leave it in the final cut of the video. 

So, eventually it turned out that Dana loves to be interviewed and may I say that she knows very well how to answer questions. She naturally links answers of a question to the other without knowing what’s next, so that our list of questions to ask shrunk drastically. In the end it all looked like a typical English tea chit chat, and the clock on the wall stroke 4pm. 

If you would like to explore more of Dana before buying the book (it is very entertaining, I am not overstating) you can listen to some of her music. Her personality already comes out from the lyrics of her songs. Sometimes I find her so amusing, others genial. I even took time to gather a Spotify playlist for you with the Dana’s songs I love the most. Many of them I knew from playing with her and when I will have finally listened to all her 70+ records, the playlist will probably be a few songs longer!