MUSIC LEGEND BARBARA IS A SECRET ROCKER

BAR RBARA Dickson is full of surprises. “I’m a great progirl l,” she tells me when I ask her what music she listen to in her own time. When I was a pop star I never listened to music radio. I listened to Radio 4 and I listened to the prog people and rock. Friend Troy plays in a band called Night wish who are a Finnish symphonic metal band and they are just glorious.” Yes, we are talking about that Barbara Dickson. The Barbara Dickson we know so well from singingngs from Evita and duetting with Elaine Paige. The Barbara Dickson who has won awards for West End turns in Blood Brothers and Spend, Spend, Spend. Turns out, at heart she’s a bit of a rock chick. but ther if you still think of her as the ho used to turn up on The Two woman who appear in big shoulder pads and big Hair on Top of the Pops you just haven’t been Paying Attention. the Truth is Dickson, who will turn 70 later this year, has spent the last couple of decades redefining what she does, as anyone who goes to see her on tour will realise. "About 1990,” she says, “not long after I know him So Well was a success, I said to myself Right, I don’t want to be a middlestar because I think that’s vaguely aged. see myself in that way. I like pop I’m not prepared to just sing pop e got to try and do something that what I learned as a young he was a teenager in Dunfermline of the 1960s Dickson was a folk the circuit and so it was to folk that ned in the 1990s. r took myself that seriously as a pop star,” she says. “I always thought the folk police were going to come along and say: ‘excuse me. Can we have her back now?’”

She was always something of a reluctant pop star anyway, she says. “I could never have been like Madonna. I could never have played Las Vegas. My management would have loved me to have played at Las Vegas. I could never have done that because I would never have believed that I should have been there.”

These days in concert Dickson sings traditional Scots songs, maybe the odd number by the likes of Randy Newman or Tom Waits and retooled versions of the songs that were hits way back then.

“I only had a few hits,” she says modestly. “Answer Me was lovely. Another Suitcase in Another Hall is a bit twee as a record, but it’s a nice song.

“I sing that song with an acoustic guitar and it’s really touching. January, February is a great pop record. I don’t do I Know Him So Well because it doesn’t fit with what I do and it’s a duet so I don’t feel beholden.”

If anything, she says, performing on stage is a lot more fun now than it was when she was at her height of her fame

“When I was at the height of my powers I didn’t enjoy playing as much as I do now because there was too much pressure.

There was pressure to be brilliant every time people came to see me, because they were coming in such huge quantities. It made me nervous and worried and I think that I was worried about living up to what they thought was my reputation.”

Not that she regrets her years at the top. “It was good for me. The only lasting legacy was everybody knows who I am. Now they might not like me, but you never have to explain who Barbara Dickson is.”

And her fans have come with her on the journey from from Evita tunes to murder ballads. “It’s a rocky ride,” she laughs.

“Gentlemen of a certain age have always rather liked me. Even now there are husbands knocking 70 hiding behind pillars in foyers up and down the country who are too shy to come up and say hello, which is really charming.”

There have been other changes in Dickson’s life in the last couple of years.