Kirsty on Kirsty

"I'm the only person in the world who doesn't think I sing folk music."

Kirsty's comments are taken from an interview conducted by music journalist James Bennett at around the time of the UK release of Titanic Days. James has been thanked.

You are perhaps noted for being Miss Multitrack - lots of voices. How many Kirsties do we hear at most?

"It varies. I don't multitrack everything I do. I do much less probably on the new album than I have on older stuff. I think people associate that with the work I've done on other people's records mostly - more so than my own. Which is why they get me - because they want that multitrack sound. And I do it quickly!"

I've never heard anyone do it in quite the same way.

"I think it's a sort of spin off from my enjoyment of the Beach Boys' early stuff. But because it's one voice doing all the parts instead of several it's got a certain distinctive sound to it, I suppose."

How many tracks?

"There's never more than twenty [laughs]. I like to keep a limit on these things, you know."

They don't know is a really strong song. Why did you give it to Tracy Ullman?

"Once a song has been recorded, it's no longer down to the writer to decide who does it anyway. So anyone can record any song they've heard that's been published. It was actually suggested by a friend of mine who worked at Stiff Records. I was on Polydor at the time and having a really bad time with them and I was sort of thinking about selling up everything I had and moving to Spain and being a hippie. My mate suggested that because had had this big hit with her first single, which I think was Breakaway. She'd had a much bigger hit than they had expected and they didn't have anything else to follow it up so they were looking for material. And basically they thought, I'm there writing the sort of songs that she wants to do and it seemed like a good partnership. "

Are you grateful to her?

"I'm grateful for paying the rent. Yeah. It was fun; it was good."

Some people don't know you wrote it.

"A lot of people do know my version which was a big airplay hit in 1979. It was number two in the airply charts between Wings and Abba so I think quite a few people heard it. But it didn't really bother me. I don't mind a bit of reflected glory!"

What about Chip Shop. I'd have thought it was your Laughing Gnome but you still do that live

"Yeah. But I think it's much better than the Laughing Gnome. It's actually a song that gets a lot of covers in America. It's been covered by a New York punk band and by a country band in Seattle. It's got a broad range of people that pick up on it. I think there's more to it than that. I think it's a good song. I think people miss the point if they think it's about Elvis look-a-likes. It's about a certain macho state of mind. I think a lot of men are part-Elvis, or at least would like to be."

Were there any circumstances that made you write it?

"No. It's just about someone who's just a sort of liar. Who's presenting themselves as one thing when they're actually not that thing at all."

Let's go onto the macho thing, because there's Don't Come the Cowboy and on the new LP Big Boy on a Saturday Night. Same theme. An important theme? Do you have a problem? Do they have a problem?

"Yeah. I think men harder find it harder to express their insecurities and to be open about them than a lot of women. A lot of men do, not all men. I think that's why they go the other way and present this image of thoughtless thuggery. 'Because it's manly innit'. And it's not really. I think it's just a cover up for their inadequacies."

Is it something you've come up against?

"Everyone comes up against it, don't they. The world is organised by men in suits, isn't it? Generally. And if you don't fit in with they way they've been brought up to think things are, then you spend the rest of your life head-butting it all the time."

I just wondered if there's a reason why you've taken it on as a theme?

"Well, I don't think it's something that's going to go away all of a sudden!"

You're certainly good at putting them down!

"Yeah, but they're quite kindly put-downs. I'm not exactly butchering them."

A New England is the other song people probably know. And they probably think you did write that. And you didn't of course. Are you still looking for a new England? The first words of the new album are "I want to make my mark"

"If you look outside in London on a wintry day, there's something terribly depressing about it, isn't there? When I was writing it, it was that sort of weather - it was just grey. And it's never really light. I think you get that sort of oppression that builds up throughout the winter from the end of October onwards. I just wanted to kick all that shit away and get on with something more positive. But you can actually achieve something by making a positive move, although it's very difficult. Because it's a very apathetic climate."

Have you done that?

"I have done a few things towards it. I don't think I've stayed in one place and become totally static. I've been performing a lot in the last couple of years, which is something I haven't really taken to much before. Live work. That's a bit of a metamorphosis for me."

Did you enjoy recording with Morrissey?

"I'm a big fan of Morrisey's lyrics and I'm a big fan of Johnny's playing and the stuff they've written together I'm really a huge fan of. It was great to be asked to go and sing with them."

There has been some of the press coverage about the racist slant to Morrissey's lyrics. Do you want to express any opinion on that?

"I think it's up to him to address it really. I don't really think he is, otherwise I wouldn't have been quite such a fan, I suppose. You can interpret things in different ways. I think he feels so isolated by so many things that that just wouldn't occur to him, do you know what I mean?"

Fairytale of New York. Did you enjoy singing those words, "you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot"?

"Yeah, well, the thing about that song is it's a brilliant combination of being really romantic and really warts-and-all as well. It just does sound like two people who're really having this huge row. It's very human. It's much more romantic than most of the so-called romantic songs which you hear on the radio - the sort of songs that Whitney Houston sings - which I don't find any romance in at all. They might as well be about Barbie and Ken. What's all that about? Who are these people?"

Are you proud of that song? I think it's the best Christmas record there is.

"Yeah, I think it's the best Christmas record there is. I feel I can say that very modestly not having written it. It's a brilliant record and I'm very wary and nervous of that terrible over-sentimentality that you get at Christmas, and a lot of the music is really cloying, you know. And this is like the antidote."

How did it come about? Did Shane ask you?

"They hadn't really decided who they were going to get to sing it. I think they might have approached somebody else and not got an answer... "

Do you know who?

"I'm not really sure. It's only hearsay and I don't really know. I think because my ex-manager was managing the Pogues by that point, he suggested me and Steve [Lillywhite] would have suggested me. Shane knew my stuff anyway and said, yeah, let's give it a go. I was a bit worried because I thought it was probably too folky for me to sing because I'm the only person in the world who doesn't think I sing folk music. I thought, I'll give it a go, and if they don't like it they can get someone else."

It's interesting about folk music. Because you could almost be on the fringe of a whole generation of Jonie Mitchell (sic) guitar singer songwriters?

"I write songs that are generally stories to a certain extent, but I don't think it's particularly folky the way they're presented. I think it's more electric than that."

But everyone else does!

"Some people do."

That's presumably why you did Walking Down Madison?

"I did quite a lot of different things. If you look at all the singles, I don't think Days sounds particularly like Chip Shop. Free World doesn't sound like They Don't Know. There is quite a diversity of styles which I've done and that's mostly because I don't see how you can only like one kind of music. If you're listening to the radio, you like certain records; you don't like them because they fit into a narrow category of things you will allow to take place in a record! 'Oh, I like this one because it's got a trumpet solo" You just like it or you don't. And as far as songs go, there are great songs in every genre probably - except heavy metal, of course." [laughs]

I had to interview Jon Bon Jovi this week...

"Yeah, that sort of stuff leaves me fairly cold. But, you know, there are examples of good songs and they can be done in any style. It depends what you choose to do with them. With Walking Down Madison - when we demo'd it, it was always a very urban song. It was about being in Manhattan and walking down the road and that juxtaposition between the haves and the have nots. It wouldn't have sounded right if I'd done it as a country song. It would have sounded weird."

Do you get upset that you don't get the commercial success that you might have got. Like Walking Down Madison did quite well. I thought it was really going to go high in the charts. Angel didn't chart really, did it?

"I don't count that. It hardly got released really."

If I were you I'd look at the crap in the charts and look at your own record...

"You can feel like that. But you have to rationalise it in your own head, by saying, does a chart position reflect quality? And in that case I'll never be as good as Joe Dolce! It doesn't mean anything really. You get lucky and you get unlucky, but basically, as long as I can be given the chance to continue to make records, then that's my main thing in life - writing the songs and getting the chance to record them and then playing them to people. The bottom line is whether you get people turning up to the gigs. When you get a couple of thousand people all singing the words, that's more important really."

Tell me about the stage fright - which is now cured!

"I don't know about cured. I still get nervous, but I can function now and know I can do well. But before, if I could stop hyperventilating after about three minutes I'd be all right. I did a tour before I was ready, years and year ago. Everything went wrong that could go wrong and it just put me off doing it again. I thought, 'This is not for me'. So I concentrated on studio stuff. "

How bad was it? Did you stand in the wings and throw up?

"You couldn't control your breathing enough to be able to sing."

Did it ever get to the point where you said, "I just can't do it, I'm sorry."

"No. I always battled on grimly until the end. But I just thought it had to change. You have to re-assess things in life as you get older and you can't keep the same phobias that you've had all your life or you don't grow up. You've got to deal with them. You've got to say, 'OK. That was then; this is now.' "

What's your accent?

"Croydon."

What's the fascination with angels? What is this angel doing drifting round your house. Doesn't it get in the way?

"I don't tend to relay the positive side of things when I'm writing a lot of the time. I just write things in the way that I see them in a realistic sort of sense. With that one it was at a point where I could either feel completely 'jack it all in' or something would go right. It was that feeling of 'it'll all be all right in the end' - which I don't feel very often."

It sounds like there have been a few times when you've nearly jacked it all in?

"I've toyed with the idea, but I don't think I'd ever do it because as much as I don't enjoy the business side of the music business, I love the music too much. I can't stop doing it. Even if I never had another record released I don't think it would be the end of my songwriting."

Can you tell me what happened with Virgin?

"It's all boring... "

I remember music press stories a couple of years saying you were in the middle of a tour and they wouldn't support it.

"We were doing a tour which they had asked us to do and then they pulled out the tour support at the last minute. But these things happen and it's boring. I don't want to go on about it. I want to feel positive about being on a new label as opposed to remember all the crap that's gone before. "

Soho Square talks about being too old to cry. How old are you and when did you last cry?

"I'm 34. I cry quite regularly [laughs]. When you're a mixed-up fourteen year old you think you'll somehow have this revelation when you're older that'll make you able to deal with things and things won't bother you so much any more. But I don't think that necessarily happens."

My Affair. Did you have one?

"Don't."

There's quite a few songs like that. I know it's always a mistake to take writers' lyrics autobiographically and if we take yours that way, you've had one hell of a life. But there's a lot about affairs.

"Those songs are like putting yourself in character. And for that one for me it was like being Carmen. It was very Carmen. The music was very Carmen and I had this image of this woman - could have been a Lorena Bobbit, couldn't it. It's just more about people laying their rules on you all the time - whether it's your parents or whatever, you do things this way if you want to fit in with society. You don't present yourself like that, you don't do this, you don't do that. Otherwise... Phwoa - nobody likes a naughty girl, you know."

Is it your way of having an affair. Of doing things you're not supposed to do? Writing about it?

"I suppose so. Everybody gets to certain points where they think, "My life's in this situation, and there's all these things going on in the world that I may never do," and it's just a frustration with having other people's restrictions imposed on you."

Talking about Bobbit. On the new record you're a mad woman and you've got a knife. People will certainly misinterpret that I think.

"Yeah. That was weird because I wrote it well over a year ago and I went out to do a six week tour of America before Christmas and people used to react really over the top to that song because the trial was being televised at the time. I think everyone thought it was about that. It was more like I had a vision of this woman cleaning up in an office after everyone else has gone home and she's probably done another job all day and then she's got to go home and clean her house and feed everybody, and she's the sort of person that if she had access to automatic weapons she'd probably rush into McDonalds and shoot everybody."

But people think it's you. Are you aware of it when you write these songs?

"Well, everything's part you, isn't it? I think writing about it is safer than doing it."

On Steve Lillywhite and Titanic Days [at this time they were still together]:

"He didn't produce this album but I was really relieved that he mixed it. He did Angel, but the rest of it was really a co-op between myself and Mark and our engineer Vic."

He did Kite and Electric Landlady. It could be said that you snubbed him!

"No. I was ready to start this album. I was raring to go, and he was working on other projects and I didn't want to hang around and wait. I've written a lot of the songs with Mark and we had a very clear idea of the sort of sound that we wanted to get. I don't feel that I have to have someone there all the time now. It's not like I've just started out and need a bit of guidance. I've got some overall plan and it's really a question of bringing that into being."

Doing French & Saunders was a big break for your career, wasn't it?

"I was really surprised because they invited me to go and do a number each week in that series. That was before I'd overcome my nerves about performing and I think I was just terribly, terribly nervous about it instead of enjoying it so much as I could have done. I was very nervous. But it was a great opportunity."

Will you work again with them?

"No idea. No plans to. I haven't really been working with anyone else. I haven't done any backing vocals for anyone else for ages because since I've been performing I haven't got as much time."

And you worked with the Rolling Stones. I don't remember that.

"I don't even remember that. A bit of a blur really. It was on that Dirty Work album. It wasn't a major thing where I had a great input. It was just I was one of a load of people. One of the big chorus."

Tell me about your father, Ewan MacColl.

"He split with my mom very early on. A lot of people assume that if your father was a musician that you sat around every night playing acoustic guitars and singing songs together. I didn't live in the same house as him, so it wasn't like that."

He died a few years ago...

"When I was recording Electric Landlady."

Were you ever close to him?

"Yeah. At various times. Not as close as I would have been if I'd seen more of him, I suppose. Or maybe not. I don't know. Maybe it wouldn't have been any different."

Does it occupy your mind?

"Yes. Sometimes. You have to get on with life, don't you."

Was he a great songwriter?

"Yes, he was a great songwriter and he had a great voice"

Was he proud of you?

"When I started I was doing pop music - He always had a very low opinion of pop music. It had to be politically sound otherwise it was worthless. It was partly a generational thing and partly because he was so committed to his own political drive that he couldn't see the worth in anything else. Anything else was just throwaway. But when I did Kite, he was really into it. He was very complimentary about it. I think he was proud of me then."

Where was Titanic Days recorded?

"Most of it at home. I didn't have a record deal when I was recording it so I couldn't have done it if we hadn't had a studio at home. So, we go in to a big studio for a couple of days with the band and put all the backing tracks down because I like to record people live, because you get people bouncing off ideas live. I'm not interested in doing it all with computers. I suppose I could have done it all at home with computers, but I'm not interested in working like that. I need human people around about. It's more fun. You need musicians there to tell the jokes."

I'd love to see the process of it happening.

"... then we'd take those tapes home and go and work on them and do all the overdubs and vocals and stuff."

Who would you like to collaborate with? Which is probably another way of saying which musicians do you admire?

"There are people that I admire a great deal. I look first at the songwriting and people like Neil Young - Harvest was so important to me when it came out. It was such a 'wow this is it! This is what I want to do.' That album for me - that was when I wanted to learn guitar and write songs. That was it really. I've bought that album about three times in the last fifteen years, and it just doesn't date. There's something about it. And that's partly because it's not done on computers and it's not fashionable. It wasn't following a trend when it came out. It wasn't about the haircut."

Do you disapprove of CD like Neil Young does?

"No. I don't disapprove of it. I don't think it's necessarily all it's cracked up to be. I don't think it's indestructible for a start which is something that was one of its main selling points when it first came out - how it didn't deteriorate and that's not true. But I quite like the squareness of it. I don't like cassettes - they're just so disposable. They're all right for cars. I like getting a booklet with it. That was something you always got on vinyl that was missing on a lot of other formats - getting lots of information and features and lyrics and notes and stuff."

Pretty Girls - are you jealous of girl singers with 24" waists and perfect...

"Not really. I've been one of them. You're looking at an ex-teenage nymphet you know. You see people sometimes who are so beautiful that when they walk into a room nobody can function and it must be very weird for them to live their life like that because they don't ever have to try that hard in certain respects. Or you imagine that they don't. It may not be true. It's that thing of what it must be like to have coasted through life because you have that effect on people and then to get to a point where you're older and what's left now, because you haven't got that so much any more."

You'd rather have the talent to write songs than model looks.

"Your brain can last a lot longer than your body, usually. I think people spend an awful lot of time working on their bodies, but a lot of people don't seem to give any thought to their minds. They're quite happy to go to a gym five times a week, but reading a book is out of the question. I think you need both. I don't think you can survive."

Fifteen Minutes coming when it did at 89 was the ultimate comment on yuppyism, I thought. Does that still apply?

"I think it's quite valid still."

The other song I always loved from Kite was End of a Perfect Day. It's one of the cruellest songs.

"I suppose it's to the person who never wants to leave the party, you know. 'Come on, it's been a good day, but you've got to go home now. I've got to start doing the washing up.' It wasn't really about a male-female relationship, it was more about someone that learned to know when to leave things alone."

Have you ever had a hand on your buttocks in a Spanish bar?

"No, but I expect to this year. You don't have to go as Spain to find a Spanish bar."

Are you disturbed by the way chart and pop music is going - dance, explosions, techno, techno - no real songs.

"The only new thing that seems to have come out of music in the last few years is dance music really. Everything else seems to be plodding along the same. There hasn't been a new wave of anything else except dance music. I do actually quite enjoy some of it, but I just think that if you have to do your record out of all recycled bits of other people's records - which is what it is really - if you're nicking a sample - they might be fantastic samples, but if was somebody else that had the idea to record them in the first place and got the sound. And you're just lifting the sound wholesale and recycling it to make your own song and shoving a rap over the top. That's lacking in imagination really."

Are you just bitter because you haven't been sampled? Or have you?

"I don't know. It's quite possible I might have been. I'm not anti-sample, but I think it's more interesting to create the sample out of something a little bit more unique than just lifting it whole sale off someone else's record or song. Although, having said that, there's a few songs that were much better when they were turned into dance hits, I thought. That Suzanne Vega one. And Utah Saints. "

Generally I find it quite depressing.

"It goes along with that whole thing of video games. That's what kids are really into now. That monotonous manipulation for hours on end. I remember when we first got a video game at home. You would sit there for hours doing this thing and afterwards you go to sleep dreaming it. And you'd think, 'Fucking hell, I've just wasted sixteen hours. I could have been doing anything!' I think that sort of music goes along with that kind of mentality of monotony. [To the tune of No Limits:] 'There's no lyrics.' You don't have to learn anything. You just keep doing it and it's all very mechanical and it's got this machine quality to it, the same as a video game has where it doesn't actually lead you anywhere or take you anywhere, it's just a kind of bodily function. I find it quite boring, a lot of it. But having said that, there are one or two that stick out and are great. It's like anything. If you get people with no ideas and they want to make a record, they're going to use loads of samples of other people's records, they're not going to make a very good record anyway. But if you get someone who's got a bit more going on creativity-wise they can use the same song and make something interesting out of it."

And they don't sell

"Probably. "

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Kirsty on Kirsty

"I'm the only person in the world who doesn't think I sing folk music."

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