Bowie's friend from the age of fifteen. The first London Mary Magdalene. The UK's long-reigning Queen of the Blues, with more than seventy albums. And the woman who gave the Temple of Art and Music its name. This December she comes home to the room she named.
“Dana is a very, very, very, very, very, very excellent songwriter.”David Bowie, live on BBC Radio 1's John Peel session, June 1971
British music's golden era happened in a handful of rooms: a few clubs on Wardour Street, two or three Soho studios, one basement flat in South Kensington. Dana Gillespie was in almost every one of them, often the youngest person there.
A Friday night at the Marquee on Wardour Street. The support act was a seventeen-year-old with lemon-yellow hair, billed as Davy Jones and the Mannish Boys. He came up behind Dana while she was brushing her waist-length hair, took the brush from her hand, and asked if he could come home with her: he'd missed his last train to Bromley.
He kept coming back. David Bowie gave Dana her first guitar lessons. The first song he taught her was “Love Is Strange”.
One afternoon Bowie rushed round to her basement flat, “The Bunker”, with his twelve-string. “Listen to this, I wrote it an hour ago.”
The song was “Space Oddity”. Six months later it was his first hit, timed to the moon landing. Dana heard it first.
Two years later he wrote “Andy Warhol” for her, sang it with her on John Peel's show, and she sang backing vocals on “It Ain't Easy”, which ended up on Ziggy Stardust.
She auditioned for the chorus of Jesus Christ Superstar in skin-tight jeans, singing the Beatles' “Get Back”. Seven days before opening night she was called to sing “I Don't Know How to Love Him” alone on the empty Palace Theatre stage. The director told her: “You will be the new Mary. You have six days to learn the role.”
Nuns picketed the stage door until the Archbishop of Canterbury came on opening night and gave it his blessing. And in the chorus, a young Richard O'Brien, turned down for Herod, went home and wrote The Rocky Horror Show.
Later came films with Ken Russell and Nic Roeg; in Bad Timing she acted alongside Art Garfunkel and Harvey Keitel.
Signed alongside Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop to Tony Defries' MainMan, Dana moved to New York and toured America. At Reno Sweeney's, the audience one gala week included Bowie, Bette Midler, Dudley Moore, Raquel Welch and Bob Dylan.
She took this Polaroid of David Bowie and Mick Jagger herself.
Dana knew Mustique before it was famous, when the roads were dirt tracks and the island ran on rainwater. With her friend Basil Charles OBE she founded the Mustique Blues Festival and ran it for two decades, bringing in Mick Jagger, Ronnie Wood and blues greats to raise scholarships for the children of St Vincent.
In the late sixties she sang on session records next to a young pianist called Reg Dwight, who told her one afternoon he was changing his name to Elton John. In 1997 Bob Dylan asked her to open his UK tour; at Wembley, Queen's Roger Taylor sat in on drums.
More than seventy albums later, she is the UK's long-reigning Queen of the Blues.
Singer · songwriter · TAM Fellow
From Palermo to London: Gemma moved here at eleven without speaking English, and music became her first language.
She has written sixteen songs and released three: “Smile Like She Did” (October 2025), “Another Stupid Fight” (January 2026) and “Mask” (March 2026), an ISC 2025 semi-finalist.
A TAM Fellow mentored by Dana Gillespie, she gave the world premiere of Dana’s 1966 song “Foolish Seasons” at TAM on 31 May 2026.
Joining Dana on Wednesday 16 December: Gemma Schito, the Palermo-born singer-songwriter Dana mentors as a TAM Fellow, and the voice of the Christmas single Under the Same Sky. Unwrap the tag for her story.
Dana's new photo book, What Memories We Make (Hawksmoor Publishing, 2026), named after a song from the album she made with Bowie. Six decades in pictures, from bridesmaid to Bowie, Mustique, India, and the Temple of Art and Music.
Her official autobiography: 400 pages and more than 150 photographs, most never seen before. Bowie and Dylan, Jimmy Page and Elton John, Mary Magdalene and Mustique (Hawksmoor Publishing, 2020).
“Spending time with Dana was very special. She was magical, and helped me overcome my shyness. She knew my story before I did!”Sir Elton John
Play “The Best Christmas Ever” with stories from the memoir over the video, then send it on as a Christmas card.
In 1964, fifteen-year-old Dana painted her basement orange and scarlet, lit incense and called it her temple.
In November 2020 she crossed the river to a converted paper factory at 42 Newington Causeway, did a livestream, and phoned the next morning to say: call it the Temple of Art and Music. Same word, different room, fifty-six years later. On 16 December she plays the room she named.
Know a Bowie fan? An Elton fan? Send them an invitation to Dana’s night, with a photo from her archive and a note from you. It opens on WhatsApp, or copy the link anywhere.
Dana's night is part of The Best Christmas Ever. Times are announced soon. The more of you there are, the less each ticket costs, and startup teams get their own pack.
| Ticket | Per person |
|---|---|
| Standard | £22 |
Stories from Dana Gillespie's memoir Weren't Born a Man (Hawksmoor Publishing, 2020) and its first draft, I Rest My Case. Photographs from Dana Gillespie's archive, as published in Weren't Born a Man and What Memories We Make (Hawksmoor Publishing, 2026); Salford 1973 by Kevin Cummins; Bowie and Jagger, 1974, by Dana Gillespie.
TEMPLE OF ART AND MUSIC