Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Singer and actress who played lead vocal in John, Paul, George, Ringo and Bert, won an award for Blood Brothers, had hit singles, and starred in ITV's Band of G
On the island
Eight records
when I was very young, I went to see a a film at Resythe Picture House. My mum took me to see Doris Day and Calamity Jane, and because she was being such a tough, sort of spunky girl, I thought girls can do anything if they could just be like Doris Day.
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Classical music hasn't played an enormous part in my life, but I do love Vaughan Williams because it it just strikes a chord. I think it's something to do with it being rather like folk music to me.
Jimmy Macbeth was a brilliant sort of slightly music hall orientated traditional singer who used to sing loads and loads of funny songs, but I've chosen a song of his that's not funny.
Somebody told me there was this American band called Little Feet had emerged and people were and read great reviews, and I went round the corner to the record store in Shaftesbury Avenue and bought this record.
Don't Let Me Be Lonely TonightFavourite
I have been deeply in love with James Taylor since about nineteen sixty seven. When I went to Denmark I stole a friend's album, Sweet Baby James, and put it in the bottom of my my guitar case so the corners were all sort of curled up.
My children have become devoted to an album that we have at home, which is a collection of the old BBC children's favourites. And this, politically incorrect as it could ever be and we couldn't find a more politically incorrect song than this.
My favourite songwriter, and I've got a lot of favourite songwriters, is Randy Newman, who's an American and a brilliant lyricist, very important lyrics. But I've chosen a tune of his which doesn't say anything very important at all.
I want to escape in in my own head for a little while. I'm going to have to get something wild to dance to, because I want to dance on the shore.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:53Does that mean you don't feel you deserve your success or that you just still can't believe it's happened to you?
I think a bit of both actually. I think that being Scots and with my mother having a Jewish background I've got this extraordinary dichotomy, you know, which is that in Scotland it's not encouraged for you to show off. You shouldn't show off and yet my mother's Liverpool background is if you've got it flaunt it, you know, so I'm stuck in the middle of that. But it's also that kind of feeling, is it that kind of girls from Dunfermline born in the baby boom just don't make it big?
Presenter asks
1:59But you always had the voice. Did that not mark you out from an early age?
Yes, but I didn't use the voice. I used to sing in the bathroom with a sort of tube of toothpaste for a microphone. But I didn't actually use it because I was very, very shy, and I still am actually. I don't like showing off and I find it difficult to walk into a room full of people who turn round and say, Oh, look, there's Barbara Dixon. I just my my legs go.
Presenter asks
8:41You began life in a prefab in Dollytown. What was the reality like?
Well, I remember it being a very happy house, and I speak to my mother, and my mother said that she thought it was the happiest house that we ever lived in as a family, although it was very, very small.
The keepsakes
The book
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads
Francis James Child
what I'd like to do is just to have that collection so that I could learn these fantastic ballads like Long Lankin, so that when I come back, if I am rescued, I would know all of that stuff. I'd be like Professor Dixon of the School of Scottish Studies
The luxury
Can I have a very large set of heated rollers? ... solar power? ... My hair is like the bane of my life
Presenter asks
14:17Tell me about Denmark. That was the big break, the big offer.
Well, what happened was there was a place in the Tivoli Gardens called the Visa Versajus, and it's a musical venue. And all through the sixties they used to have foreign acts would come and sing for maybe a season of one or two weeks in the summer. And I was invited to go there, and I thought, brilliant idea But but I was it is extraordinary really I was very cautious. I thought, now, if I go to Denmark, I'm going to come back, I'm going to have no money, I'm going to have to be on the door. … So I thought I've got to resign. And that was a bold move, really.
Presenter asks
17:45A metamorphosis took place and you turned into a different person overnight. Tell me about that.
I became a beautiful swan, hadn't you noticed? I made an album while I was in Jumpo George Ringo and Burt. And it was to be the first pop album I'd really done, and it was going to be called Answer Me… I went along to a studio in South Kensington. And Laurence Zatecki was the photographer, and there was a bloke in the corner who was a very, very interesting little Frenchman called Regis, and Regisse did a massive makeover on me, lasting about two hours. He cut my hair, which was sort of long and sort of not quite wavy, not quite straight. He permed it into a sort of elliptical kind of shape, so it looked rather kind of Art Nouveau. And he made up my face. I got dressed up in these rather lovely nineteen twenties kind of diaphanous frocks and went out there with little snakeskin shoes on and had my picture taken and left the studio a different woman.
Presenter asks
26:10Why did you leave it so late to get married? You were thirty-six.
Because I just never really found anybody that was a suitable husband and father. I mean it's as simple as that. I didn't really want to get married. I wanted to get married when I was very, very young a couple of times, but fortunately I didn't do it. I say fortunately because I really mean that. And when I met my husband it was in uh when I was started in Blood Brothers, and I didn't really when I met him, I didn't think of him as being immediately as being a sort of pu suitable partner for me, because he's eleven years younger than me. And I thought, well, that that'll never work. But I mean, we've been married eleven years and we're still together, so it's worked so far.
“I think a bit of both actually. I think that being Scots and with my mother having a Jewish background I've got this extraordinary dichotomy, you know, which is that in Scotland it's not encouraged for you to show off. You shouldn't show off and yet my mother's Liverpool background is if you've got it flaunt it, you know, so I'm stuck in the middle of that.”
“I don't like showing off and I find it difficult to walk into a room full of people who turn round and say, Oh, look, there's Barbara Dixon. I just my my legs go.”
“I had to be absolutely backed into a corner to do that show because I was so scared and nervous of being a failure in it. And my whole life, whenever any I've done anything important, I've had to be backed into a corner by whoever I really respect who's said to me, If you don't do this, you're a fool.”
“I became a beautiful swan, hadn't you noticed?”
“I'm not really like that, you see. I'd much rather do the sort of tough things.”
“I want to dance on the shore.”