Dana Gillespie

Dana Gillespie

Dana Gillespie is a singer, songwriter and actress from Woking, United Kingdom. Born in 1949, she begins recording and performing in her teens and builds a career that moves from teen pop and folk to rock and then blues. Her work includes more than 45 albums, and she appears across music, theatre and film.

Early career and recordings

Gillespie starts out recording folk music in the mid-1960s. Some of her teenage recordings fall into teen pop, including the 1965 single “Thank You Boy”, written by John Carter and Ken Lewis and produced by Jimmy Page. She later records an album in 1973, Weren’t Born a Man, produced by David Bowie and Mick Ronson, after performing backing vocals on Bowie’s “It Ain’t Easy” from Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

Her later recordings are mainly blues-based, and she appears with the London Blues Band. In the 1980s she is a member of the Austrian Mojo Blues Band. She also records three albums in Sanskrit under the pseudonym Third Man before returning to the Dana Gillespie name.

Theatre and film

Gillespie is also an actress. She plays Mary Magdalene in the first London production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Jesus Christ Superstar, which opens at the Palace Theatre in 1972, and she appears on the Original London Cast album. She also appears in London West End productions of Jesus Christ Superstar, Tommy and Catch My Soul. On screen, she appears with Dudley Moore in The Hound Of The Baskervilles and stars in Ken Russell’s Mahler.

Blues work and releases

Gillespie releases several blues albums through Ace, including Blue Job, recorded in 1982 and built around blues songs with a humorous risqué twist; Below the Belt, produced by Mike Vernon; and Sweet Meat, which centres on songs about “fat” and “thin”. These three albums are later combined on the CDs Blues It Up and Hot Stuff. Another release, Staying Power, reflects her long connection with blues music, and she also issues Live with the London Blues Band.

Songwriting, touring and recognition

Songwriting is a major part of Gillespie’s work, and Bob Dylan says that he likes her songs. Her touring schedule takes her to many European blues festivals, and in 2002 she takes her road band, the London Blues Band, on the first major tour by a western band of India, playing large venues across the country.

She receives recognition from the British Blues Connection and Blueprint Magazine, which vote her Top British Female Blues Vocalist between 1992 and 1996 and later place her in their Hall of Fame. She also founds and organises the Mustique Blues Festival with Basil Charles, a charity event held on the Caribbean island of Mustique to raise funds for scholarships for children in St. Vincent.

Early life

Gillespie is born Richenda Antoinette de Winterstein Gillespie in Woking, Surrey, to Anne Francis Roden Winterstein Gillespie and Hans Henry Winterstein Gillespie, a London-based radiologist of Austrian nobility. Her older sister is Nicola Henrietta St. John Gillespie. In 1962, she is British Junior Water Skiing Champion.