Barbara Dickson has had a rich and varied career. Best known as the best-selling Scottish Female artist of all time, with 6 platinum, 11 gold and 7 silver albums, she has had a similarly storied acting career, winning two Olivier Awards for ‘Blood Brothers’ and ‘Spend, Spend, Spend’. She has also graced our TV screens in such acclaimed dramas as ‘Taggart’ and ‘Band of Gold’. Ahead of a short 4-date tour of the North, Barbara took time to talk time to Folk and Tumble, about her life in song and stage.
FT: Ahead of your tour here in April, you do seem to have an affinity with Ireland? Can you tell us a little about the connections you have with Ireland?
BD: Curiously enough, I did a DNA test, and was quite confounded to find I was 24% Irish! Now I have no idea where that came into my DNA! When I was 17, I was already very involved in Folk music, it was the 1960s and folk music was all the rage. I went over to Dublin for two weeks, for a holiday, when I was still working as a civil servant. I went with a dear friend, we stayed in a B&B, and we had high jinks and great adventures in Dublin, the likes you could never imagine. It was absolutely brilliant. The Dubliners were still playing in the back of O’Donaghue’s in Merrion Row, and Luke Kelly was still deafening everyone with that brilliant voice of his. I went to the south of Ireland to begin with, and became completely enamoured with Irish songs, Irish culture, and Irish people. Not long afterwards, I would have been in my early 20s, I came to Belfast to play Queen’s University Folk Club, run partly by Fergus Woods, who is involved in the Sunflower Folk Club now. I went with a group of musicians to Belfast and then to Ballyliffin in Donegal. So I was sucking all this music and culture up like a sponge. I went to Fleadhs in the West, I went to Clare several times, I have a friend in Cork, so I have got to know Ireland well. Even during the troubles, I had no fear of coming to Ireland. I have been to Pat’s bar in Belfast with Fergus and some wonderful folk. I had a friend in Edinburgh from Belfast, and she knew a lot of artists who played down in Pat’s bar, and round Sailortown, and actually Anthony Toner took me back to Pat’s and it’s all sadly all closed up now. I had no context to where it was, in relation to where I was staying back in the day.
I just remember one night, coming out of Pat’s bar one night, straight into the arms of a B Special. And I went ‘My God what the hell is this guy’? I mean this is really what alerted me to the politics in Northern Ireland, and how stupid it was. Nobody of my generation, from this side of the water, would have seen a person like that, armed to the teeth. I thought, My god, this guy’s a soldier
FT: I’ve been reading and very much enjoying your autobiography, ‘A shirt box full of songs’. You capture the atmosphere of the folk clubs of back in the day, that sense of community and belonging. Do you think we’ve lost that collective spirit in Music and perhaps in society in general?
BD: Oh I absolutely do, don’t get me started. In Edinburgh, they have sessions, and instead of being organised, and being very unkind, it’s like background music for people to drink to. So people come into play and others continue to make the racket. It’s no longer, as we say in Glasgow, ‘One singer, one song’. The best of order would be called, and that might have been Joe Heaney singing ‘The Rocks of Bawn’. No one would talk. You know it would have been a disgrace and a scandal for people to talk during a singer’s performance. There’s no sensibility like that, any longer. There’s no respect for the musicians. The musicians are playing for themselves now, which is fine, but back then, you would be wanting to listen, and if people were talking, you would say, ‘Would you shut up’. You can’t do that now. People at The Sunflower, would know exactly what I’m talking about. The performance of the musicians is very important, so yes, that is disappearing.
We are talking about, really, is the death of live music! If you think about the Taylor Swift concerts gigs, it’s all an event, it‘s like a party. They go with certain clothes on, they go with balloons. So the serious aspect of folk music, sitting down and listening to the artist, and just soak it up. If you say anything about this, you sound like an old fart, but I am unrepentant. With someone like Anthony Toner, I am so honoured to have someone of Anthony’s talent, start my show, I could not believe how wonderful he is. ‘The road to Fivemiletown’ is one of my favourite songs, ever! He’s a real man of words. It’s not rocket science, but it just comes from his great love of words, and his tunes are great, and he’s a wonderful player, but like Paul Simon, he can do the words as well.
So we are very, very lucky to have him, he should be a national treasure here!
FT: In terms of your own song writing, I remember really loving your ‘Sweet Oasis’ album, which had quite a number of your own penned songs.
BD: A lot of people did enjoy that album, but I didn’t really see myself as being a really good song writer at that time. This is not being-self-deprecating, because I had friends like Gerry Rafferty, and Rab Noakes. I knew people who written songs from the age of 13,14, and were producing songs, admittedly it was pop music, and aiming to get into the charts. I never really saw myself as having the capacity to do that. It wasn’t until the lockdown, and you’re talking 50 years later, that I started to think I really could do something quite creative now. I’ve written a couple of songs that really seem to have chimed with my audience, one called ‘Where the shadows meet the light’, which I’ll be singing on the Irish tour, which people have really identified with. There’s another called ‘Good night, I’m going home’, which I think is my favourite of my songs. I’m not currently working on a particular project, but I haven’t given up writing, I’m still at it!
FT: You’ve been successful in so many areas, in Music, folk, pop and musicals, Acting on stage and screen. Is there a particular part of your career that you look back with particular fondness?
BD: That’s a very good question, because everything I have done, has taught me something. It’s almost like a daisy chain. I started in the folk clubs, my friends were folk people like Gerry Rafferty and Billy Connolly and people like that. I learnt a lot from them, I got support from them. They liked me, I liked them. I moved south to do folk clubs in England, and learnt a lot from that, travelling on my own. I had always sang contemporary songs and traditional songs, and so by the time I became a pop musician, which was after I had done the Beatles show, the Willy Russell play, ‘John, Paul, George Ringo and Bert’ play, I was quite familiar, because Gerry was involved in pop music at that point, and other people that I knew as well. I knew the Fairport guys, and others, so I sat quite comfortably within the realms of pop music. I resisted the push to go to America. I thought, I don’t want to do that and lose myself in a sea of something else. I had a pretty powerful manager, and I managed to keep a clear line going. So, I came out of theatre, and went back to being a musician again. All this, it’s all joined up. I’ve been fortunate. I was learning stuff all the time. Even in the 90s, I wasn’t having chart hits, but I didn’t care about that. It’s unseemly to have chart hits when you’re middle aged, That’s for young people! So I did a one-woman show, where I used all the music I knew, that was ‘Seven ages of a Woman’, so I was always busy, and thinking about what I might do next. I’ve not been a success in America, and my portrait is not in the Scottish portrait gallery, but it doesn’t matter, because I know who I am, and I know what I have done.
FT: But you are the most successful Scottish female artist of all time! Which isn’t a bad accolade?
BD: Well, thank you, that’s album sales, I sold more albums than anyone else, of course I came in at a time when record sales were enormous
FT: You’ve scaled back from touring, playing with Nick Holland on stage rather than a band. Does that affect your choice of material, and what can the audience expect in April?
BD: Oh yes, of course, but Nick and I have used this to our advantage, in exploring songs we didn’t play with the band. With the band, we did more epic stuff. Nick and I are two musicians on Stage, I play the guitar, Nick plays keyboards, and all of the colours and textures come from Nick.
He is also a really good singer. I then move to the piano, playing and singing while Nick sings and supplements arrangements, and we have never found it’s lacking because we choose music that has the intimacy. We don’t play the Royal Albert Hall the two of us, we play smaller venues and therefore what we playing, is actually ideal, and it’s intimate, and I do quite a lot of talking, in the show, so people learn about the songs, and the audience enjoy that background to the choices.
FT: Is there anything you would change in your career?
BD: Well you see, because I’m philosophical, by nature, I would say that everything I’ve done, good or bad, has taught me something. So I wouldn’t change a thing. Because if I took a link out of that chain, then the chain would be broken. I think you need the ups and downs. I would say, if I hadn’t have done this, then I wouldn’t have done that, and if that hadn’t have happened, then the following wouldn’t have occurred. So if I take a link out of the chain, the chain is no longer a chain. Being 77 years old now, that is really important. If you had asked me 30 years ago, I might have said, oh, I wouldn’t have done that, or I wouldn’t have sang that. But it’s all part and parcel of who I am today. So I am who I am, as the song goes.
FT: And thank god for that! (Barbara laughs.)It’s been a very varied career, but a wonderful career, and it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you!
BD: Well thank you. Will you come and see us in the Lyric?
FT: Barbara, I would love to, and I very much look forward to it!