In September 2001, Barbara spoke to Thom Dibdin from the Edinburgh "Evening News" about acting, her early days in the music business and Eminem (!)
HOUSEWIFE & SUPERSTAR
Barbara Dickson's dressing room is an oasis of bright cheerfulness amid the peeling paint and faded municipal trappings of the King's Theatre in Glasgow.
Flowers and mementoes dispel the fug from its gloomy corners. Around her mirror, bringing a personal touch to the bright, naked make-up lights, are holiday snaps of her husband and three teenage children. And on the mirror itself, is a post-it note with the homely reminder: "It's only a show", written across it in a neat hand.
Oh yes, Barbara Dickson might be a multi-talented star, remembered for her appearances on the Two Ronnies, her solo hits like January February and Answer Me, her duet with Elaine Paige of I Know Him So Well which hit the No 1 spot in 1985, and her awards for appearances in musicals like Willy Russell's John, Paul, George, Ringo . . . and Bert, and Blood Brothers.
But on her home turf, Barbara Dickson is just another mother, who turns up from a quick shopping spree, sprinkling bags and offers of tea all around.
She even insisted that she got a five-week break from the tour of Spend, Spend, Spend, the story of Pools winner Viv Nicholson which will arrive in Edinburgh next week, to go on holiday with her family.
As she restarted the tour in Glasgow, she admitted to "having a slightly runny week because I'm feeling rather separated from them all after having been with them all that time." It just so happens that she's a mum who can sing and act a bit.
"I've never been concerned with celebrity," she says. "I never take any of that seriously, I think it has all got out of hand. I'm not trying to be a killjoy, but I think if you do your job well and sign autographs for people and are reasonably civilised about all that, that is as seriously as you should take yourself. Take your work seriously, but not yourself. I think that helps in a transient world like show business."
Nor is she fazed by tabloid rumours that Eminem likes her music and wants to sample her early recording of Caravan. Although her eldest son Colm, who has just turned 15 and whose Eminem CDs gave her a taste for the notorious rap artist, was really impressed.
"I think that there is a terribly big dose of salts supposed to be taken there," she says with a laugh. "I do like Eminem, I think he is very good, very interesting. He is dismissed by older people as some kind of nasty subversive terrorist or something, but in fact he is very bright and his work is very good.
"I wouldn't be covering his material, but I think he is great and the nearest thing we have got to Bob Dylan nowadays. There's nobody else hanging about out there. It is just a funny story, because it is the idea of me, the old fogey and him, the young gun."
Born in Dunfermline in 1947, Barbara Dickson started her singing career in the couthy folk clubs of Fife in the early Sixties, while working as a civil servant in Rosyth Dockyards. After moving into a flat in Edinburgh and a job at New Register House, she began to make her mark on the Edinburgh folk scene.
"I was 17 and there was a massive resurgence of folk music at that time," she remembers. "It had actually come from America through people like Pete Seeger and Peter Paul and Mary. A lot of British people picked up on the political side of it really on songs about the depression in America.
"Then of course they all discovered the beauty of the folk songs of Britain through people like Ewan MacColl. So in Scotland there was a big resurgence in Scottish songs and it was that time that I came into.
"At first I started out singing American songs and was taught some Scottish songs. I was living in Northumberland Street and going to virtually everything, soaking the music up like a sponge, learning the songs, and becoming more well known on the folk scene."
Before she left Edinburgh in 1968, it was a meeting with the young Liverpudlian playwright Willy Russell which was to really start her career.
They got to know each other when he came up from Liverpool to perform in the Festival and in 1974, he cast her in John, Paul, George, Ringo . . . and Bert.
"That was the first thing that made me well known, because it took me from Liverpool to London," she explains. "Not long after I did that, the producer Terry Hughes, who went on to produce the Golden Girls in America, asked me to do a whole series of the Two Ronnies.
"That was the most important thing that happened to me up to that date, because not everybody had seen the show, but suddenly I was on television every week which gave me a massive opportunity."
It was about that time that her first big album, Answer Me, was released. Then, having had a hit with the single, she became, as she says herself, a bona fide pop star, making records for the pop market, directed at the charts.
While Willy Russell was instrumental in Barbara Dickson's move into the world of pop, he had an even bigger role to play, in her next career change into the world of acting.
"That wasn't planned, it was almost accidental," she says. "I became an actress because Willy Russell wanted me to be in Blood Brothers. He wanted someone to sing the songs and he loved my voice so they decided to try to make me act, rather than try to make an actress sing. I think he probably had in mind a voice like mine doing the songs as Mrs Johnstone." Planned or not, it was a move which has kept Barbara Dickson in the public eye ever since. Obviously the acting lessons paid off, as she made the role her own and was awarded a Society of West End Theatres Award for Best Actress in a Musical.
Not that she stopped touring as a singer. But during a series of interviews promoting her Parcel of Rogues album in Edinburgh in 1994, she vocalised a desire to move into television. Whether the producers were reading the interviews or not, it wasn't long before she was staring as a wealthy ex-pop star on Taggart, then Anita Braithwaite in Band of Gold and finally opposite James Bolam in the BBC film, The Missing Postman.
Which, despite being asked to star as the lead role in Crossroads, was her last appearance on the small screen.
"I thought that if I was older it might be better," she explains of her reason to turn the role down. "I've got so many things I want to do, that I don't want to be away for three years becoming a soap star on television. It might be nice and I might get invited to the Television Awards and even win an award and all that stuff. But at the moment, I think I would rather notch up Olivier Awards if that is all right with everybody."
That is quite all right, if her performance in Spend, Spend, Spend is anything to go by. Playing the old Viv Nicholson, looking back on a life which went from grinding poverty to outrageous fortune winning the equivalent of £3 million on the Pools in 1961 and back to poverty again before finding God, Barbara Dickson adds a stability and maturity to the production.
Even if Eminem does turn Barbara Dickson back into a bona fide pop star, as the first call for the show to start crackles out through her dressing room tannoy and she starts to prepare to go on stage, it is clear that this is one mother who knows exactly what is important.
After all, it is only a show.
