The video they produced for the single Billie Jean is now an iconic piece of pop history. Filmed in Charlie Chaplin’s studio in Hollywood, it featured Jackson walking along a pavement that lit up every time he stepped on it. But it was made for peanuts.
“We didn’t have enough money, so we had only about five bits of pavement and had to film it all on those,” says Barron. “We thought it was a great song, but Jackson was really uncool at that stage — he’d been a little boy in the Jackson Five and, until then, he’d only really appeared in front of sparkly curtains.”
After the release of Billie Jean and Thriller, everything changed for Jackson. Barron and her brother, meanwhile, went on making magic for the likes of Madonna, Adam Ant, the Jam and Culture Club.
Born in England in 1955, Barron spent her early years living in the south Dublin suburb of Terenure with her grandparents, a Jewish couple who had a business on Dame Street, printing Catholic cards. Both her parents were actors, but they went on to work in television and film production. Her mother, the late Zelda Barron, was a pioneering director who worked with Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand.
When she was 14, Siobhan left home and went to Paris, where she was discovered by John Casablancas, the model agent. During the 1970s, Anthony Price used her as a model in his hip London shop and Barron went to all the glitziest social events of the era, including Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding.
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When she was 25, however, Barron followed in her mother’s footsteps and set up Limelight, a film-production company, with her brother Steve. They thought up some of the most groundbreaking pop videos of the 1980s, including Jackson’s hit, A-ha’s Take on Me and the Human League’s Don’t You Want Me. But there wasn’t the parental approval the pair might have expected. “My mother was disgusted by what Steve and I decided to do,” says Barron. “She thought it was such a waste of our talent.”
The young Barrons enjoyed dazzling success, however. In 1990, the team produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, one of the highest-grossing independent films of the time. But at the pinnacle of her career, Barron chucked it all in. Ten years ago, she resigned from Limelight and moved back to Ireland.
“I started getting really burnt out,” she says. “Limelight and the whole pop industry took me off into some mega- executive mode and really my thing was always about the detail.
“I was always much more interested in the film sets and what people were wearing — all these pop stars didn’t come to camera with their whole image sorted out. I was much more interested in that end of it.”
When she moved back to Ireland, she brought her two daughters. Jessica Draper, aged 25, is an artist now working in London, while Cat, 14, attends school locally. Barron’s mother, who passed away in August, also came to live with the family five years ago.
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“My blood lineage is English and Russian. The only person in my family born in Ireland is my brother,” she says. “I travelled a lot, but Ireland is the only place I feel I can call my home.”
In 2000, she bought Castlemacadam School House in Avoca, Co Wicklow, and has since restored the building. She has retained its sash windows and put in reclaimed oak floors, but she also transformed the space with a distinctive, magical use of colour. Her experience in set and costume design was an obvious help, but when choosing her palette, she used feng shui as a guide.
Now, however, Barron is looking for a bigger canvas to work on. Currently breeding horses on a small scale — the house is on two acres, including two paddocks — she wants to sell Castle- macadam for €1.2m, which will allow her to buy more land and build an eco-friendly house and stables.
As well as developing her horse-breeding enterprise, Barron is considering going into business again, offering her services as a feng shui-guided designer. The work she has done on her own home has proved so successful that family and friends have called on her to transform their houses.
“I approach a house by coming in and decluttering it,” she says. “That’s the first stage: cleaning everything out. When that’s done, it also clears up people’s time. I really believe that nobody should spend more than a couple of hours a week cleaning their home — it’s a waste of time.
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“Then I work out the colours, taking into account the personality of the people living there. I feel that things should be cosy on top, but underneath everything should be clean and sterile.”
In her own home, Barron has applied this philosophy to such a degree that she can allow her menagerie of animals — currently numbering six dogs, two cats, a donkey, a Shetland pony and a mare in foal — to live with her in relatively close quarters.
The house, measuring 2,300 sq ft, was built in the late 1800s for the children of workers in the local Avoca mines. The original school building is now the kitchen and living area, and attached to that is the old master’s house. There is a large entrance hall and a reception room with a cast-iron fireplace. Three bedrooms are upstairs, along with a bathroom, and there are two more downstairs (one is used as a study). Barron sleeps in the second downstairs bedroom, which also has its own bathroom.
“You don’t feel like you’re in a downstairs bedroom,” she says. “You go down some stairs to go into it, so it’s separate. With the en-suite bathroom, it feels very separate from the rest of the space downstairs.”
A door in the bedroom looks out onto an enclosed patio and field behind the house. “I like having all my animals close,” she says. “I’m a bit of an animal freak. My bedroom door opens out onto the back yard, where my donkey is. We have the mare there, too, so I can keep an eye on how she’s doing.”
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The kitchen and living area have also been known to have some strange visitors — once Barron came in to find Cat’s pony eating the broccoli that was soaking in the sink for supper — yet their layout means the areas can accommodate the most sociable of animals.
“To keep the house practical, I keep it quite sparse,” she says. “I took out all the carpets and anything that collects dirt or mud. I put in reclaimed oak floors and kept the tongue-and-groove wood panelling — it’s very school-like.
“Then I took that through to the cupboards at the end. I didn’t put any handles on the doors — you just press them and they open. It keeps it simple and clean-looking, and if I’ve got something in my hands, I can just lean against them with my hip or elbow and open them. There’s a good example of something that’s both good-looking and practical.”
The sweet pantry off the kitchen, with its Belfast sink and shelves with cookie jars, also keeps things out of the reach of nosy animals, with colourful utensils hanging from a stainless-steel mobile.
Barron has developed other ingenious tricks to keep the house clean with the minimum of fuss — she had loose covers made for her couches from antique Belgian linen sheets, for example. The quality of the linen means they stand up to regular washing. She always has a gleaming white set on the couches, no matter how many dogs choose to lie about on them.
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So while the house is kept fresh and clean, it’s also a very welcoming one. And although Barron has made a practical and comfortable home at Castlemacadam, her distinctive use of colour — forest green and pale blue in the kitchen, pink and green in her bedroom — elevates it beyond the ordinary.
“You can use feng shui to work out your lucky wall and all that kind of thing, but the reason I got into it is that it forces me to use colours that I wouldn’t normally,” she says. “When I come up with the colours — and I’ve done this loads of times for my family and friends — every single time, when I show them the colours, they don’t like them.
“And the painters go absolutely bonkers. My auntie Margaret always goes: ‘Nah, that’s not going to work.’ I have to ignore everybody. I tell them I’ll pay for it if they don’t like it in the end. And they all end up loving it and copying it.”