Continuation of Barbara's "Folk Roots" magazine interview from May 1994.
The idea for a new album made up entirely of traditional material sprang from the introduction at one of her concerts of her completely unaccompanied version of MacCrimmon's Lament and the stunned
reaction it received from her audience. "My manager suggested I sing something acapella and I didn't really think anything of it. To me it was the easiest song in the set, but people hadn't heard anything like it before and just had no conception of how anybody could sing a song completely without
accompaniment. I find it a lot easier not having to worry about other instruments, but it started me thinking."
She's not the first person to go voyaging into her roots - and Parcel Of Rogues comes hot on the heels of Don't Think T\vice It's Alright, an album of Dylan songs which didn't exactly set the world on fire. Maybe there's something therapeutic in these apparently regressional career moves, but Dickson - a stubborn adversary of folk elitism in the '60s and '70s - insists the album is a commercial as much as an idealist enterprise and liberally uses modern arrangements and technology to prove it. Inevitably, though, it's a work of real nostalgia. Among the musicians backing her, for example, are two staunch survivors from her folk days, Alistair Anderson on concertina and Archie Fisher on guitar and backing vocals.
"See, I've still got my old shirtbox. When I was travelling around I used to learn songs from different people and they'd write the words down on these grubby bits of paper. So I collected all these bits of paper and stuck them in this old shirtbox that's tied together with string. It got lost when I moved to Richmond but when I moved out into the country (she now lives in Lincolnshire) I found it again.
"So when I got together with Archie Fisher we started going through this old shirtbox and finding the bits of paper with Guinness stains on that people had given me in the west of Ireland and places. It's like
having songs written on the backs of fag packets. We were going through these bits of paper trying to recognise the handwriting."
Archie Fisher was one of her biggest influences. Brought up on pop music, her first introduction to folk song was through John Watt, who pointed her in the direction of the great singers still around in Scotland at the time, people like the colourful street singer Jimmy McBeath and the mother superior of Scottish traditional song, Jeannie Robertson.
"I listened to a lot of those singers and people like Enoch Kent and all these guys singing Ewan MacColl songs, which I thought were great. Songs with a real tough, hard edge to them. I learnt an awful lot from all these people as well as MacColl records and the Waterson family songs. And everywhere you looked there was an emerging contemporary scene with people like Robin Williamson and Clive Palmer and Mike Heron - Edinburgh was very vibrant in those days. You had the Incredible String Band and Owen Hand, as well as Archie Fisher and Ray Fisher.
"When I was 17 I went on holiday to Ireland and I never recovered from it. I went to O'Donoghue's pub and there was Luke Kelly and the Dubliners sitting in the back room there. If you're exposed to that sort of quality you cant help but soak it up like a sponge."
Her liberal attitude towards folk song didn't especially endear her to some aspects of the scene. It wasn't unknown then for clubs to insist you only sang the songs of your own country: or that you must only sing traditional material; or you might have your guitar confiscated on the way in at 'unaccompanied only' clubs. She had no truck with any of that. "I always hated that attitude. Nobody's ever going to tell me to put my guitar away. I could always have done a night of just unaccompanied songs, but I didn't want to.
You've got the technology, so why not use it. That sort of thing did happen to me and it was horrendous, though I'm happy to see it doesn't seem to exist now.
"But by and large I was very well treated in folk clubs. People used to fix up tours and drive me around and let me stay at their houses and I didn't have a difficult time at all. Then at the end of the tour I'd go
home to Scotland having had a great time. It was never gruelling: but then again I didn't work flat out all the time. so it didn't become a chore. I wasn't looking to get out of that scene at all, but I had the offer from Willy Russell to do the John, Paul, George, Ringo & Bert show at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre and thought I'd do that and then come back to playing in folk clubs. 1 never really expected it to lead on to anything else."
The show was a huge culture shock and an unexpected success. It required little acting from Barbara, and she merely sat at the piano and played Beatles songs in the same manner that she would ordinarily play Jeannie Robertson songs. They caused a minor sensation - the world had become used to hearing Beatle songs in various odd guises, but Lennon-McCartney as folk music? Different - and gloriously effective. The show took off and before she knew it, Barbara Dickson was a star.
"I'd never worked with actors before, but folk music goes very well with theatre and I loved it. It's very honest and direct and I know a lot of folk musicians have worked in the theatre to good effect. And I thought actors were wonderful ~ they were so wacky. And then I came out of the theatre and went straight into pop music and that was a real culture shock!"
She was signed up by one of the great record industry moguls, Robert Stigwood, stuck in a studio with
former Marmalade front man Junior Campbell, and - with big budget, promotional push and a radical update of an old Nat King Cole song Answer Me - transformed into a pop star.
A real Cinderella job. Suddenly the slightly frumpish looking bespectacled figure with lank hair and dowdy expression was magically fumed into a striking glamourpuss with contact lenses, highlights, perms and figure-hugging costumes. It was a culture shock for the folkies too, watching wide-eyed in the wings.
"Oh, there's always been an image machine in the music business, but you can use some of that to advantage. If you feel like you could do with a new hairdo or a certain look these people are actually very good at it. At the beginning I was very frightened about all that because I wasn't secure enough to be happy about them doing it and I thought I was going to disappear and be plasticised. But you have
to understand that if you have an album that's called Satin And Lace or something, then they're going to want to put you in a ballgown. It's part of the selling process.
