Barbara Dickson on her folk music roots, Top of the Pops and making a new album during lockown

They included the likes of Gerry Rafferty, Bert Jansch, Billy Connolly, John Martyn and a young singer and musician called Barbara Dickson.

Today, Dickson is best known for chart-topping pop hits such as I Know Him So Well, Answer Me and January February, but she started out in the folk clubs that proliferated back in the Sixties.

“They were sort of an appreciation society and they were quite low key, sometimes there wouldn’t be a microphone, and this is where you cut your teeth as a performer,” says Dickson. “People could go to their local folk club and get up and play. Even if you weren’t very good you could get up and play.

“I didn’t meet John Martyn, but Billy (Connolly) I knew well because he was part of a bluegrass duo and Gerry Rafferty came back and joined Billy and started to perform in folk clubs, because these clubs were a very good way of making a living. They were local and there were lots of them and sometimes you’d be playing in front of a couple of hundred people.”

It’s 50 years since Dickson released her first album, Do Right Woman, and her latest record, Time Is Going Faster, came out yesterday, and in March next year she is due (all being well) to be back on the road with a new tour that takes in Bradford’s St George’s Hall.

Her latest album includes several new songs as well as a cover of Gerry Rafferty’s Look Over The Hill and a new version of Tell Me It’s Not True from Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers – Dickson starred as Mrs Johnstone in the original stage version.

“My last big concert tour was the beginning of last year and right up to last Christmas I was really busy and we were about to resume recording when the pandemic started,” she says.

The music industry has been left devastated with tours postponed and venues forced to shut their doors, but Dickson was determined to finish her album. “I already knew what I wanted to record and we ended up doing a considerable amount of recording virtually because you don’t need to lock yourself away for three months in a studio like in the old days.”

All the different musicians around the country and abroad (the bass player was in France) added their parts with the final edits mixed in the studio. And Dickson is pleased with the end result.

“I am inordinately proud of it. During the early years of my pop career in the late Seventies and Eighties, I was a reasonably prolific songwriter, but I haven’t really written for the best part of 30 years now. It’s something which I have gradually started to get back into and there are three new songs of mine on the album.”

It’s all a far cry from her early days when she was just starting out. Dickson was born in Dunfermline and her passion for music was there from an early age and by the time she was 12 she was playing the guitar.

“There was music in my house and I started to sing at my local school with the encouragement of a music teacher who was a big fan of American folk music from the time, people like The Kingston Trio, Pete Seeger and then Bob Dylan.”

She started singing in her local folk club in 1964, though it was another five years before she recorded anything.

“When I made recordings it became like a second string to my bow but it wasn’t that important. Live performance was always the way that you spread the word and made a living.”

She feels she was fortunate to be around when folk music was enjoying a revival. “There were wonderful singer-songwriters like Tom Rush, James Taylor and John Sebastian and many others, and I was so fortunate to be young when they were writing songs. That repertoire is still matchless, there’s very little being written now that is as good as that.”

Dickson could have continued as a jobbing folk musician but a meeting with an old friend, musician and playwright Willy Russell, changed the course of her career.

He offered her the role of the musician/singer in his Beatles’ musical John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert, at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre. which went on to be named Best Musical of 1974.

“When he wrote John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert and asked me to come and interpret The Beatles’ songs, he knew me and my work because he’d seen me in the folk clubs, but the people in the theatre didn’t have a clue who I was. They’d never heard of Barbara Dickson.”

Its success brought her to a wider audience, but it was her first top ten hit, Answer Me, followed by an eight week stint on The Two Ronnies as the guest singer, that made her a household name.

“I recorded the Two Ronnies in one day and that was the big one because 15 million people watched the show every week. I didn’t spend any time with them but the recognition I got from it all was amazing.” And it all happened within a few short months. “By the end of 1976 I was a pop star and remained one for the next ten years.”

She says she enjoyed aspects of being famous. “Some of it was great because it gave me a chance to be taken seriously.” It also meant she became a familiar face on Top of the Pops during this period. “I loved it because it was a great way of getting your record to go up the charts. I remember being on with all sorts of people - I was on with Johnny Nash and Phil Collins one time, so I’d get quite excited when I knew I was on with someone I really liked.”

By the 1990s she moved away from pop and back towards her folk music roots. It also saw her branch out into TV, playing roles in Taggart and Kay Mellor’s Band of Gold.

In 2000, she won her second Olivier award for her role as the 1960s Castleford pools winner Viv Nicholson, in the musical Spend Spend Spend. “Viv was a very different experience because she was a living person at the time, and she was a very interesting character.”

More recently she’s focused again on her own musical projects and, at 73, is in fine voice. “I’m not prepared to retire, you wouldn’t expect a painter to retire so why should I? I just want people to be aware of the fact that you can be my vintage and still be doing it all these years later,” she says.

“I think there’s something in my voice that people respond to and that’s the thing that’s sustained me all these years. I’m very fortunate, I’m a survivor and I’ve just managed to keep going.

“I hope with this new album I can take people on a journey because it’s what I’ve tried to do all my life through my songs.”

Time Is Going Faster is out now. Barbara Dickson is due to play at St George’s Hall, Bradford, on March 25 next year.

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