Barbara talks to Jackie McGlone from "Scotland On Sunday" about moving house, and her forthcoming starring role in the musical "Fame".
AGEING GRACEFULLY
Last night, Barbara Dickson was doing her impersonation of a pressure cooker, a bit of business usually reserved for immediate family and close friends. Near-hysterical, she was about to blow her top, prostrate herself in the drawing-room of her country house and drum her heels on the floor like a thwarted toddler.
Then in waltzed her American friend, Wendy, who's into touchy-feely stuff and generally known as a purveyor of placidity.
"Lie down!" ordered Wendy. "Now breathe in, breathe out. Be nothing for ten minutes. Personally, I would meditate, but you should just lie there and say your prayers."
Well, says Dickson, she did and it worked - ten minutes later she was completely chilled out. End of hissy fit. But, adds the angelic-voiced singing star and double Olivier Award-winning actress, she had earned the right to get into a tizz. "You see, even as we speak, Pickfords' men are in our house packing up all our possessions," she says, calmly sipping an early-morning coffee. "I've been waking screaming in the night just thinking about it," she adds, surveying her painfully hip Edinburgh hotel room in which there is no furniture at all, apart from a huge bed and a neo-brutalist black leather sofa that makes rude complaining noises as we both keep sliding off it. Soon she might relish such minimalism, for she's about to begin living out of tea chests. Another suitcase, another hall? "Exactly!"
It's the end of an era for Dunfermline-born Dickson, fondly remembered for her hit single "Another Suitcase, Another Hall" from Evita and her powerful performance in the compulsive 1995 ITV drama series, Band of Gold. She and her husband, Oliver Cookson, have sold the five-bedroom mansion they've owned for a dozen years in a north Lincolnshire village, near the market town of Louth, where Dickson's 85-year-old widowed mother has a flat. The Old Vicarage has been the heart of family life. Indeed, 13-year-old Archie, the youngest of their three boys, was a babe on Dickson's hip when they moved there from London.
They have not bought another house yet, so they're about to move into rented accommodation. Dickson's prize possession, her Bechstein grand piano, has been sold at auction, along with other precious pieces from the house they had carefully restored to its original Gothic glory. As for the house they're renting, her 15-year-old, Gabriel, remarked: "Mummy, this is just like a hotel." And it is, sighs Dickson: soulless and totally devoid of personality - hence her nightmares. But with the boys at boarding school, she and her husband were rattling about in their grand Grade II-listed house, designed by renowned Victorian architect S.S. Teulon. And then there was the land - 12 acres to manage - and the self-contained two-bedroom cottage, not to mention various outbuildings. "Teenage boys aren't into rural pursuits. They want concrete. They want to skateboard. They want town life. So it was time to move on." She shrugs her shoulders and gazes around the hotel room. Dickson is on a flying visit to Edinburgh to publicise Fame, a musical based on the 1980s film and TV series, which comes to the Playhouse in December as "an alternative panto". In the show, the 56-year-old plays Miss Sherman, the teacher who sternly warns students on their first day at the New York School of the Performing Arts: "If you've come here expecting to live forever or dance on the roofs of cars, you're humming the wrong tune." Dickson will strut her stuff like the trouper she is, then she would like to go round the capital's estate agents.
"I've had a brilliant idea," she told her husband. "Why don't we buy a Georgian flat in Edinburgh and a country cottage in Yorkshire to be near the boys?" (Their elder sons, 17-year-old Colm and Gabriel, are at school there, while Archie boards in Lincolnshire and comes home every weekend, much to his parents' delight.) The idea wasn't a goer, sighs Dickson. Her husband, who is 11 years her junior and a first assistant director in television ("the chap who shouts, 'Action!'"), is a creature of habit. When he's not working on shows such as Merseybeat and Judge John Deed, he's with his friends in the "farty, old-English pub" in the village or at the golf club. "Really boring! It's sad. I'm married to a man whose main priority in life is the local. But then I suppose he puts up with living with me - and I am fairly flaky."
For all her joking about her man being set in his ways, theirs is that showbusiness rarity: an enduring marriage. They celebrated their 19th wedding anniversary in August, having met in Liverpool in 1982 where Cookson was stage managing Blood Brothers, for which Dickson won her first Olivier Award when Willy Russell's great musical transferred to the West End. Marriage and children changed everything in her life for the better, says Dickson, flicking back her caramel and vanilla-coloured hair. "Instead of me, it's us."
Her marriage also put paid to the gay rumours that had dogged her ever since she hit the big time in the late 1970s and early 1980s with the hummable singles "Caravan Song" (of which Eminem is reportedly a fan, claiming he'll sample it on his next album) and "January, February".
"I was a folk singer, then I became an actress by accident and ended up in the West End. I was a household name because I was never off the telly. But the big thing was that I must be a lesbian because I didn't have a husband. I was in my late 20s; then I got into my early 30s and I still wasn't married. Obviously, I was gay!"
Every time she was interviewed, the singer would be asked if she had a boyfriend - to which she always responded with an emphatic "No!". Her private life, she reasoned, was nobody's business but her own. "I had a boyfriend and we lived together, but I had no intention of revealing his name. I had a male companion who was my lover; there was nothing weird going on. He wasn't in the business so, happily, I never had anyone on the doorstep taking pictures. I didn't suffer any traumatic stuff. It wasn't like I was in rehab or anything."
But surely sex, drugs and rock'n'roll come with the territory? "Well, like everybody else, I've had my moments," replies Dickson, with a throaty laugh. "I've tried to compete with the band by drinking too much, but I always have to turn in the worse for wear at 2am. I was 27 when I started to become famous, so I had lived a life already and wasn't a weak personality; I had self-control."
Nevertheless, the endless questions about her love life infuriated her. Always described as "the lonely Barbara Dickson", she was adamant that she wasn't going public about her private life. Then she met her husband, fell passionately in love and married. "Suddenly, the word was out: 'Oh, Barbara's heterosexual again, isn't it marvellous? She's gone straight and she's even having children.'"
ALL conversation with Dickson eventually reverts to her sons. She is besotted with them and admits she's spending a lot of money on their education. She likens it to taking out a second mortgage. "I'm a product of the Scottish state education system myself, but things have changed, especially if you live in England," she explains. Her youngest and eldest sons are dyslexic. When Colm's problem was diagnosed, she took him out of the local school and sent him to an independent boarding school near their home. "He went from a class of 30 to a class of six," she says. "He's just passed nine GCSEs and will be taking three A-levels. I'm so proud of him."
Dyslexic children, she adds, are often very bright, but have problems with organisation and concentration. "And it's like being an alcoholic - they'll never get over the problem. But I just want my kids to be happy. I don't expect them to become rocket scientists, although I feel privileged to have been able to send them to good schools. If I'd been living in a council flat, it wouldn't have been so easy."
So how would she feel about her sons choosing a career on the stage? She's been giving the matter a lot of thought lately, since she is about to star in a show that deals with hormonally fuelled kids, attired in leg-warmers and leotards, in pursuit of the second most famous four-letter word in the English language - fame.
