Everything in singer Dana Gillespie’s life is colourful. Her hair. Her clothing. Her furnishings. Her language. And yes, oh yes, her sex life.
In the days of the Swinging Sixties, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Keith Moon and Bob Dylan were the randiest of rock gods.
Dana bedded them all – and had a threesome with Bowie and first wife Angie.
They were the days when the last man – and woman – standing would end up in bed at the end of a drug-fuelled night.
Dana documents her sexcapades in brilliant new memoir Weren’t Born A Man – also the title of her 1973 album.
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And when I meet her she is very quick to shatter any illusions that long-term love was on anybody’s mind.
She explains: “Nobody wants to shack up permanently with those kind of guys, you want to have fun with them. People say put a ring on it, but b******s to that.”
Of all of her conquests, The Who’s wildman drummer Moon – just 32 when he died from a drug overdose in 1978 – was “never bland or boring… the nicest sort of lunatic”.
And he always wanted sex in bizarre places.
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Blues singer and actress Dana, who went on to star alongside the likes of Art Gartfunkel, was aged 17 and one of England’s top young water-skiers when she met Moon on a London film set.
Now 71, she says: “Everything written about him is true. He really lived life to the full and had an enormous appetite for drink, pills and sex.
“All those pep pills meant he could go on for hours and hours.
“He didn’t really care when or where.
“His kick was shocking people. We had wild sex in some pretty strange places which included a pleasure boat and The Tunnel Of Love in Battersea Funfair.”
But Dana never wanted their relationship to turn serious, adding: “I’ve always loved drummers but it’s one of those things where you don’t want to be Mrs Moon.”
She says it was Bob Dylan, 79, who captured her mind – even if he was obsessed with her figure.
The American famously alluded to her boobs when asked what he was most looking forward to about touring England in 1966.
But Dana insists Dylan’s mind is what left her enchanted. After their fling, the pair remained friends and in 1997 he turned up at her house in South Kensington to invite her on tour.
Sitting on the same sofa where he sipped fennel tea, I ask Dana what captivated her the most about the Blowing In The Wind legend.
“Well, I think with Bob it is his mind,” she says. “A razor-sharp brain is a turn-on. He is an enigma. He is like an iceberg and we just see the tiny tip of him.
“But you move into a different world when you are in that stratosphere of existence.
“When he came to my house he went straight to my bookshelf and I like a man who does that. He went straight to a book of quotes. He is very into that kind of thing.”
Dylan has always been mysterious about his love life and even hid his second wife Carolyn Dennis and child from public gaze for 15 years.
Dana once asked him how many children he had. She says: “He said he wasn’t sure but he thought seven or eight”.
But memory has also failed Dana on several occasions – and she finds it hard to remember the finer details of her sex sessions with Rolling Stones frontman Sir Mick Jagger.
Bandmate Keith Richards famously wrote about the size of Jagger’s manhood in his autobiography Life.
The guitarist said: “Marianne Faithfull had no fun with his tiny todger.”
Dana reckons Keith was wrong to give such personal details, saying: “There are lots of things I could dish the dirt on but it’s best not to.”
Grinning, she adds: “Little might have been the operative word but I can’t remember.”
What she does recall is: “Everyone would get stoned and whoever was able to function at the end of the night would end up in bed together.
“That’s the way it was. I do know that, even if a guy is hung like a donkey, the effect of too much cocaine is that he will have a tinier todger.”
The last time she saw Jagger was in Mustique in 2005.
Dana admits rockers these days have to clean up their act otherwise they end up dead.
She says: “Mick only has a glass of champagne now.
“When I went to his house in Mustique for dinner we all smoked a spliff together.
“My mum was with me and called it a ‘Mick Jagger cigarette’.”
Dana first had met Bowie – who died aged 69 in 2016 – when she was 15.
They hit it off in a London club and Dana later became best pals with his first wife Angie.
She says: “Angie didn’t mind if I slept in David’s bed, because we were best friends, so ‘what’s mine is yours’.
“Sometimes he would say to me – after a threesome with her – that he preferred having sex with me while Angie would be standing there shouting directions.
“It wasn’t a kind of faithful/unfaithful thing; it was just a ‘**** with your buddies’ occasionally.”
Bowie wrote the song Andy Warhol for Dana and it featured on her 1973 album – one of 70 she has recorded.
In the early 1980s Dana read a book about Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba.
Until he died in 2011, she regularly travelled to his retreat – and was inspired by its mantra “love all, serve all”.
She says: “I became a volunteer at the Royal Marsden Hospital, around the corner from where I lived.
“I also learned enough Sanskrit to record several albums of Bhajan [devotional] music.
“It was time to move on to higher things.
“Yes, I enjoyed partying when the London scene was at its wildest – but I now feel much more fulfilled.
“At 71, I’m still recording, still doing gigs, still getting a buzz out of it all.
“I’m also quite happy sitting quietly, sewing a tapestry and knowing that I have lived an amazing, charmed life.”
- Weren’t Born A Man by Dana Gillespie is published by Hawksmoor on January 18 at £24.99. © Dana Gillespie 2021. To pre-order a copy, go to hawksmoorbookstore.com