April 2004 interview from the ''Daily Post' newspaper about Barbara's return to "Blood Brothers".
IT'S IN THE BLOOD
By Philip Key
Backstage at the Liverpool Empire, singer Barbara Dickson was in her dressing room and on her knees. Struck down by a vicious influenza bug, she had never felt worse in her life.
She had been suffering for the last week but each night she had gone on stage to perform the demanding role of Mrs Johnstone in the Willy Russell musical Blood Brothers.
Now she was insisting on going on again. "Somebody came in, saw me and told me I better go home or I would die," Barbara recalls. "I had to be told to get the hell out of there."
It was the Christmas season and she was spending it away from her Lincolnshire home in what she considers her second home of Liverpool.
Her three children had come to join her in the house she had rented. The oldest boy had arrived with the 'flu, given it to the middle one who had given it to Archie the youngest.
"And Archie gave it to me," says Barbara, 57. "I had been doing the show and nursing them and they were all terribly ill. Then I caught the virus but still kept going for a week."
A reluctant Barbara returned home where she took to her bed.
It had come as a complete shock to her. "I am usually in the rudest of health. But this time I was very ill and didn't get better for about six weeks. I was so upset about missing those shows."
Now she is heading back to Liverpool for a rare two-week run of the musical at the same theatre. It will be her only appearance in the touring production and at the specific request of producer/director Bill Kenwright.
But the show - and Liverpool - has always been very special to her. This year it celebrates its 21st anniversary and Barbara was right there at the start when it first went on stage at the Liverpool Playhouse in 1983. "I think I must be the world's expert on Blood Brothers," she laughs.
Back in 1983 she was best known as a highly successful pop singer, a role she had taken on after her appearance in the 1974 production of another Russell show, John, Paul, George, Ringo...and Bert at the Liverpool Everyman.
An awful lot happened after 1983 but the real change came after 1974. I had gone from being a very modest folk singer with a very serious outlook on everything to something very different. It was such a chasm that I had to jump over and I don't even remember jumping it. It was such an extraordinary thing.
"I tell you, I changed more in those years than any other time in my life. It was a change for the better, I suppose, but I made a rod for my own back.
"If I wanted to sing serious songs it was a lot more difficult to be taken seriously because of that success. People didn't taken me as seriously as they would have done without it."
She prefers to consider herself a chanteuse these days. "I don't subscribe to that middle-aged pop singer thing. But if people know you for one thing they think that's all you can do."
In its way, Blood Brothers was to change that. It was her first dramatic acting role and this time people did take her seriously. "I had never acted at all until then, I used to do music at school but no drama. So I was concerned at the time about my ability to do it.
"It's a famous quote of mine but I always say that if I was going to fall flat on my face I would rather do it in Liverpool than anywhere else in the country because I knew everybody would pick me up again."
Although born in Dunfermline, Scotland, her mother was a Liverpudlian and she would spend school holidays in the city.
"My auntie lived in Carrington Street in Liverpool 8 and it was the sort of street where the Johnstones in Blood Brothers would have lived. It was a melting pot of people, all colours, all creeds and I would play in the street bursting tar bubbles with all the kids."
