The Times (1999) Theatre: Barbara Dickson is relishing tonight's return to the West End. Clive Davis reports
SPEND A LITTLE TIME WITH HER
Being a perennial pop star suits some people: can you imagine Tom Jones ever hanging up the leather trousers and spending his middle years mowing the green, green grass of home? But when Barbara Dickson turned 40 ten years ago, things just didn't feel right. She didn't want to turn her back on music altogether, but she had also had enough of her middle-of-the-road image.
"That was a very strange time for me," she says. "I'd always thought that what I did had a certain worth. I'm not the most radical performer, but I do have a spunky streak in me. I didn't like the idea of firing endless anodyne songs at a Radio 2 audience."
Acting provided a solution. Dickson had already given more than a hint of her talents in Willy Russell's 1983 musical, "Blood Brothers". She starred as Mrs Johnstone in the original Liverpool Playhouse production, and repeated her triumph in the West End. Then in the Nineties came ITV's vice series, "Band Of Gold", in which as the dishevelled Anita Braithwaite - tart with a heart and no dress sense - Dickson upset all the preconceptions. This week sees her take on another warts-and-all role - this time as the pools winner Viv Nicholson in Steve Brown and Justin Greene's new musical "Spend Spend Spend".
Nicholson is one of those Sixties tabloid figures who remain firmly fixed in folk memory. Wealthy overnight (she won £152,000 in 1961, equal to almost £3 million today), the brash Yorkshirewoman set about disposing of her cash in a whirl of conspicuous consumption that supplied the press with the daily equivalent of Posh and Becks's wedding.
The story ended in tears, naturally. Old friends were alienated and the money soon disappeared, leaving an unrepentant Nicholson back where she started. Five husbands later, and now a Jehovah's Witness, she lives modestly in Castleford.
"Spend Spend Spend" is not the first time this riches-to-rags story has been told. In 1977 the playwright Jack Rosenthal turned her life into an evocative BBC drama. Pop star Morrissey put her photograph on the cover of the 1984 single "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now". And now it is Dickson's turn, in a production directed by Jeremy Sams.
Stars always talk up a new production, but there is an almost evangelical quality to her enthusiasm. "If the public don't like it, it wll be a crime," she says over lunch at her rambling home in Lincolnshire. "It's a really good cautionary tale. And it's a very tough piece of work." Perhaps Dickson sees parallels between Nicholson's background and her own working-class roots in Dunfermline. For all the trappings of success, she remains a resolutely unstarlike mother of three, fretting about the imminent arrival of a central-heating engineer.
"It has some of the same qualities I saw in "Blood Brothers" - a real heart that's totally British. It's not an epic, big frocks musical. This woman has no regrets, and the show is not sentimental in the least."
She first read the script - which was first staged at the West Yorkshire Playhouse - when she was laid up at home with a virus. Part of the attraction lay in the production's engagement with ordinary, non-idealised life. Here was the promise of genuine emotion, not "Phantom"-like escapism.
"I'm not instinctively a fan of musical theatre," she explains. "I came up through folk music, remember - I'm no hoofer from stage school, and I wouldn't particularly travel all the way to London to see a musical. My favourite is "Sweeney Todd", although I love old ones like "Oklahoma!"
"But I'm going to be spending the next nine months in a flat on my own, 185 miles away from my family - so the show must be good!" As for her recording career, there are plans for another reunion with her old friend Elaine Paige - her partner on the 1985 single "I Know Him So Well". At the moment the hunt is on for suitable material.
As befits her folk roots, Dickson has a passion for Bob Dylan and Ewan McColl. James Taylor is her all-time favourite, but her tastes also run to Elvis Costello, Steely Dan and Little Feat. She doesn't mind Blur, even if she would rather put on a Charlie Parker record. Her sons, for their part, think her music is "cool".
"They love Robbie Williams, like all kids their age. I don't mind. You have to remind yourself that they're listening to all this for the first time.
"I've heard it all before. In any case, I make sure they hear a little bit of Marvin Gaye or Little Richard or early Stevie Wonder - just so they don't get fooled into thinking that Liam and Noel Gallagher invented it."
