Wednesday 11 February 2015

Barbara Dickson on famous friends and music therapy

Singer Barbara Dickson. Picture: Brian ArisSHE’S been mates with the Scottish greats, but it’s the uncanny power of the music, not the star trip, that keeps Barbara Dickson singing

IT’S not important to Matthew that the woman singing to him is Scotland’s best-selling female artist of all time. She has six platinum albums, 11 gold and seven silver. She has two Olivier Awards for her acting, an OBE from the Queen. It’s not important to the 17-year-old that she’s best pals with Billy Connolly, Eric Clapton and the late Gerry Rafferty. He just likes her voice, and the rhythm of her song, January, February, as she sings it for him in his music therapy session.

Barbara Dickson is playing for a very select audience. In Edinburgh’s Royal Blind School a young man called Matthew Goode, who is cortically blind with dystonic cerebral palsy, is being treated to a performance of her bestselling hit from the 1970s when she visits with the music therapy charity, Nordoff Robbins Scotland.

“He likes things with rhythm so I sang that one,” says Dickson. “Francesca, the therapist, played the guitar and I sang it. It was transformative. I’m not a hippie and I have a large cynical streak, but I saw these young people, and particularly Matthew, being taken away from their difficulties and transported to another place. There was no doubt about it. I watched it happen,” she smiles, fired up at the memory.

Read on...

CURRENTLY AVAILABLE AT GONZO
Winter
CD - £9.99

Che Faro
DVD - £12.99

B4 74 - The Folkclub Tapes
2CD - £11.99

Full Circle
CD - £9.99

Into The Light
DVD - £12.99

Time And Tide 
CD - £9.99

No comments:

Post a Comment

...BECAUSE SOME OF US THINK THAT THIS STUFF IS IMPORTANT
What happens when you mix what is - arguably - the world's most interesting record company, with an anarchist manic-depressive rock music historian polymath, and a method of dissemination which means that a daily rock-music magazine can be almost instantaneous?

Most of this blog is related in some way to the music, books and films produced by Gonzo Multimedia, but the editor has a grasshopper mind and so also writes about all sorts of cultural issues which interest him, and which he hopes will interest you as well.