Being good-looking when I was younger was, I have to say, a great advantage. So was being known as ‘busty Dana Gillespie’ though it got a bit tiresome when critics wrote more about my 44 in boobs than my latest single.
It sounds bizarre now, with everyone so uptight and politically correct, but there were no rules back in the 1960s. I was making records before I was old enough to smoke or drink — even singing on David Bowie’s breakthrough Ziggy Stardust album — and as this was the glorious Sixties, making love was all part of the scene.
Ziggy was 70s.
But then as is oft pointed out, if you can recall which decade the 60s were then you weren’t there…..
She looked like an extremely naughty strumpet from that village in the Safety Dance video
https://0themastercylinder0.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/dana-gillespie-8-x-10-glossy-photo-reprint.jpg
Oh my word Steve. That’s just…delicious. I’ve come over all strange. I think I’ll have to go & have a lie down on someone.
Sadly, I remember the sixties.
I don’t remember her at all. Did she ever marry?
Magnificent upper works. I wonder if she ploughed through anyone and everyone in the 70s but only recalls the famous, or if she had a knack for picking a star?
I know actually reading stuff is hard, but as it says in the article, she met him in the, well, sixties, when he was still Davie Jones. A contemporary mine at school had the Davie Jones and the Lower Third 45, which was crap. Always hoped he hung on to it and turned it into a retirement fund.
So Bowie went from the luscious Dana to Lulu.
That’s one hell of a downgrade, almost in the Diana/Camilla class.
Ah, the young Dana Gillespie, following the basic show business mantra for females, “If you haven’t got any talent, show ’em your tits”. A mantra which has continued through the years, with Amanda Holden appearing to be the latest, with her gownless evening straps on BGT.
It’s a sad fact that the 60s don’t start on 1st January 1960, but sometime later – and a similar effect in most decades. The Beatles, for example, don’t really have a national presence until Autumn 1962, nor were miniskirts widely worn until about then.
Sod it, here it comes again, apologies in advance, oldies but goldies, very ON topic:
https://youtu.be/cleCtBP0o5Y
Finished the Biskind’s Warren Beatty biography, I’m all drained and sans-juices.
I do remember a horrible empty feeling in 1970 that the 60s hadn’t lasted forever as anticipated and I would have to grow up and get a job.
In the USA at least, “The Sixties” actually means about 1966 to about 1974. I can see why she’d mention Ziggy Stardust as part of The Sixties.
@Dennis
Good point.
Dominic Sandbrook’s British cultural/political history “Never Had It So Good” detaches the first part of the Sixties and attaches it to the latter half of the Fifties, with which (in his view) it more properly belongs. Suez to the rise of the Beatles is treated as a coherent time period. From 1964 to 1970 he treats as a separate era (covered in his book “White Heat”) which I think many people would recognise as the “real” Sixties.
Interestingly he compares to several other authors’ ideas of what constitutes “the Sixties”. Robert Hewison goes with 1960-1975, Mellor and Gervereau pick 1962-1973, Hobsbawm situated it in a “golden age” of affluence from the late-40s to mid-70s, Arthur Marwick suggests a “long sixties” from 1958-1974 separated into “First Strirrings” (58-63), “High Sixties” (64-69) and “Catching Up” (69-74). In the UK context, Sandbrook argues the correct starting point is as early as 1956, to capture Suez as a line-in-the-sand between a previous and more modern self-image of Britain, and culturally to incorporate “Rock Around The Clock” and “Look Back in Anger”. Any earlier and you get back to distinctly unsixties rationing (which clung on, post-war, a long time in the UK).
For the end of the Sixties, Sandbrook plumps for a round 1970, arguing that too many distinctly “Seventies” trends started very early in that decade (he cites “inflation, strikes, the IRA bombings, football hooliganism, progressive rock and the ecology movement”) that contrasted with the optimistic and carefree Swinging London, and that 1970 marks the end of several eras – the Beatles split, England’s time as World Cup holders came to an end, and Harold Wilson lost the election (didn’t find this one quite so convincing myself since he was back later, but things were never quite the same for him). He does concede the case it ran on a bit later, perhaps 1973 (the OPEC oil shock and Britain joins the EC), but reckons 1975 is too much of a stretch.
Interesting that his arguments about the end being in 1970 are so UK-specific. Can definitely see a case for it stretching longer in other countries.
Perhaps I linked this one last night, can’t remember. 60’s cinema starts dying, early on, to be later replaced with Coppola/Scorsese et al.
https://youtu.be/6eN_pU8g_UU
What hapepened to our Dennis? Dennis? Where are you? Ohio? What’s your view on alleged voter fraud?
What’s the latest?
BiS – I believe she would’ve given Sid James a heart attack
Jussi – Dennis has retreated to his cozy delusion bubble where clit-snipping Somali Mahoundans are as American as apple pie and the Democrats can be trusted to respect laws.
“The Sixties” is one of those floating festivals. Many times I read/hear “1970s hippies/flower power/etc” and find myself mentally correcting it “no, you mean *60s* not 70s. 1970s was Slade and Black Sabbath and stuff. When I first saw Jason King it was clearly a programme from the 1960s, of an era with The Avengers. I was surprised when I discovered it was from 1972.
MBE,
I don’t know what Dominic Sandbrook was doing in the ’60s but I can assure you that football hooliganism was definitely a thing. I started going to Elland Road around ’66/’67 and when we moved to Huddersfield in ’68 I started watching Huddersfield Town them at Leeds Road and witnessed some fairly serious fighting and hooliganism. After we’d moved I found out one of my school friends had done a bit of time in borstal for it and was on one of the bans that meant he had to go to a police station every time Leeds were playing.
In the ’70s it got taken over by organised gangs who used football matches as an excuse to meet up for a good old scrap along the lines of the old Mods and Rockers at Brighton and Southend, but that wasn’t the start of football hooliganism by any stretch.
I remember the 1960s.
They started about 1964, and ended about 1975.
Dennis, “you ain’t even there”.
First one to say the movie gets a virtual pint. No peeking on the internets.
Mrs Thatcher was leading the Conservative Party from the second week of February 1975; Saigon did not fall until the beginning of May of the same year. Ergo the duration of the 1970s was slightly in excess of negative three months.
If only it had seemed like it at the time!
Instead of doing a study on 1930’s anti-tank guns which became almost instantly obsolete, we’re talking Bofors etc, here, I’ll do this…
Times, they are a-changin’
https://youtu.be/90WD_ats6eE
Jussi –
I’ve already ruined a thread battling the Three Stooges on voter fraud and the election. No need to do it here. All I’ll say is that there’s a difference between an allegation and evidence, and the difference is important.
In the USA the ‘60s ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon.
Dennis
“In the USA the ‘60s ended with the resignation of Richard Nixon.”
I know, It’s all explained in Shampoo (1975), based in 1968. It’s a wonderful film.
https://youtu.be/mwJKMWxXChU
‘It’s a sad fact that the 60s don’t start on 1st January 1960, but sometime later’
Witchie, I’d argue that the 19th century started in 1815 and ended in 1914. I think Flashman would agree with me.
Perhaps I should also consider whether the 20th century started in 1920 and is ending just now.
I said the 60s started in 1966. I’d correct that to 1965… The year of the Watts riots.
@BIND
Yeah, “football hooliganism” surprised me too, bearing in mind that violence at matches has been recorded on and off as far back as the early days of the Football League in the 1880s, and the term “football hooliganism” was itself coined during media concern in the mid-60s. The 70s might be more associated with the organised violence of the “firms” and the introduction of fencing. I’m not sure when most clubs brought segregation in. Statistically I’m sure football violence rose substantially in the 70s but thinking of the 60s as free from it seems a bit rose-tinted specs to me, perhaps wanting to situate the World Cup triumph in a more idyllic age.
Despite my eclectic tastes in music, Dana seems to have slipped under my radar. Having searched Spotify I listened to the top search result, Ten Inch Record. This contains the most unsubtle piece of innuendo that I have ever heard.
I’d say there were two sixties, as far as the UK was concerned. There was the Swinging Sixties probable started with Cliff Richard’s film The Young Ones in 61 & encompasses early Beatlemania, Mods, Twiggy, Carnaby Street etc. Then there was another sixties started getting underway in 66. Much driven by US influences. That brings us Flower Power, the Counter Culture, Oz, Jimmy Hendrix.
The first 60’s was very much stage managed from the top. Cliff Richard was a marketable act. So were the Beatles. That’s how they started. Five blokes from Liverpool wanted into the entertainment industry.(A friend’s mother was peripherally involved with their naissance & she was from a music hall family.) It was always about the money. The second sixties comes from underneath. Rolling Stones were from the British blues scene. That really starts with people like Alexis Korner & Cyril Davies. This was about the time I left school & home, lived in Earls Court & Notting Hill & very much part of the scene. They were all musicians who primarily liked playing music. Half of them seemed to be working at Walls Pie factory, over in W. London to subsidise it. No one ever expected to make any money. Musicians didn’t. Much the same applied to everything else. You did something because you wanted to do it. Initially it was Central London & a few outposts. Kensington Market, Portobello Road, the cheap end of the Kings Road. A few stops east on the District Line & you were in another world. The guy upstairs from my Powis Square bedsit was a draft dodging Yank folk musician had actually cut a record. He had an English pal used to sprawl in the corner, stoned out of his head, picking chords out an acoustic. Marc Bolan. Some point or other it went countrywide & then global. Surprise to everybody.
I suppose the second sixties ended in 73 when the final chopper lifted off from the US embassy roof in Saigon. The Counter Culture had won. Or gone commercial & lost.
Annus Mirabilis
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)