Often overlooked within the music of the 1970s hitmaking powerhouse Queen are the contributions of the quartet’s rock-solid bassist, John Deacon. Take, for example, his baroque arpeggios on “The Millionaire Waltz” from the album A Day at the Races. Or, from The Game, his jaunty, swinging rockabilly lines on “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” and, of course, his pumping, snapping funk pulse on “Another One Bites the Dust.” Deft, robust, and deliciously melodic, Deacon’s playing is an indispensable element of Queen’s magical music. It’s a signature feature that carries and embellishes the tunes while somehow also staying out of their way. Most listeners during Queen’s 1970s heyday, however, were more fixated on the gloriously over-the-top pomp of the band’s late front man Freddie Mercury or the sizzling flash of its heroic guitarist, Brian May. But not all of them.
One, a little girl in urban Pennsylvania was laser focused on the understated Deacon and what he did. And her attentions would eventually have her soaring to heights in the music world that few, least of all herself, could have imagined. “Queen was my favorite group,” recalls Gail Ann Dorsey over coffee and a cookie in Kingston. “I totally loved Freddie Mercury. As a performer, he was the greatest to me. But I really loved John Deacon’s playing, how he always served the song.” On bass Dorsey has served the songs of many big names very well herself. Among them: Bryan Ferry, Lenny Kravitz, the B-52s, Tears for Fears, the National, Gang of Four, the Indigo Girls, Ani DiFranco, Jane Siberry, and, most famously, from 1997 to 2013, David Bowie.
She thanks her family for igniting her passion for music. “My mom would always have AM radio on in the kitchen,” says the musician, who was the youngest of five children. “I’d hear the Carpenters, the Fifth Dimension, Dr. John, Gladys Knight, Olivia Newton John, Donny Hathaway, people like that. My siblings were all older, and they were into Jimi Hendrix, Rare Earth, Cream, and the more ‘FM’ artists. [The late 1960s and early 1970s were] a brilliant time for music.”
Philly Soul
Dorsey grew up in West Philadelphia. “It was very segregated, something like 98 percent Black,” she says. “The [racial boundary] lines were clear, it was street to street. But the irony I learned early in life was that while Black communities are always painted out as being ‘dangerous,’ they’re really the most welcoming communities. One of my best friends was a white girl—we bonded over our love of Queen. She was always welcome at my family’s house, but I wasn’t welcome at hers. I was angry about [segregation] because it was robbing me of so many basic human things. I’ve never understood why it’s an issue, all over the world, that kind of conditioning.” Yet such regressive conditioning wasn’t powerful enough to hold Dorsey back.
Gail Ann Dorsey on the block she grew up on in Philadelphia in 1977.
At age nine, she decided she wanted to play guitar, and some of her chief contemporary influences—Queen’s May, Grand Funk Railroad’s Mark Farner, Chicago’s Terry Kath, Heart’s Ann Wilson—were white guitarists. “I always knew I wanted to play music, even before I got a guitar,” she remembers. “I’d go to Sam Goody to buy records, and I’d see the bulletin-board ads there and at music stores by local bands looking for musicians. I noticed that 90 percent of the ads were from guitar or keyboard players looking for people who played other instruments, and a lot of them were looking for bass players. So I said to my mom, ‘Mom, will you buy me a bass?’ And she got me one. I’m totally self-taught, I still don’t read music, but when I was 14 I got into this Top 40 band. I was underage and they played at bars, so I’d come on, do a 20- or 30-minute set with them, and then just go hide.”
Scene Change
Despite her early success as a professional musician, by the time she’d reached college age Dorsey had been drawn to a different creative medium: movies. The screenplays and Super 8 shorts she’d made to accompany some of the music she’d begun composing earned her a full scholarship to the California Institute of the Arts to study film and video. But the cinematic spell didn’t last. “I couldn’t deal with the Hollywood movie world,” she says. “I had given my bass away when I went to college, but I got another one, and a four-track tape machine, and I moved to New York to try to do music again.”
She spent a year there, writing songs and paying her rent with record store jobs—but making little headway as a musician. In 1983 Dorsey figured she’d try London. “I had a friend there who I’d met in film school,” says the bass player, who emigrated that August. “He played music as well and had a space where I could live.” The pair formed a duo called 20To, a partial reference to Dorsey’s age at the time, 22, which soon brought a development deal with CBS Records. Next came studio and live work with Boy George, French singer Anne Pigalle, Donny Osmond, and others. Her first big break, though, would not be as a bassist.
Open Mic
In 1985 she got a call from percussionist John Stevens, who was assembling the Charlie Watts Orchestra, a big band led by the Rolling Stones drummer, ahead of its premiere at famed London jazz club Ronnie Scott’s. “Charlie had planned to just do instrumental jazz standards, but John pointed out to him that they should have some vocal numbers to break up the set,” Dorsey remembers. “John liked my singing, so he asked me to sing with the band.” The high-profile gig led to a soulful solo performance of Bobby Womack’s “Stop on By” on BBC-TV’s music program “The Tube.”
Watching were reps from Warner Music Group, who signed her for her 1987 debut The Corporate World, its title a barely veiled dig at her newfound environment. “There were a lot of executives asking me, ‘Where’s the single?’ when I was recording it,” she says about the album, which featured Eric Clapton and Gang of Four guitarist Andy Gill but did not sell well. “After a while, I just got fed up.” Released from Warner, Dorsey took a year off from performing but kept writing. Island Records founder Chris Blackwell snapped her up for 1992’s Rude Blue, a set that boasts players from James Brown’s horn section. “We had a lot of fun making that album,” she says, although, in a familiar scenario, her eclectic style confused the company’s marketing wing, and she got out of her contract. A free agent again, she became a member of Tears for Fears in 1993 and opted the following year to return to the US to tour with the Indigo Girls.
Mountain Move
“I wanted to be near New York, but I didn’t want to live in the city,” Dorsey says. “One of my friends, Louise Goffin [the daughter of Carole King and Gerry Goffin and herself a singer-songwriter], said, ‘Hey, you should come to Woodstock!’ Another of my closest friends [fellow erstwhile Gang of Four, B-52s, and Indigo Girls bassist], Sara Lee, was there.” In 1994 she found a place in Glenford that proved to be transitory. “I spent a year there but I’m a still kind of a city girl, and I wanted to be somewhere that had sidewalks and coffee places,” she explains. “So I got a loft in Uptown Kingston. Uptown was deserted then; it was so beautiful, I saw so much possibility. I ended up living there for 22 years, it was the best apartment I ever had. I’d say to everybody back then, ‘Someday Kingston’s going to be really happening,’ and they’d laugh.” While recording 1995’s Raoul and the Kings of Spain with Tears for Fears, Dorsey got another call that would change her life—dramatically.
“I was staying with [Tears for Fears] leader Roland Orzabal and Roland’s wife came running over to us. She said David Bowie was on the line, and he’d asked if I could call him in five minutes. I called the number, thinking it was a joke. But it was really him. He said he was about to do a tour with Nine Inch Nails and asked if I’d like to be in his band. I told Roland and he said, ‘Go!’”
What followed were nine magical years with Bowie. Dorsey was an integral collaborator of the rock icon for his studio albums Earthling, Heathen, Reality, and The Next Day, and she became his on-stage vocal foil. “It was surreal,” says the artist, who released another solo album, I Used to Be…, in 2004. “Every time a tour ended, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get called [by Bowie to tour] again, but he kept calling me back.” Perhaps the most wonderfully surreal moment, though, came when her boss asked if she’d sing the lines originally sung by her departed idol Freddie Mercury for performances of his and Queen’s 1981 hit “Under Pressure.” “I couldn’t believe it,” she recalls, her eyes welling with emotion at the memory. “But he just put it out there nonchalantly, a challenge: ‘You’ve got two weeks [to get ready].’ He saw things in me that I didn’t know I had. He was so good at inspiring others around him to be better.
Ashes to Ashes
Yet it was Dorsey who would inspire something in Bowie: his latter-day love of, and eventual move to, the Hudson Valley. “I’d be in New York recording or rehearsing with him and when we were done, he’d joke, ‘Now Gail’s gotta go back to be with the pot-smoking hippies up in Woodstock,” she says. “But then we worked on some of [2002’s] Heathen at Allaire Studios outside of Woodstock and he fell in love with the area.” The singer bought land on an adjacent mountain and lived there until he died in 2016. His ashes were scattered on the property after his passing.
Now with the impending spring release of The Appearance of Life, Dorsey’s first album under her own name in 21 years, she’s stepping back into the solo limelight. “I have witnessed Gail’s growth as a musician, a songwriter, and, most especially, as a singer, deepen and mature,” says Sara Lee. “Gail has the ability to connect with her audience on a very deep level.” One of the album’s tracks, the tender “Maybellene,” addresses the difficult topic of suicide and was first performed at a benefit for teen mental health organization the Maya Gold Foundation. Its first single, the optimistic “(It Takes All Kinds) To Make a World,” references one of her mother’s favorite sayings. “I feel like I’ve settled into the music that’s deepest in my heart, ’70s AM music like Carly Simon, Jackson Browne, and Carole King,” says Dorsey. “I hope the songs give people something that they can relate to and find comfort and joy in.”
“Gail’s talents more than measure up to some of the great artists she has accompanied over past decades,” offers Lee. “And now could not be a better time for her to share them with the world.”
The Appearance of Life is planned for release in spring 2026.
This article appears in December 2025.
