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The Kirsty MacColl web site
INTERVIEW
This article appeared in the The Times in 2000.
Caitlin Moran
The last time I interviewed Kirsty MacColl, we drank tequila until the bar
shut, whereupon she came back to my house, played her songs on my three-stringed
guitar, didn't hit me with it when I missed all the high notes and, some hours
later as I threw up, watched over me with a motherly air. "You do
remind me of what I was like at your age", she giggled, wrapped in
fake fur and sitting on the edge of the bath. "You might need to wash
your hair later, love", she added. She was right. I found a
prawn in it the next morning.
Sadly the question "Who is Kirsty MacColl?" is probably being asked at this point, as MacColl, being a mother of two and therefore a genius on flexi-time, hasn't been able to spend much time on the stupid but useful business of getting famous. Unexpectedly but happily, Bono from U2 can answer that question. "Red hair, sharp tongue - she should be Irish; but I think of Kirsty as one in a line of great English songwriters that includes Ray Davies, Paul Weller and Morrissey. The Noelle Coward of her generation." He isn't wrong, and he's got celeb backup to prove it. Morrissey, very much the Morrissey of his generation, noted that MacColl has "great songs and a crackin' bust. She is a supreme original - but not, as far as I know, one of the original Supremes." And Johnny Marr, who played guitar alongside Morrissey in the Smiths reckons she has "the wit of Ray Davies and the harmonic invention of the Beach Boys, Only cooler."
We know all this because in 1995, when she released her greatest hits album (Galore), MacColl enjoyed the fun bit of death without actually dying - she got her peers to write the sleevenotes in the form of a eulogy. Every rock luminary you can think of chipped in with tributes to her ability to write perfect pop singles, sing like an angel and drink them all under the table. Only Morrissey mentioned her breasts, though. When I met her today - in her own house this time, and drinking just tea, thank God - she admits it was Morrissey's tribute that touched her the most. "I was heavily impacted by him as a writer. He taught me that you can write about what you want to write about, and not all the stuff that was previously associated with pop lyrics." The wrinkle of her nose suggests she's thinking of moony-Juney-spoony stuff. "That made me a far better writer".
Bless her, but she's being a bit disingenuous, given that her recording career started in 1979, when Morrissey was still in his mam's front room trying to glue his quiff up into a big hair cliff. That was when, at the mind-manglingly precocious age of 17, MacColl wrote and released They don't know, which Tracey Ullman later covered quite badly, but still took to No. 2 and used as the theme tune to her American TV show.
As with all of MacColl's subsequent gems, They don't know was, as Bono notes, very English by which I suppose we've come to mean salt-and-vinegar vignettes with the hustle, vim and occasional melancholy of a pub at closing time. Depressed friends who relocate to Australia and take up surfing; the screaming horror of yuppies with their "dollars on elastic"; a guy who works down the chip shop and swears he's Elvis - MacColl turns all of these into perfect three-minute pop singles while, on the side, bringing her extraordinary multi-tracked self-harmonising guest vocals to, among others, the Pogues Christmas hit Fairytale of New York.
Basically, if there's been a great English pop moment in the past 15 years, MacColl has usually been spotted walking away from the scene, whistling nonchalantly. Which is what makes her latest album a bit of a surprise. Kirsty, you see, has gone Latin. "Well, no I haven't", she chides, "I made it with my old muckers Pete and Dave, and if I'd wanted to make an authentic Latin album I wouldn't have made it with two people who know nothing about Latin music. Really, it's a pop album. A party pop album."
Following her divorce from Simple Minds producer Steve Lillywhite in 1997, MacColl flew off to Brazil to get some sunshine, and found it changed her life. "It was like a sudden liberation of my brain. I'd spent so long being unhappy in a very British way, and suddenly there was all this ... this new stuff." She gestures at her egg-yolk yellow dining room, filled with bright Brazilian icons and tropical flowers. "I was in Salvador on a Friday night and we were walking through the streets looking for a bar - of course - and we heard this drumming. It got louder and louder until we walked round a corner and saw this bunch of street kids. The biggest one was holding the biggest drum, and the three and four-year olds at the front had tiny drums. I stood there for 20 minutes and my mate was trying to drag me off to a bar, but I couldn't leave because it was so exciting."
So MacColl scraped together enough money to go into a local studio for a couple of days with some Brazilian musicians. She was expecting just a couple of acoustic guitars and some percussion instruments, but when she walked into the studio she was confronted with a full-on rock band. "I asked the guitarist, 'Who's your favourite band?' and he said 'Dire Straits.' I thought, 'Brilliant. I've flown 5,000 miles to jam Walk of life." Which is why the resulting album, Tropical Brainstorm, although conceived in Brazil, was actually recorded in Blighty. It's hard to convey how very non-worthy, non-'Look, I'm jamming with the natives' and profoundly non-Sting like it is. These are pop songs having fun with trumpets and maracas and gallons of the native brew. It's a Graceland as gaudy and fun as the real Graceland.
And it shows, once again, that MacColl's only current peer as a lyricist is Jarvis Cocker. Take, for instance, England 2 Colombia 0, about MacColl's first and last date with a cad who took her to a pub to watch the last World Cup on TV. It's full of quotable couplets like: "I never can possess the object of my desire/ Because he's bound to turn out to be a serial liar/ OK I didn't mention my kids/ I thought I'd wait a bit/ But I am free and single and he's a lying git."
Of the seven albums MacColl has made in her 21 year career it's very possibly the best - which, given that her 1989 album, Kite, still pops up in Best Album Ever polls, and even won the grudging respect of her notoriously hard-to-please folkie-icon father Ewan, is saying something. How does she keep her standard so absurdly high? "Well, whenever I go into a studio I always operate on the principle that I might get hit by a bus tomorrow." MacColl explains, finishing her tea. "And I'd hate the obituaries to have to read: "And her last album was her not-very-good album." Rest assured if she gets hit by the 271 to Archway tomorrow, Kirsty MacColl will be lauded as an unblemished genius before they've even scraped her off the front grille.
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