In 1995 Barbara spoke to Anne Barrowclough from The Sunday Mirror newspaper about marriage and the recent changes in her career.
MY BAND OF GOLD GAVE ME RING OF CONFIDENCE : HUSBAND IS THE INSPIRATION FOR A BRIGHTER BARBARA
She is 49 - a time in life when many singers are on a downward slide into oblivion and most actresses are struggling to get auditions, let alone a starring role.
Yet Barbara Dickson is finding her career rocketing in the direction she has always wanted.
Not only is she taking on the kind of gritty acting roles that have eluded her in the past, but on her album, Dark Side Of The Street, she is back to singing the type of hard- edged folk songs that first launched her.
Barbara Dickson has reinvented herself, and shrugged off her image as Queen of Schmaltz.
Why has this happened only now - 30 years after she first started out?
Barbara puts it down to the confidence born of a secure, happy marriage.
"I probably wouldn't be doing all this if I was still single," says Barbara, who appears in the new Taggart and is filming a second series of Band Of Gold as hard-as-nails prostitute Anita Braithwaite.
"I used to feel that I was always this tiny voice at the back of the queue. It wasn't until I got married and had children that I realised my strength and drive.
"When I was single I didn't know how strong I could be but now I have someone saying to me 'you can do that'."
That someone is her husband Oliver Cookson. He's 11 years younger than her, but looks older than 38 - chubby-cheeked, balding and slightly dishevelled. But Oliver gave her the confidence to put her dual career back on track after years in the wilderness. Until they met, her personal life had also been a mess, drifting from relationship to relationship as she tried to get over her first big love affair.
"I was 17 when I fell in love with an architectural student and we were together for five years," she says. "He wasn't in love with me, but I stayed with him because I loved him unconditionally. That love affair broke my heart.
"One day he just disappeared, he didn't even tell me it was over. But he kept me dangling on a string, ringing once in a while or showing up. I stayed in love because I thought he would fall in love with me too. It took me four years to forget him - almost as long as I'd been with him, and I was left very damaged.
"After him, I just wanted something that could make me feel good, but nothing did. I was constantly looking for somebody to take his place in my heart.
"I didn't sleep with a lot of men, all my relationships were quite long - two or three years - but when it came to the crunch I was too scared to make any lasting commitment again. Some of the men I'd met were just too nice, some were too dangerous.
"I felt there was a person out there for me, but it took me a long time to realise I was looking at the wrong kind of men.
"I also had to face up to the fact that it wasn't their fault, it was something in me. I had to sort myself out. I don't know what it was with me, maybe it was insecurity, immaturity, being a masochist. The world is littered with women who never learn and it's bloody difficult to take that long hard look at yourself. But once you do, you ultimately find someone."
She met Oliver in 1983 when she was starring in Willy Russell's musical Blood Brothers and he was the stage manager.
"By then I'd given up all hope of being married," she says. "I was certain that I would stay single for the rest of my life. At first I didn't look at Oliver as a lover. I just thought he was a really nice guy. Then I got the feeling that he was lovely and I saw him in a different way.
"Like a lot of women, I had tended to go for the sparks, the men who set you alight. But you can't marry such men - you can only have affairs with them."
And it is Oliver who has given her the confidence to discard her image as a singer of ballads like January February and Answer Me and go back to those songs with an edge she used to sing in Edinburgh clubs 30 years ago. "I want to sing about real life, about people having lovers who are married, people having children at the wrong time," says Barbara.
She is just as excited about Band Of Gold. "I love playing Anita," says Barbara. "She is such a complex character, hard as nails and extremely selfish. It's also shown people I can act - even though I do know more about singing.
"I might be 49, but I feel as if my life is beginning again."
