‘There were no rules then’: Dana Gillespie’s 1960s childhood

Although I can understand why Dana Gillespie might choose to call her memoir after her most famous album, for the first 170 pages I remained convinced she should have taken a leaf from John Cleland and called it Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. For hers has been an extraordinary life (or perhaps half life, as the trail of hi-jinks runs its course by the end of the 1970s). And so, despite reading at times like a cross between Terry Southern’s Candy and Confessions of a Window Cleaner’s screenplay — but with A-listers the ones shaking their sticks — as an evocation of the 1960s SW7-style, Weren’t Born a Man rings wholly true.

By 13, having already lost her virginity, Dana was occupying a self-contained basement flat in South Kensington beneath a four-storey house in which both parents lived with their replacement spouses. It was an era when child care services were rarely called to places such as Thurloe Square. Dana, looking back, seems unbothered: ‘It sounds bizarre now, with everyone so uptight and politically correct, but there were no rules then.’

Said basement had its own entrance, so once the word got out (and how), it soon became the default crash pad for any would-be musician who left a club too late for the last Tube and too ‘brassic’ to get a cab home. Looking and acting far older than her years, by 14 she had been to bed with David Bowie, followed by Bob Dylan at 15, Jimmy Page at 16, Roman Polanksi at 17 and Michael Caine and Sean Connery by her majority.

Not everyone shared Dana’s bed, but when she set her heart on meeting a guy — and as she says on the penultimate page ‘in those days the way you met people was that you slept with them’ — her oft-mentioned 44” bosom was better than an all-access backstage pass.

When she crashed Dylan’s first UK meet’n’greet at the Savoy (not the Dorchester, as stated), the instant attraction was such that Dylan told a security guard: ‘She’s with me.’