The Guardian, 1991

The first time I see Kirsty MacColl she is a reluctant pop star, sitting disconsolately in the conservatory of her Ealing home, head in hands, slagging off the music business. "I don't want to be presented as something I'm not. The pop world packages women. You're either a dolly bird bimbo or a soap box sociologist. So many songs are written by men for women to sing and they obviously have a pretty strange string of women around. Dopey cows in frilly dresses singing Oh Baby I Can't Live Without You. It's capitulation. I've done that shit for years. Now I know what I want. I am 31, the mother of two children, no longer a teen ballad writer. I want to be me."

Outside the rain beats down and a mad squirrel barks at us through the glass. Her mood swings constantly between abject vulnerability and wild attack. At times she just dissolves into tears. Jamie, her six-year-old son, "the tortured intellectual in the family", hurls a boomerang at his mother which she, with remarkable restraint, does not hurl back. Her theme is consistent and relentless. She wants to be honest: "Why should I pretend? What's wrong with who I am?" The best advice she ever had was given by her mother: "Don't be limited by other people's narrow-mindedness." And so she pushes herself. "It's like walking around with no skin half the time."

All her life she has been held back by others' low expectations of her and so now she sets her own agenda. The aim is nothing less than to be herself in public. Her tone is pitched somewhere between the anguished cry of the maimed adolescent and the maturing artist struggling to find an individual voice. Echoing Hemingway's claim that the best training ground for an artist is an unhappy childhood, she tells me, "As a child I was misunderstood. I couldn't express myself which is why most people become artists, we've all been to the same concentration camp."

Creativity substitutes for intimacy and all relationships turn inward to the solitary need for self-expression. The central relationship is with yourself and through your work. No wonder she says she felt lonely: "I'm not as lonely now as I was. Life's a lot more bearable. I'm happily married, I've got two lovely kids. But I've known what it's like to be lonely, to be broke. To sit in the bedsit with the payphone by your bed waiting for it to ring. And I've known what it's like to be happy, to be rich. Where most people may have known one thing, I've known them all."

You can quibble with this, you can call it arrogance, ego, self-absorption. Put bluntly like this it may not even seem particularly endearing. It's a quality you notice in vulnerable people, this ability always to be one up. But there's a sense of danger surrounding these people with no skin. They get under your skin. It's as if their terror communicates itself to you, draws you in. And this, of course, is what she puts into her music. Her influences, she says, are diverse - Latin, folk, classical, rock. And, "Everything you hear influences you. You think: why don't I like that? Because it's got crap lyrics, it doesn't sound like they mean it, it sounds like everyone else. I don't want to sound like anyone else. And I don't have to."

Her new single, My Affair, epitomises her attitude which she would probably call defiant but which I'll call existential bravado, principally because I hope it will make her laugh. It's a song about a woman who has to prove she can do anything and survive. Playing on the ambiguity between my affair, as in my business, and my "love" affair, it traces a pattern through childhood rebellion, adolescent sexual awakening, the misery of faithlessness: "Who I see is up to me/It's my affair." To the final resting place of all individualists - free and alone. "So if the phone should ring and there's no one there/Then it's my affair." All set against an upbeat Hispanic romp. "Life's a bitch," MacColl says, "but that doesn't mean we have to play it as a dirge." Ultimately the song turns on itself. Defiance, it says, can sustain you only so far. The trick is not simply to survive but to be happy. Her songs, she says, are all about contrasts and opposites, humour and misery, "flipsides".

The flipside of her new single is called All The Tears That I Cried. "Too much reminiscing is bad for the soul/ It screws up your life and it makes you feel . . . "

She has no doubt where her melancholy comes from. Her father, the folk singer Ewan MacColl, left her mother, the choreographer Jean MacColl, for Peggy Seeger before Kirsty was born. He would visit on Sundays. "I can't say I looked forward to it, I won't say I didn't." At Croydon comprehensive, schoolfriends who had seen her famous dad on telly would ask her about him. But she never knew him. She can't talk about him even now, except indirectly.

"Children are happy if their parents are happy. They shouldn't have to feel responsible for the cock-ups of grown-ups. I felt guilty about a lot of things that were nothing to do with me." And, "Loving is not saying, 'I love you' to someone, it's giving them what they need. I'm not sure what I needed but I don't think I got it." And, "I don't want to make my mum unhappy. She wanted it all to be all right. She didn't turn against my father, she loved him and she never loved anyone else. I wish I'd been closer to him, but he was a sad man and it made him close up. Childhood was just something I had to get over in order to get on with my life."

She could never, as a child, listen to his songs. Ewan MacColl, incidentally, was an outspoken critic of the spread of pop music in the fifties. He died two years ago. Death, she says, catapults you into an awareness of mortality and now she's started to get help, started to feel better, even her asthma has cleared up since her homeopath told her it was all in the head. And she has written a song about her father on the new album, with her older brother, Hamish. It's called The Hardest Word and one line runs, "Forgive our indignity as we forgive yours."

So it's over now, she says. But he still casts a long shadow. "They say, her dad's a famous songwriter, no wonder she's in the business. And now they say, she's married to someone who's a successful and famous music producer, Steve Lillywhite, no wonder she makes records. But why shouldn't I marry him just because it's going to ruin my credibility with a couple of assholes? I love my husband, and he's a wonderful father." They have been together eight years, having met when she was doing backing vocals for the group Simple Minds. "They say you shouldn't hang around with other musicians or you become rent-a-pop-singer. But I like working with my friends. And I knew Simple Minds would be mega, though I would have done it if they weren't going to be mega because they're good."

Lillywhite is a perfectionist and so is she. He has produced her last two albums, Kite in 1989 and now Electric Landlady. "He gets a better vocal performance out of me than the others." The last two years, she adds, she has felt better than she's felt in her whole life. "At last it feels as though I've got things sorted out." The second time I see Kirsty MacColl, she is suddenly, vibrantly, ecstatically, irrepressibly alive.

Her new album has soared into the charts at number 17 and she's off to the States to promote it. We sit in the blue drawing room and sip champagne. Nothing can dampen her zest. Not the fact that Virgin, her music publishers, have forgotten to send word of congratulations. Not the miserable fungus infecting her carp in the custom-built reed bed she has constructed in her garden to "put rhythm" and purification back in the water. "At least it's not being transmitted to the goldfish."

The sun has come out and she laughs. "I'm a more successful person than when you saw me last. A little success has gone straight to my head. What does success do? It makes you horny." I can see what she means about Lillywhite being lovely; he's one of those people who when he walks seems to bounce and now he bounces into the room. What's she like, I ask, to live with? "She's brilliant," he says, "and sometimes she's not very happy." Which seems a fair summation.

"You forgot to tell her," says MacColl, "how great I am in bed." "Ah yes," he replies, reeling visibly. "And she's a great lay." "Mutual," replies MacColl. There's just one more mountain to scale. It is 10 years since Kirsty MacColl has performed live in front of an audience and the thought still terrifies her, makes her physically sick. The last time was in 1981, touring her first single, They Don't Know, around the Irish ballrooms. "It wasn't easy, those places are huge, they hold over 2,000 people, all farmers looking for a wife, lined up, plastered, giving each other the eye. But I was crap. I came home bruised, mauled, with everything ripped off. And it served me right." In October, however, she plans a live tour. "I've got to do it. If I don't, I'll think I've failed as an artist. You have to have total faith. I want to write better songs, make better records. I want to do everything better and better and better until I die. That's all."

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The Guardian, 1991

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