The following interview is taken from BBC Devon Online. Barbara is interviewed by Andrew Segal.
FOLK LORE : CURIOSITY EXTENDS BARBARA'S CAREER
Doing the same job for a long time, it has to be said, might not be the most interesting of things. So, if you get a chance to tackle the unfamiliar, do you take just for a chance or should you stay wth what you know best, better the devil you know, and so on.
One woman who has decided that change is as good a learning experience as opposed to a rest is folk singer Barbara Dickson.
With a career that has encompassed singing, acting, recording and presenting, Barbara is getting back to her singing roots on the concert stage with a new tour. So where does all the energy come from?
"I don't really think it's energy," she says. "I get bored easily, you know. And having had, luckily, the opportunity to do various things, I've just taken them.
"I've not wanted to do one particular thing forever and ever. I'm not the product of a stage school, for example. So it never occurred to me to stay in the theatre and go from show to show. That's not where I came from. I'm a folk singer from Scotland, basically.
"And so I grew up in an environment, certainly from my late teenswhere I was singing traditional music and music from England and Ireland as well as Scotland. So I was basically enjoying music that would suggest singing about kind of important things, as well as songs about love and just ordinary subjects. Traditional music does cover huge amounts of issues."
And it could be said that singing about real issues helped lead to the next step in Barbara's career.
"Then of course I went into the theatre because of my connection with folk music. I ended up there because I knew Willy Russell from a folk club and so things happened and there's a kind of logical story-telling aspect to it. In other words, I could do through my entire life as to why things happened at that time. But I'm very glad to say that I have been able to do all those different things. I mean, I've not sought to do them, it's just that the opportunities have arisen.
And those opportunities have led to the growth of a multi-talented performer, with stints at television presenting, straight acting television roles in programmes such as Taggart and Band Of Gold, success in various musicals and several critically-acclaimed albums.
"Basically, it's the variety of what I do that I find so interesting," she explains. "I mean, I don't particularly like recording because I find it rather sterile. But I don't particularly like performing all the time because I find it's tiring, and I quite like being at home in my house and not doing anything, like a lot of people do, and enjoying the time with my family."
But sometimes the motivation for trying different things is quite simple. "I find myself as a person curious and I like challenges, but my curiosity is the biggest factor in this. I really want to know how things work, and that includes production and songs and I'm always thinking about creativity. I'm not that bothered with my career. I'm bothered with creativity - I want to make things that work, like when I was in Spend Spend (a musical based on the life of 1960's pools winner Viv Nicholson).
"I would never have signed myself up to nine months in the theatre in London but the wonderful thing was I just had to do it because the show was so fantastic, and I thought : 'If I don't do this I'm going to kick myself'. So I had to just bite the bullet and get on with the unpleasant aspects of it, which was being away from my family six days a week so as I could do something which was as stimulating as that."
But though she has had these opportunities to have a go at other things, she has no doubt as to where her heart lies : "I'm a folk singer from Scotland, basically. I didn't want to be a performer particularly, I was just really interested in the genre. I was just better at music than anything."
