AGEING GRACEFULLY (continued)...
"I'm really fogeyish about this," she replies. "I don't consider showbusiness a proper job. My theatrical life came as an offshoot of my singing, so I've never been through auditions and stuff, but I know people who have. My husband comes from a family of actors, and I don't want my boys to suffer all that rejection."
But Colm wants to study music and acting. "Isn't it hilarious? He'll probably go to Fame school, perhaps ending up at LIPA [the Liverpool Institute of the Performing Arts sponsored by Sir Paul McCartney], of which I'm a Companion. In fact, I'm going to be teaching there. Life mirrors art - I will be Miss Sherman in real life. But if this is what Colm wants to do, I won't stop him. It'll be his decision. I'm puritanical about pushy parents. On my deathbed, my sons won't be saying, 'You made me do that.' But I do think fame has become an addiction for a lot of people in this country." In the course of her career, Dickson has had a unique opportunity to observe the tragic toll of celebrity, from the Bay City Rollers to Michael Barrymore, with whom she worked and who loved her singing so much he wanted her to do summer seasons with him at the height of his fame. "Fame is a terrible Faustian pact, which rather appeals to my black, Fife sense of humour," she confides. "You wanna be famous? You're gonna be famous, but only if you jump over everybody and scratch their eyes out. Then what do you get? You get people going through your dustbins, emotionally and literally." She shudders, pulls down the sleeves of her toffee-coloured sweater and hugs herself.
THE daughter of a Rosyth dockyard worker and a spirited Jewish mother from Liverpool, Dickson and her younger brother grew up on a modest council estate, a world away from showbusiness glitz. Gifted with a gorgeous mellifluous voice, she sang almost before she could walk. She learned piano, then acoustic guitar. At 17, she left home to work in the Registrar General's office in Edinburgh, where she spent her days logging causes of death ("depressingly, much the same as now - lung cancer and heart disease") and her evenings soulfully playing the burgeoning folk club circuit when folk music, in Billy Connolly's immortal phrase, was not just about "four men in Aran jumpers singing about dead sailors".
Her career took off when the ethereal-voiced, bubble-permed Dickson was given a six-week engagement in Denmark. After moving to England, she was offered the singing, piano-playing commentary role in Willy Russell's John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert in 1974. A run of chart hits in the 1970s earned her a first gold disc for The Barbara Dickson Album. In the 1980s her album All for a Song stayed in the charts for 36 weeks, selling more than 600,000 copies in Britain alone. Blood Brothers followed. "I Know Him So Well", her mega-hit with Elaine Paige (still one of her dearest friends), was in the charts for months and remains an anthem for girls' boozy nights out. Within weeks, her album, Gold, went platinum; then, without missing a beat, Dickson reinvented herself as a brilliant actress - she was awarded an OBE for services to drama and music last year.
Despite her innate warmth - you could toast your hands on her cosy personality - she played her absolute opposite, a raddled 1960s pop singer, in a three-part Taggart in 1993. Just a couple of years later, she won the plum part of the vulnerable Anita in Band of Gold. A role in BBC Scotland's The Missing Postman (in which she took her kit off for the first and last time in her career, although she claims she wouldn't have said no to Calendar Girls) opposite James Bolam, brought further acclaim. Since then she's notched up another Olivier for her portrayal of 1960s pools winner Viv Nicholson in the musical Spend, Spend, Spend. But, unbelievably, there have been no further offers of gritty TV dramas or - her dream - even a small, meaty, film role.
Yet Dickson remains proud of the fact that she's created her own "strange rocky path" to stardom. She never made it in the States because she wasn't that interested. "I didn't want to be Madonna. I believe my Scottish personality, my inability to swallow the big idea, stood in my way. So I made all my own choices." She even took on the mighty Robert Stigwood Organisation in the courts when she thought she wasn't getting her fair share of royalties, and has since controlled her career through her own management agency.
"I know this will be hard to believe, but I don't have a lot of drive. However, I am very, very good at what I do. I know I can sing really well, so I've always had huge belief in my voice. But I've never believed in myself, although I'm better now that I'm older. Nobody could ever say to me, 'You can't sing!' But if they'd said, 'You're fat, boring, ugly, illiterate and not funny,' for years I would have replied, 'Yeah, you're right,' because I was so deeply insecure."
Elegantly crossing her denim-clad legs, Dickson remarks that it's terrible to be in the public eye and feel you don't look right. "I've never thought of myself as good-looking, even when I became 'glamorous'. The turning point came in 1975. I went in a door, with long, dank, wavy hair, funny glasses and a frumpy frock, and I emerged from the same door in a vintage dress, my hair cut and coloured and my face made up. It was a shoot for an album cover, and the record company had given me a stylist who transformed me. Talk about metamorphosis! I was the ugly duckling who emerged a beautiful swan. I couldn't believe my eyes."
On tour around Britain next February (including, provisionally, Motherwell and Dunfermline), Dickson plans to record a new album, Faithless Love, in March. She will not be indulging in either Botox or a facelift for the cover photo shoot. She believes that a fellow Scotswoman and singer (whom, she pleads, must remain nameless) has not done women of a certain age any favours by having it all done, then keeping quiet about it and simpering on TV, while everyone says, "Don't you look marvellous for 55?"
"Actually, she doesn't! Why would you want to look like Britney Spears at 55 when real beauty comes from the spark within? In fact, my son's friends think I'm dead cool anyway because I know Eric Clapton and am still capable of performing at this great age without the aid of a Zimmer frame.
"Botox? Forget it! All I really want is to become one of those crazy, bicycling old ladies who refuses to be silenced - just like my own mother, in fact!"
