Barbara Dickson

• 1. Introduction

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  Barbara Ruth Dickson started her career singing in folk clubs around Fife in 1964. She was born on the 27th of September 1947 in Dunfermline. The Scotsman newspaper has described her as Scotland's best-selling female singer for chart singles and albums since 1976. A meeting with a young playwright in Liverpool pulled her out of folk music and eventually into the pop charts. A role she accepted despite having no acting training opened a parallel theatre career. A duet she recorded for a chess-themed musical earned a place in the Guinness World Records archive that has never been displaced.

• 2. From Fife to the Folk Circuit

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  Dickson's father worked as a cook on a tugboat at Rosyth Dockyard. Her mother, Ruth Malley, was of Irish descent and had grown up in Liverpool. The family moved from Rosyth to Dunfermline in the 1950s. Dickson attended Pitcorthie Primary School and later Woodmill High School.

  Her first commercial recording came in 1968. Collaborating with Archie Fisher, she contributed to The Fate O' Charlie in 1969, a collection of songs drawn from the Jacobite rebellions. Her first solo album, Do Right Woman, followed in 1970. Those years built her into a recognized presence on the British folk circuit. That circuit would carry her south to Liverpool, where a student running a folk club had a play he was eager for her to hear.

• 3. The Russell Connection

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  Willy Russell was still a student when Dickson first encountered him at a Liverpool folk club. He showed her the first draft of a show that would later become John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert. The cast included Antony Sher, Bernard Hill, and Trevor Eve, all then unknown. Dickson's distinctive readings of Beatles songs shaped the production's reception.

  The show's co-producer, Robert Stigwood, signed her to RSO Records. Junior Campbell arranged and produced her album Answer Me. The title track became a top 10 hit in 1976. The show also earned Dickson a guest residency on The Two Ronnies. Each week, she reached more than ten million BBC Television viewers.

  In 1982, Russell invited her to take the pivotal role of Mrs. Johnstone in his new musical Blood Brothers. Dickson had never acted professionally, and she initially declined.

• 4. Pop Chart Ascent

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  Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice had seen Dickson in John, Paul, George, Ringo... and Bert. They invited her to record "Another Suitcase in Another Hall" from their new musical Evita, which became her second hit in 1977. That same year she contributed two tracks to Scouse the Mouse, a children's album featuring Ringo Starr and others.

  Gerry Rafferty's City to City in 1978 and Night Owl in 1979 both carried Dickson's backing vocals, and both were best-sellers. Her own solo hits, "Caravan Song" and "January February", arrived in 1980.

  In 1984, Tim Rice approached her for the concept album of the musical Chess. She took the role of Svetlana. One of the tracks she recorded was a duet with Elaine Paige called "I Know Him So Well". It spent four weeks at number one on the UK Singles Chart. Guinness World Records certifies it as the best-selling female duet ever recorded.

  Starting in 1983, Dickson and her backing band made regular appearances in musical interludes for the BBC Scotland comedy show Scotch and Wry.

• 5. Two Olivier Awards

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  Blood Brothers earned Dickson the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Musical in 1983. She has returned to the role many times, including a production at the Liverpool Empire Theatre in 2004.

  That Liverpool run brought one of the most difficult periods of her life. In a 2017 interview on Fern Britton Meets, she described needing a four-week break from the show to recover from a personal crisis. When the production transferred to the West End, she moved with it. Years of stage fright followed. Therapy eventually helped her through the anxiety.

  The writer and director Chris Bond created a stage show for Dickson in 1996 called The Seven Ages of Woman. It premiered at the Liverpool Playhouse and toured extensively through 1997 and 1998, winning her the Liverpool Echo Actress of the Year Award.

  In 1999, she starred in Spend Spend Spend, a new musical by Steve Brown and Justin Greene. The show was based on the life of Viv Nicholson, a pools winner, and played to capacity audiences in the West End. At the 2000 Laurence Olivier Awards, Dickson received Best Actress in a Musical for the role. It was her second Olivier.

  Television work in the 1990s included Taggart, The Missing Postman, and Band of Gold, in which she played Anita Braithwaite. In 1998, Michael Aspel surprised Dickson for This Is Your Life at the Groucho Club in London.

• 6. A Life in Full

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  Dickson married former actor Oliver Cookson in 1984, and the couple has three sons. As of 2015, the family had lived in Edinburgh for a number of years. The Queen's New Year Honours in 2002 brought her an OBE for services to Music and Drama. In a 2017 interview, she described converting to Catholicism while living in Richmond during her thirties.

  Her twenty-fourth studio album, Time and Tide, arrived in January 2008. It included "Palm Sunday", her first self-written composition in nearly twenty years. Her autobiography, A Shirt Box Full of Songs, was published in 2009. A tribute to Gerry Rafferty, To Each And Everyone - The Songs of Gerry Rafferty, followed in September 2013.

  Time Is Going Faster, her 25th studio album, spent three months on the Official Folk Album Chart. The single "Where Shadows Meet The Light" was her first single release since "Love Hurts" in 1995. A completely revised edition of her autobiography accompanied the album, together with an audiobook and Kindle edition.

  In 2021, the full version of "Best of Friends" appeared on a special edition of her album Heartbeats. The song had served as the closing theme for the ITV children's series Andy Robson from 1982 to 1983 but had never been released commercially before that year.

  Her first online show, Barbara Dickson: Ballads And Blether, streamed on the 20th of March 2021. That year she also hosted Answer Me Ten... With Barbara Dickson, a podcast series in which she interviewed well-known female singers. Her guests included Petula Clark, Toyah, Kiki Dee, Kim Wilde, and Eddi Reader.

  In March 2022, she starred in BBC Radio 4's The Road and the Miles to Dundee, written by Val McDermid and directed by Turan Ali.