So while a cast of actors, which included notable British talents like Anthony Sher and Bernard Hill, acted and narrated the story of the Beatles, Barbara performed the songs on the piano at the side of the stage. The show was a hit and transferred to the West End. But while she made solid friendships with actors in the show, she never really thought of herself as one of them. Meanwhile, thanks to John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert, she had embarked on an increasingly successful pop career. Her first top 10 hit was a 1976 cover of the Sigman/Winkler/Rauch standard "Answer Me," which led to a busy period as one of Britain's foremost recording and concert artists of the late 70s and early '80s.
Only when she saw Blood Brothers in its original incarnation as a touring non-musical play for schools, and later heard one of the first songs ("Easy Terms") did she briefly entertain thoughts about playing the lead role.
"That was, indeed, a wonderful, wonderful song and I did think, I would love to do that. I would love to be Mrs. Johnstone," she says. "But it wasn't as simple as that, because I was so riddled with self-doubt about whether I could actually do it, never having acted in my life. I don't know if everybody would agree, but I think it's much more of an acting than a singing part and it worried me that I would not be up to doing it."
As the musical was written, slowly, Willy Russell and director Chris Bond did their best to persuade Dickson to take on the role in the show's Liverpool tryout. She turned them down several times, concerned about the risk and her lack of any reputation as an actress. In the end though, they got her to read the part and found their faith in her justified. She came to the West End with the show, won a Laurence Olivier award for best actress in a musical, and although she was only with it for six months - Blood Brothers was not an overnight success, but a slow burner which closed just as word of mouth was building business, before producer Bill Kenwright picked it up and revived it as a global hit - Dickson has become indelibly associated with Mrs. Johnstone. She returned for a short season when the show celebrated its 10th anniversary in 1993.
Her singing career continued to thrive. But curiously, for most of the intervening decade and despite her obvious talent, Barbara Dickson waited in vain for her acting career to evolve. It wasn't until 1994 that television producers started to cast her in dramatic roles that, again, tended to reflect her fascination with the grittier side of life. A major breakthrough finally came in 1995 when she started alongside Geraldine James in Band of Gold, a hard-hitting series about the lives and times of a group of prostitutes surviving from day to day in a north England town.
Since then, she has toured in straight plays and starred in the hit show about youth in the 1960s, A Slice of Saturday Night (playing yet another Mother Courage-like character, the ex-dancer and club manager Erica Devine, who dishes out hard-earned wisdom to her young customers), as well as her own show, The Seven Ages of Woman. Finally, in 1999,16 years after Blood Brothers, along came Spend, Spend, Spend and the chance to create a new character in a West End musical. Critics hailed her performance as "full of pathos."
"I actually consolidated my reputation over a very long period of time as someone who could act as well as sing," she says. "And that's been quite important to me, because I don't think there are a lot of people in this country who can do that. I think Americans have a more natural relationship with musicals. They are often to the manner bom. We just don't feel so easy with it." Not that Dickson has completely avoided the more commercial aspects of musical theatre. In 1976, after all, she contributed the first version of the mistress' song "Another Suitcase in Another Hall," to the original concept album of Evita. Many people still consider this to be the definitive reading. At a distance of nearly a quarter of a century, she's warmed to it herself.
"Now, I think it's very nice indeed. There's a great innocence to my singing, which I remember Andrew Lloyd Webber insisting on at the time," she says. "I didn't really like singing that way, because I didn't think it sounded like me, particularly. I felt it was slightly twee. But, in fact, he's been proved right, because it was absolutely right for that character. She would have sounded like that. Not worldly at all."
She was asked to sing the song because Tim Rice and Lloyd Webber had seen her in John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert. Rice remembered her in 1984, when he was working on Chess with Benny Andersson and Bjom Ulvaeus, and they invited her to join Elaine Paige on "1 Know Him So Well," the highly charged, emotional duet between Florence and Svetlana that became an enormous stand-alone hit for the two women around the world. She wasn't a member of the original London cast, but did eventually play Svetlana in an ill-fated Melbourne production in 1997.
"Chess is a very strange show. I'm sure Tim won't mind my saying that it's never quite been what everybody involved with it to begin with wanted it to be," she says. "It has great shortcomings in its book, and all sorts of people, sometimes more qualified than others, are forever rejigging it, turning it inside out, taking the sleeves up and letting the hem down, and it never quite works. Also, when I got to Australia, I think they'd had a run of blockbuster musicals and they weren't in the mood for Chess. The production was very minimalist, and I think the critics resented that. But I enjoyed being in it, because it was a lovely sing and I made a lot of friends there."
Future projects depend very much on the long-term success of Spend, Spend, Spend; Dickson hopes to be with the show for some time. But she is also working on a new album with her great friend Elaine Paige that includes songs written specially for them by Andersson and LTvaeus. The pair are snatching time between Paige's preparations for the London revival of The King and I and Dickson's performances in Spend, Spend, Spend. And she'd like to revive her one-woman show, The Seven Ages of Woman, which toured in Britain with some success through 1997 and 1998. The story of a woman's passage through life, the project was devised by Barbara herself, together with her Blood Brothers director Chris Bond (writer of the play which inspired Sondheim's Sweeney Todd), and uses songs that reflect her musical versatility, from Sondheim, Willy Russell and Weill, to Lieber and Stoller and Kander and Ebb. She hopes that, in due course, they will be able to take it to a wider audience.
More than anything else, the key to the many strands of Dickson's career, each so successful in its own right, is her voice, ft has many guises: here, reflecting the melancholy, wistful elements of her folk
singing roots; there, the smooth, well-produced pop sound, the result of many years' experience in the recording studio; and, of course, the rawer, more life-stained quality demanded by roles like Mrs.
Johnstone and Viv Nicholson. Strong, true and equally capable of ethereal beauty, or hard, dramatic interpretation, her voice is now at its peak. Married with three young sons, Dickson has worked hard to achieve her status across so many disciplines. "I have my family life, which is most important to me," she says.
"And what I love about my working life is that ifs all so very different. I can do concerts, which I love, because I know I'm at a stage when I can sing anything I want, from folk music to James Taylor, Randy Newman, Rice, Lloyd Webber, Sondheim, whoever I fancy. I do whatever I like, and an audience that likes my voice seems to be captivated by my choice of material. I'm very lucky, because I don't have to do anything that isn't very good. I can record. I'm doing this project with Elaine. There will be a cast album of Spend, Spend, Spend. .And I hope I'll be with the show for some time. It's a good life."
(Piers Ford is a British journalist and writer)
