"First Love" is Dana Gillespie's new album full of covers

Having been involved in more than 70 albums over a career stretching back to the 60s folk scene, Dana Gillespie can reasonably be described as a veteran. Even so, for all that she's highly regarded by her peers and often remembered for her associations with David Bowie, Gillespie has arguably never received the plaudits so often accorded to elder musicians with comparable CVs.
It's to be hoped First Love changes this. Adapting a template set by Rick Rubin's work with Johnny Cash on the American Recordings series, it finds Gillespie performing a set, bar one song, made up of covers, including leftfield choices.
But, while Rubin went back to basics to capture The Man In Black's tombstone gravitas, First Love co-producers Marc Almond and his regular collaborator Tris Penna instead opt for giving Gillespie's bluesy, gutsy, indisputably authentic voice a contemporary, adult-pop sheen.

From the moment the opening bars of her cover of Green Day's Boulevard Of Broken Dreams kick in, it's clear this was the right choice. A song that always seemed overwrought as a mid-tempo emo-punk anthem gets a new clarity, simply sounding more grown up. 

Lana Del Rey's Gods And Monsters, a typically studied narrative of hedonism gone sour, is all the more powerful for being sung by someone who lived through the 70s. A duet with Almond on Leonard Cohen's Dance Me To The End Of Love is positively jaunty, albeit with mordant undertones.

We'll have to disagree on the wisdom of covering newer Morrissey songs but, if you are able to set aside some of Mozza's more dubious recent utterances, Spent The Day In Bed skitters along in fine fashion. 

By the time that you arrive at a recasting of Fleetwood Mac's Dreams as a piano ballad, via songs made famous by, among others, Bob Dylan, Jake Bugg and Python Lee Jackson (the perennial In A Broken Dream, sounding here like a lost James Bond theme), a late-career uptick for Gillespie seems highly likely.