Tropic of MacColl

Kirsty done gone Latin. Nigel Williamson hears about Brazil, Spanish lessons, songwriting … and Ewan

Kirsty MacColl says, "It’s not meant to be an authentic traditional album. Who needs that from me when there’s others doing it so much better? It’s an Anglo-Latin hybrid pop record that reflects some of the things I love about Cuban and BraziIian music." She’s talking about her new album Tropical Brainstorm which just happens to be one of the year’s unexpected musical delights.

Witty, imaginative pop songs of the kind MacColl has been writing since There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis almost 20 years ago are at a premium at the best of times. Combine them with a liberating and feisty sexuality and some sashaying mambos and cool sambas that have nothing in common with Ricky Martin Livin’ la vida loca or Geri Halliwell’s trashy take on Latin froth-pop and you have something very special indeed.

But although MacColl has made an unashamedly popular album, her love of both Cuban and Brazilian music is profound and her knowledge of its traditions impressive. We are drinking morning coffee in her sunburst-yellow dining room and it is obvious that she has immersed herself totally in the culture. She speaks excellent Spanish and only slightly less proficient Portuguese, the house is full of folk art acquired on her travels around south America and the Caribbean and she’s an expert on the cults of santeria and candomble. When she invites me to inspect her CD collection it reveals row after row of Beny More, Los Van Van, Celina Gonzalez and other Cuban classics, many of them on the state-owned Egrem label and personally imported after her numerous visits to the island.

"I didn’t want to make a straight Latin album or even a record that sounded like David Byrne, much as I love what he does. Cuban and Brazilian music is very structured and disciplined and I didn’t want to have to follow any rules," she says. "So yes, it’s a hybrid. I wanted to make a record that would appeal to existing fans of my songwriting. I didn’t want to turn off people who’ve been with me for years by singing in Spanish or something. But maybe it can introduce some of them to this music and also attract a new audience that hasn’t necessarily been into my kind of songwriting before."

MacColl made her first visit to Cuba in 1992 so it has taken a long time for her interest to express itself in her music. She had dabbled with Latin rhythms once before on the excellent My Affair from her 1991 album Electric Landlady. At the time it seemed merely an entertaining diversion. In fact, it had sown a seed. "I recorded that in New York with Cuban musicians and it was very organic and mostly live. It was such a joy playing with that many people all at once. Having spent years in the studio doing my own thing it was just the most fun I’d ever had. I thought then that it would be really nice to do more stuff like that one day."

When in 1994 she split up with longtime partner and hot shot producer Steve Lillywhite (U2/Simple Minds) she sought balm for the wounds of marital breakdown in increasingly regular trips to Cuba where she consummated her Latin love affair. "I think I had always had this impression of it as terribly romantic. My father had given me a mariachi album when I was four years old, which was very different musically. But after that I had this idea that anybody who spoke Spanish was having a better time than I was. It sounded so exuberant. Years later somebody introduced me to the Fania All Stars. I didn’t have any great knowledge at that point but every time I heard anything like that I was completely transfixed. Just because it was so outside my own upbringing and different to everything else you heard."

But first she chronicled the split with her husband on the 1994 album Titanic Days. "I had to make my sad divorce record. Then I thought ‘what can I do next?’ I felt I was free to do anything I liked. I returned to Cuba for the second time that year and that was when I started getting intensely into it. I went back as often as I could but I probably didn’t write anything for two or even three years."

Never a prolific writer, six years were eventually to elapse between Titanic Days and Tropical Brainstorm. "I’ve got used to having long periods of writer’s block," she says. "They come and they go. But if you’ve got nothing to say I’m a great believer that it’s better just to shut up. You don’t need to make an album a year. You shouldn’t rush these things." And she should know. MacColl has made just five albums in two decades. Disillusioned with the state of the music industry she also found herself without a recording deal. "It was the time of Britpop. I looked around and I didn’t hear anything that sounded very interesting apart from Cuban music. Beck was doing something different but he was about the only one. Now they’ve got marketing people telling them that everything has to appeal to 22 year olds who drink lots of lager and go to lbiza for their holidays which is why it’s so incredibly narrow at the moment. I don’t know. Maybe there will be a backlash." We can at least live in hope.

But despite her silence on the recording front, there were obvious signs of MacColl’s growing Cuban fixation. When her old label put out a ‘greatest hits’ compilation it contained a picture of her in a Castro-style military cap lighting a huge Cohiba cigar with an American dollar bill. Her name became a regular fixture at Cuba Solidarity Campaign benefits and on her regular visits to Havana she would return with suitcases full of albums. "I collected mostly old stuff from the forties and fifties. I wasn’t that into the contemporary thing because a lot of it is like pop music anywhere. There’s a lot of crap and it’s not as if everything Cuban is great. But the good stuff sounded so refreshing, especially when you turned on the radio here and heard another generation of bands trying to be the Beatles all over again. I’d lost interest in that."

For three years she listened to nothing but Cuban music. "The kids would sit down to tea and I’d have Tito Puente blaring away and they’d say ‘please can we listen to something else?’ And I’d say ‘no you can’t!’ I guess I was obsessed with it." She also took Spanish lessons. "I couldn’t stand listening to all this stuff and not being able to understand it. And when I was in Cuba I wanted to be able to talk to people, not just to those who spoke English." She cites Celina Gonzalez as her greatest musical influence. "But I was so enjoying learning about Cuba in general that it was a lot later that I thought about incorporating their influence into my own songs. I wasn’t just interested in the music. It was the whole political scene and I realised that to understand Cuba you have to understand the religion. If you don’t understand santeria then the African origins of Cuban culture are closed to you."

When she finally decided she was ready to make another album she thought about recording with top Latin musicians in Havana or in New York, as she had done on My Affair. "Then I thought ‘what’s the point?’ Other people have gone there and done a purist thing. Which is fine. But Cuba doesn’t need Kirsty MacColl doing that. So I decided to introduce elements of the stuff I’d really enjoyed into my next batch of songs. Then the Buena Vista thing became really big and I was pleasantly surprised because I realised it wasn’t just me who was getting turned on to it."

The parallel interest in Brazil came about via a Portuguese teacher she met through her Spanish class. "He was in London training to be a teacher and he needed somewhere to stay. I said he could have a room at my place in return for teaching me Portuguese. We had all overdosed on Cuba so then I went totally Brazilian. I love the late sixties and early seventies stuff. I rediscovered all those classic songwriters like Milton Nascimento and Gilberto Gil. And Jobim, obviously." he undertook a lengthy trip to Rio to check out all the big names, although Caetano Veloso was a disappointment. "He was playing in the basement of a shopping mail. It was absolutely massive and the tickets were really expensive. I was really excited. Then he came on with just an acoustic guitar and no band and played this dinner set. I felt really let down."

But one of the great things about Brazilian music is it’s regional variations and she also visited Salvador, Aracaju and Recife, where she recorded the backing track for Celestine, my personal favourite from her new album. A wonderfully seductive bossa nova, MacColl wrote the song about her alter ego ("she’s hot, she’s hot, she’s hot, she’s just a wild and wicked slut") on the flight to Brazil.

"She just turned up on the plane and I had to write her down. Then I went into this tiny little studio for two days and recorded three songs with the local Brazilian musicians. But a lot of people in Brazil are really into heavy rock. I had Jobim and nice acoustic guitars and percussion in my head. instead they had keyboards and electric guitars so I had to sweet talk them. What I hadn’t realised in my ignorance was that bossa nova comes from Rio and what they play in Recife is forro, which is mental, high-speed accordeon music and is totally different. But bless them, they worked it out and I came home with the basic track. They were two of the most educational days of my life."

The rest of the album was recorded in the more prosaic locations of Bermondsey and MacColl’s own home studio in Ealing, musicians and long-standing collaborators Pete Glenister and Dave Ruffy. "They actually knew nothing about Latin music and I’d play them stuff and watch them fail in love with the music just as I had five years earlier, which was great," she says.

Some of the songs began life at a writing week organised by EMI’s publishing division at a country house hotel in Devon. "There were 15 of us and you worked with two different people each day. During the course of that day you had to write a song and then perform it to everybody else in the evening. I was terrified because I’d had writer’s block for three years. But on the third day I wrote Designer Life with Kenneth Crouch which ended up on the record. I also met Graham Gouldman down there and later we wrote Treachery together for the album."

Tropical Brainstorm is clearly a departure for MacColl. Yet even at the height of her pop success, there was always something about her that was different. Listen to the songs on the Galore compilation and they sound far less dated than most eighties pop fare. Then there was always the wit, the most under-utilised emotional weapon in music. "Vitriol and misery have always been far easier to express in song," she says. "But a lot of people also think that humour implies you’re not serious about the music. Which is stupid. I don’t see the connection between being deadly serious and being good. There’s a lot of serious crap around and there’s a lot of people who want to be celebrities and take themselves far too seriously."

Finally, I have to ask about her father, Ewan MacColl. For years she had denied that he had any musical influence on her, pointing out that she never lived with him as he left her mother Jean when she was very small. But she has since reconsidered her position. "I think I did learn something from him, which was that you can have a successful career as a songwriter regardless of pop fashion. If you’ve got good songs it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a crap haircut. You’re always going to be all right. I actually liked classical music a lot when I was a kid and I think he disapproved of that. Then I went pop and that was the end as far as he was concerned. He was very stern and fiercely purist. We disagreed about a lot of things. But he had a lot of integrity and he fought for his causes and I really admire that."

Her next album, she says, is unlikely to be another Latin record. "I think there will be a Tropical Brainstorm mark two at some point. But I don’t think I could ever make two records that sounded the same one after another. So the next one might be a heavy metal thrash album. One on which I can play lots of loud electric guitar very badly." She also has no immediate plans to return to Cuba. "I’m still very committed and I’ll carry on supporting the Cuba Solidarity Campaign. But there’s plenty of other places I want to see. If I had three months off now I’d go to Chile and Peru."

This sparks a conversation about our mutual love for the Afro-Peruvian diva Susana Baca. And when we have finished talking she offers to play me some of her favourite Cuban tracks, singing along in Spanish to Miguel Cuni with Felix Chapotin’s orchestra and then to Celina Gonzalez, whose Yo Soy El Punto Cubano is sampled on Tropical Brainstorm. Then she goes into raptures over a wonderful old Vinicius de Moraes track. Her enthusiasm is contagious and you should catch a dose of it while you can. Just in case she isn’t joking about that heavy metal record.

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Tropic of MacColl

Kirsty done gone Latin. Nigel Williamson hears about Brazil, Spanish lessons, songwriting … and Ewan

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