Article from 'The York Press' newspaper from February 2008.
BARBARA DICKSON, GRAND OPERA HOUSE, YORK
Barbara Dickson has turned 60 and she has never felt happier making music.
Time & Tide - an album title to reflect the turning of the leaves, if ever there was one - was released on her own label last month and is being accompanied by a tour that arrives at the Grand Opera House, York, on Tuesday.
"This album is the pinnacle of what I'm capable, and as an artist in control of what I record, I have no one saying 'that's not commercial', " says Barbara, who did most of the recording sessions at the Warterworld home studio of producer Troy Donockley at Warter, near Pocklington.
Time & Tide takes Barbara back to her roots in the folk clubs of Dunfermline.
"We've revisited Witch Of The Westmerlands, which I first recorded in 1970, " she says. "That version was OK but we had some great ideas for a new recording. Troy had this idea to do this interlude in the song and it just romps along."
Barbara may be best known for her pop years of Answer Me, January February and her chart-topping duet with Elaine Paige, I Know Him So Well, but that period - 1975 to 1985 - is but one slice of a much longer career that has taken in folk and musicals.
"I was never in talent shows, so I didn't start by singing on stage, " she says. "I'd go to folk open evenings and eventually got up and did a couple of numbers and I gently learnt that the kernel of a song was the important quality when singing them."
This was reflected in her recent album of Beatles covers - itself harking back to her breakthrough role in Willy Russell's musical John, Paul, George, Ringo & Bert - and now in her cover of Goffin and King's Goin' Back.
"We did the same kind of thing that we did with the Beatles album, so Troy and I stripped the song back to almost a skeleton. You then listen to the song again, you think 'what does it need to nurture it?', which is not the way that other people seem to work.
"You think, 'what is the song saying to us?', and even with Goffin and King, it's not German lieder, but it does have its needs. We felt it needed a slightly swirling sound, if you like as a reference to its Sixties past. We've not done anything radical to it, but I think it has poignancy now, when I'm 60."
There was a time when, at her pop peak, a producer said 'this is a good song for you', and Barbara could have challenged his judgement but didn't. That was a rare occurrence. "You try to make good judgements; you usually feel it in your water and that's always been the case in my career.
"I'm rarely wrong. I know what songs work, and particularly now, I'm in a position where I'm entirely responsible for what I sing, and I'm happier than ever because I now have such a large repertoire."
She is delighted with the ageing of her voice too, citing Another Suitcase In Another Hall as an example of a song that better suits her present interpretation of her 1977 hit from Evita.
"It was meant to be sung by a 14-year old girl, and I was made to sing it in a rather twee, high chord, even though I tried to make it more mature, " she says.
"But now I have put it back to where I would have sung it naturally, which has a warmth to it that wasn't there when I sing in a high, virginal voice.
"You uncover different things when you go back to a song: it's like being an archaeologist, where you remove the dust and discover things."
