DANA GILLESPIE - BOX OF SURPRISES [VINYL]

RSD 12/4/25:

Dana Gillespie’s second long player and first UK album Box of Surprises is being reissued on vinyl for the first time.

Dana was at the vanguard of the immerging female singer-songwriter scene and Box of Surprises is notable for being the first entirely self-penned album by a British female artist to be released in the UK on a major label. There were other distinguished British women publishing and singing their own songs at this point including fellow Decca labelmates Twinkle and Marianne Faithfull and in the wider folk / rock scene Sandy Denny and Christine McVie, but none of these artists had as yet released an album of entirely self-penned material. On the indie scene Bridget St

John released her self penned debut ‘Ask Me No Questions’ around the same time.Box of Surprises was produced by Mike Vernon, who was the leading producer of the British blues boom in the late '60s, working on discs by John Mayall, Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack, and Savoy Brown, and in fact the latter were hired to be the house band on Box of Surprises. The result could have been an out and out British blues as heard on the album’s title track, but in fact the record is just as stylistically varied as Dana’s debut Foolish Seasons, with folk, country and western and eastern influences all apparent in the albums stylistic makeup.

Aside from the bluesy title track, at least two other up-tempo songs on the album, ‘Like I’m A Clown’ and ‘I Was A Book’ could have been singles, but the album also contains some excellent ballads including ‘When Darkness Fell’ which recalls The Zombies, and ‘For David, the Next Day’, a country and western tinged song written for Dana’s childhood friend David Bowie, who years later referenced the track when he named his 2013 comeback album The Next Day. Eastern influences also appear on ‘Taffy’ and ‘I Would Cry,’ foreshadowing Dana’s later explorations of Indian music, and she also revisits the acid folk of her debut LP’s title tune.

Box of Surprises is one of those elusive one-off Decca diamonds that just like her debut somehow seemed to slip through the net and was seldom seen or heard, but connoisseurs of 60’s music have gradually become aware of its charms, and this new edition remastered by Andrew Batt from the master tapes and featuring an introduction by Dana herself will likely become just as collectable as the original.