The following interview by Lynda Trapnell was published in "Musical Stages" musical theatre magazine in 1999. For more information, including back issues, visit the Musical Stages website
BARBARA'S BACK ON THE BOARDS
Barbara Dickson had been quietly following a successful career in folk music until she came into the broader public eye in 1974 with the advent of Willy Russell's 'John, Paul, George, Ringo...and Bert'. While the actors playing the various roles told the story, Barbara sat at a piano at the side of the stage and filled the auditorium with her beautiful voice. Although The Beatles' songbook was pop, she moved it into a different genre with her gentle, truthful interpretations.
"George Costigan was Bert", Barbara reminds me as we sit in the Palm Court of the Meridian Waldorf in Aldwych. "Bert was the narrator - I wasn't anybody really, I just sang the songs."
In the sixties, folk music was extremely popular and Barbara, born in Fife, was very much part of that. Her music teacher at school, a dynamic character called Sandy Sadler, used to play them folk music and sparked her interest.
"People used to go to folk clubs once a week - there would be a local gathering in a pub, put together by local people and occasionally they would save up the door money and get someone famous on the folk scene to come in with different material. Then everyone in the club would steal the material and sing it for the next six weeks!"
Barbara learned an enormous amount from these sessions, she says, and gives most of the credit to John Watt who, she explains, was a particularly interesting man, scholarly and knowing a lot of the traditional singers of the time whom he would invite to their clubs.
"it was like having another really good teacher and I learned a huge amount about British, Irish and American music. In all the time I was involved in folk music - frm 1964 to 1974 - I never did lose my tentacles that went out into different worlds of acoustic music sung by people like James Taylor. I was a huge fan of his when he made his album for Apple in around 1968. I loved The Beach Boys - 'Good Vibrations' for example - I liked The Beatles' music, I liked Cream and Jimmy Hendrix which, although it wasn't folk music, was extremely interesting."
Barbara is a joy to listen to. Quite apart from the soft Scots accent, there are very few ums and aahs in her statements. She knows her subject and her history and of course, has become a practised interviewee over the years. Studying her across the table, it is hard to believe she is now in her early fifties. Her skin is clear and soft, with very few lines around her eyes. Blonde hair waves casually to her shoulders and that elegant-featured beauty seems unchanged from our first glimpse of her.
"I really did love folk music," she is saying. "I have a wealth of knowledge in me that comes from those days. When I was in it, I soaked it up like a sponge. I know fragments of songs. If someone in the West of Ireland says "I'm going to sing a song about a wedding party going to an island and a sheep put its foot through the bottom of the boat and everyone is drowned," I know that song! I know the song about a drunken man singing to a yellow bittern on a marsh. I've heard it and I know how it goes. People say "Oh, she can't possibly remember" but I do.
"The writers of our show, Steven Brown and Justin Greene - I can't believe that I haven't met them before somewhere. Steve also sang in folk clubs, and this is where he found a song from the North-East called 'Blackleg Miner' and mentioned he used to sing it. I immediately sang it back to him."
The first act of 'Spend, Spend, Spend' has a great deal of folk influence, Barbara explains, although the second is more contemporary, displaying Steven's versatility. To have had that acess to folk music - as did Willy Russell, another folk club habitue - has, she feels, given Steven a great grounding.
"I knew Willy Russell before 'John, Paul, George, Ringo...and Bert' and I used to go and stay at his house in Liverpool. He gave me the script to read - not then with the idea that I should do it - then later, he and Bernard Theobald, my manager, worked on me to do it. I wasn't sure I could play the piano and sing songs for two and a half hours, but I did. My approach was radical, but born out of innocence. Because I was the sort of singer I was, the tune was everything. And I also don't believe in mucking around with the tunes in 'Spend, Spend, Spend'. I sing them as exactly as Steve wrote them because that's the way they should be done. If a song is a wonderful song, you don't have to do much to it. If you sing, for example, 'The Very Thought Of You', you can sing it unaccompanied and it will break peoples' hearts. You don't have to rearrange it. It's a fantastic song by anybody's standards.
