Article from the Newcastle Evening Chronicle from 7th February 2007.
BACK TO HER ROOTS
All-rounder Barbara Dickson is at The Sage Gateshead tonight. Entertainment Editor Gordon Barr has the details
It takes an artist with a lot of creative vision and not a little bit of courage to take a stroll through the Beatles songbook. But that's where Barbara Dickson comes in.
The performer, at The Sage Gateshead tonight, marks 40 years as a professional musician in a career that has embraced millions of record sales, Olivier Award-winning stage work and hit television series.
But the career of Barbara Dickson OBE has always come back to music, and her latest album, Nothing's Gonna Change My World, re-establishes her connection to one of the most celebrated pop groups of all time.
In 1974 a young Scottish folk singer, with several years of recording and live work already under her belt, really arrived on the cultural radar when she starred in Willy Russell's hit musical inspired by the Beatles, John, Paul, George, Ringo... & Bert. In that show, Barbara made her name by performing many of the Fab Four's most famous songs. More than 30 years later, she has returned to that hallowed ground to make one of the most imaginative and unexpected albums of Beatles covers in memory.
"Last year we went all over the country and we took six of the songs from the album and slotted them into my show, and I found the music from the Beatles album really fitted well," she says.
Barbara made her customised wish-list of songs that she thought would be appropriate to address. "I thought, there's no point someone of my age and experience singing little teen songs, and there didn't seem to be any point doing a straight-ahead Beatles album," she continues.
"So I made my definitive list, and we went to Bath, to where Chris Hughes lives. He's a good producer, very experienced, very creative, very thoughtful. We created every track from an absolute tiny acorn.
"We gave it a fantastic amount of depth of thought, it was just four of us in the studio for weeks on end, then when we got the shape of things, we booked the Emperor String Quartet to come and play on things, we got Terl Bryant, of the Psalm Drummers, to play fabulous percussion and djembes, Pete Knight to play a little bit of fiddle and Neil Drinkwater to play piano. So it's a small, perfectly formed cast.
"I'm basically a folk singer who has continuously tried to keep that in the frame of my career," she says. "Sometimes it's been difficult, but nevertheless that's what I am."
Dickson turned professional in 1967, eventually leading to the Beatles-inspired musical, which in turn was a hit (as was Barbara.)
The hits then just flowed, including Another Suitcase In Another Hall from Evita, Caravans and January February. She was a huge hit in Willy Russell's Blood Brothers and after re-establishing herself as a live performer with sell-out tours, her 1985 duet with Elaine Paige on I Know Him So Well from the musical Chess, hit No 1 in the UK. Further theatrical acclaim followed in her one-woman show The Seven Ages of Woman and then Spend Spend Spend, and she also starred in TV dramas like Band of Gold and Taggart.
"Fame and fortune have never been important to me," says Barbara. "I did it because I wanted to sing and make music."
