All for a Song
album by Barbara Dickson
All for a Song is a 1982 album by Barbara Dickson. The album was made up of mostly new recordings, but included four of her past hits.
Background
Following the success of her 1980 album, but relative failure of her next album, Epic Records decided to take no chances with this release and included four of her past hits on the collection and backed it up with a TV advertising campaign. This resulted in All for a Song becoming the most successful album of Dickson's career. The album peaked at No.3 in the UK and spent most of the year in the charts, eventually going platinum for sales of over 300,000 copies in the UK alone.
Past singles included on the album were "Answer Me", "Another Suitcase in Another Hall", "Caravan Song" and "January February", while contemporary singles released from the album were "Run Like the Wind", "Take Good Care" and "I Believe in You". This was the first album to include "Caravan Song", which had been released in 1979 and was one of Dickson's most well-known songs. "Run Like the Wind" had originally been written by Mike Batt for the film Watership Down, but was replaced by "Bright Eyes".
The album cover proved to be a problem when, on doing research, the record company decided that cover photographs with a lot of blue did not tend to sell well and despite the fact that the album sleeves had already been printed, they were rejected in favour of an alternative shot with warmer shades (see illustrations, right). The rejected covers were instead sold in Scotland and Ireland.
The public source identifies “All for a Song” as album by Barbara Dickson. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Song, album and Barbara.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4729977. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1982, 1980 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “All for a Song” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.