"Folk Roots" magazine interview from May 1994.
WEST END TRAD.
Colin Irwin encounters Barbara Dickson taking a voyage back to her roots.
"Do you know?" says a handsome Scots woman called Barbara Dickson, "the last person I sat having a drink with in this bar was Tim Rice..." Hello, hello, hello, what's all this then? We can see the eyebrows screaming skywards from here. Tim Rice? And Barbara Dickson? Barbara Dickson What the frigging hell is she doing in these hallowed pages?
A showgirl, right? The West End theatre. Tim Rice and the blokes from Abba. Duets with Elaine Paige. Top Of The Pops. Laura Ashley frocks. Immaculate coiffure. Another Suitcase In Another Hall, Flash perms. I Know Him So Well. Willy Russell...
And there's the link. Willy Russell. Famous Scouser. Godlike scriptwriter and celebrated socialist, is a bit of a folkie. He spent more nights than is good for anybody surrounded by beards and beer in dark
rooms in Liverpool bellowing out Wild Mountain Thyme and Leaving Of Liverpool in dramatic lung-threatening manner.
It was long, long ago before all you were born, of course, but among an impressive array of Scots singers doing the rounds at the time was a sweet-voiced lass called Barbara Dickson. An outstanding singer she was, too, regularly working the club scene throughout Britain with an approach that was widely regarded as dangerously populist at the time as a result of Barbara taking the liberty of mixing traditional material with songs by the up and coming songwriters of the day like Rab Noakes, Archie Fisher and Gallagher & Lyle.
She made regular appearances in Liverpool. Willy Russell became a huge fan and when he launched his own playwriting career with an amusingly jaundiced account of the whole Beatles phenomenon titled John, Paul, George, Ringo & Bert, he invited Barbara to sit at a piano at the side of the stage and sing Lennon/McCartney songs all night. Such was the success of Russell's offbeat tribute, and so strikingly accomplished was Dickson's contribution to it, that the whole shebang was swiftly transferred to the West End stage... and Barbara Dickson was whisked into the sunset by an adoring luvvy fraternity to make pop records and plush concert tours, and never returned again.
Until now. Barbara Dickson has just made a new album, Parcel Of Rogues, which - over two decades later - takes her back to traditional folk song. It's a brave, if risky, step. It's not as if she needs to do it - comfortable halls in Blackburn and Bristol and Portsmouth singing pop/MOR to middle-aged couples with Volvos and ice cream, lots of airplay on Radio 2 and the odd hit single thrown in, that's been the way of it for Barbara in recent years. And not a bad way to pay the mortgage either.
But here she is, going off on the sort of tangent guaranteed to confuse and irritate those fans settling down with their knitting to enjoy a nice evening of show tunes and singalong-a-Babs good humour. And then there's the folkies themselves. Strange lot at the best of times. Cue cynical ridicule and contempt from a pocket of society peculiarly protective and elitist about their own chosen form of music and who won't take kindly to the approach of this semi-household name patronising them with shallow cupboard love.
Barbara rolls her eyes. "Yes, I am very nervous, and it was important that I got it right for this reason. But I've always wanted to prove I could do an album of traditional music well, because my reputation when I used to do folk clubs wasn't particularly as a singer of traditional songs. I used to do a cross section of songs, but because I could do contemporary songs and play difficult chords and I used to sing songs by Gallagher & Lyle, people maybe thought I was better at doing that than I was at traditional songs."
At the time, of course, the boundaries were much more keenly drawn. If you sang contemporary songs then you couldn't possibly do traditional music with any degree of depth.
"People used to classify me as lightweight in the traditional songs department, but the really good
singers of traditional songs, people like Martin Carthy, never ever made judgements like that. There was an hilarious thing in The Scotsman newspaper when I went into the theatre and they were going on about what a loss it was to the British folk scene.I just thought 'I wish somebody had told me that at the time!' I couldn't even get any work in Scotland. That was the era of the 'entertainers' and with the greatest respect to Billy Connolly and Hamish Imlach it was hard to get work there if you didn't tell jokes."
Parcel Of Rogues includes the first traditional song she ever learnt, I Once Loved A Lad, along with an assortment of reasonably well-known songs like Geordie, Farewell To Whiskey, Van Dieman 's Land
and the title track, performed in a lively, authentic manner that a few years ago might have passed for standard rock. Not exactly innovative, but hugely likeable nevertheless, and specificially designed to introduce the songs to a fresh audience.
She baulks at the suggestion that she's on a missionary trail taking British traditional music to the poor masses, starved of their own music for so long. But she still talks a good propaganda pamphlet for folk music, even though admitting that she hasn't set foot inside a folk club since she got the call from Willy Russell all those years ago.
"I've never lost sight of how much I like folk music. I learned so many great songs in folk clubs and I've never stopped loving the music. It's worth so much more than the average person in the street gives it credit for - it's such a shame that more people don't know about it and get the opportunity to hear it. I know a lot of people on the folk scene are perfectly happy to keep it that way, but I think it's a real shame - I don't think it would ever get spoilt. That's why I've done these old songs on the album, it shows they are still alive.
