"The Sunday Times" newspaper article from April 1995 about Barbara's starring role in 'Band of Gold'.
Anybody who mistakenly thought that Barbara Dickson's album, Gold, had anything to do with her debut on the small screen last month was in for a nasty shock. For the tumble-haired singer of soulful ballads had become Anita, a feisty, foul-mouthed brothel keeper in the compulsive Granada/LWT series Band of Gold.
True, she also sang the title song Love Hurts, the old Jim Capaldi hit, which has just been released on CD but it is her performance as a hard-bitten madam in a seedy part of Bradford which has won her generous critical acclaim.
Dickson will make another television appearance later this year, in a three-part Taggart story called Legends. She will play a successful 1960s pop singer caught up in a murder mystery.
Her demanding career as actress, recording star and live performer is a long way from the humdrum days in Fife where she sat on the edge of the bath dreaming of life as a film star. Now 47, Barbara Dickson was born in Dunfermline, the daughter of a Rosyth dockyard worker and a spirited Jewish mother from Liverpool.
Home for most of her childhood was a modest house on a council estate with spectacular views over the Firth of Forth. She started learning the piano at four, switched to the guitar at 13 and, having been born with a glorious, mellifluous voice, sang the whole time.
While her father envisaged his daughter in a respectable, solid profession such as teaching, her more romantically inclined mother encouraged the child's musical leanings.
At 17 Dickson found a job at the Registrar General's office in Edinburgh. She spent dreary days logging cause of death statistics and happy nights in the capital's burgeoning folk club circuit.
Ian McCalman, a friend from those far-off days in the Waverley Bar and other folky haunts, still keeps in touch with Dickson. ''Back in the 1960s we all sang together but then Barbara decided to go off touring on her own. She was one of few girls who did and I salute her for that because it was tough back then for a young lass on her own.''
McCalman is uncertain how ambitious she was, but remembers thinking even then that her ''fabulous, confident, voice'' would always be in demand, particularly for pop songs. Which is how it turned out. ''When she sings it is like listening to an angel, what a horrible old cliche, but it's true.''
Despite his own busy schedule touring the world with The McCalmans, he has kept an interested eye on her career. ''She's a Scottish girl made good and while some folkies sometimes get a wee bit jealous of other people who do spectacularly well and whinge about them betraying their roots, Barbara is still held in great affection here.
''She is still great fun with a wonderful sense of humour, enjoys the crack and the success hasn't gone to her head. She has just agreed to do a spot on a Radio Two folk series which is probably way below the sort of things she gets asked to do these days, but she was happy to oblige.''
Dickson's professional singing career began when she was offered a six-week engagement in Denmark. Confident enough to chuck in the day job and much against the wishes of her father, dismayed at the prospect of her civil service pension disappearing the 21-year-old took the plunge.
Five years later, having moved to England, she was offered the singing and commentary role in Willy Russell's musical John, Paul, George, Ringo...and Bert. After an extended spell at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre, the show transferred to the West End for another successful run.
A run of hits in the late 1970s, including Answer Me, Another Suitcase in Another Hall and The Caravan Song was topped with her first gold disc for The Barbara Dickson Album. She was still riding high in the 1980s with her album All for a Song staying in the charts for 36 weeks and selling more than 500,000 copies in Britain alone.
In 1982, Dickson was approached to play the role of Mrs Johnston in another Willy Russell musical, Blood Brothers, which was an instant success when it opened at the Liverpool Playhouse and later won her a Society of West End Theatres Award for best actress. During her spell at the playhouse, Dickson met her future husband Oliver Cookson, the stage manager.
Another musical, Chess, several more albums including the well-received Gold, which went platinum within eight weeks of release, filled the 1980s and she started the 1990s with an extensive tour of the UK, despite just having had her second child, Gabriel.
A prodigious worker she brought out an album of Bob Dylan songs in 1992 and followed that up with Parcel of Rogues the following year she still undertakes gruelling tours and is currently enjoying a second short season of sophisticated late-night shows at the Cafe Royal in London.
Without missing a beat, Dickson has managed to keep her musical career on track while broadening her acting repertoire.
To research the part of Anita for Band of Gold which has proved so popular that a second series has already been commissioned and help her turn in a convincing performance, Dickson spent some time in one of Bradford's red light districts, meeting the real call girls, observing the behaviour of kerb crawlers and voicing her detestation of pimps.
The production team at Granada LWT readily admit that giving Dickson the plum role of Anita in Band of Gold was an unusual, possibly even controversial, choice. They say the decision has been vindicated by the favourable reception the six-part series, which climaxes on Easter Sunday, has received.
Carolyn Bartlett, casting director, had heard that the singer was keen to do more serious dramatic roles and she suggested her to producer Tony Dennis. Though Dickson had been inundated with offers after her moving performance in Blood Brothers, nothing had seemed quite right. Things began to look up when she landed the role in Taggart, which was filmed last year, then came Band of Gold. A spokesman for the programme said Dickson, who has never had any formal drama training but uses her experiences from years as a live performer, had worked ''fantastically hard''.
''She loved the project and got on brilliantly with the other girls in fact, the only thing that really grated with her was the clothes.
''She made that point at the press launch when she turned up in a beautiful understated Versace suit, nothing like the brash kit that Anita wears.''
Not that it is all work and no play. Dickson has the perfect antidote to her exhausting schedule through relaxing into family life in Lincolnshire where she, husband Oliver and their three young sons can get away from it all in a rambling old vicarage.
