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The Kirsty MacColl web site
MEMORIAL
Mail On Sunday.
Tim de Lisle
Singer Kirsty MacColl, who died in a diving accident this week, reviewed music and books for The Mail on Sunday. Here, Tim de Lisle pays tribute to a unique talent...
The cover of Kirsty MacColl's last album, released in May, shows a tropical sea -sunny, calm and inviting. On Monday, while swimming in a tropical sea off the coast of Mexico, Kirsty was hit by a speedboat and killed. She was 41 and in her prime.
There is a terrible poetic injustice about her death. She had survived a lot - punk rock, child stardom, heavy drinking, marriage, divorce, single motherhood, stage fright, writer's block and being repeatedly dumped by the music business, of which she memorably remarked. 'It gets slightly less to do with music every year.'
In a vicious twist of fate, she died while on a Christmas holiday with her two teenage sons in a part of the world that she had explored like a teenager herself. That last album, Tropical Brainstorm, was the result of years of immersion in Latin America. MacColl took the trouble to learn Spanish and Portuguese, and she had just been back to Cuba to make a series about its musicians for Radio 2, which has now been held over as a mark of respect. Yet Latin rhythms were only one facet of her music. Her relatively slender body of work embraced many different styles, from pure pop to moody blues, but you always knew when a song was by her, because it was lucid and funny without being a novelty record. Nobody else would have written a song called There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis, or rounded it off with the line, 'But he's a liar and I'm not sure about you.' No one else would have tackled the subject of stalking by telling a story set to music in which the victim was a fan of hers, and the stalker was MacColl herself.
As a singer, she was accomplished enough to work as a backing vocalist for everyone from Talking Heads to Robert Plant, and to be asked to duet on one of the best Christmas singles ever, the Pogues' Fairytale Of New York. But it was as a songwriter that she really stood out - and as a personality.
She was the opposite of a prima donna, as The Mail on Sunday discovered when we asked her to be a guest critic on this page. Her journalism displayed the same gift as her lyrics - uncommon sense backed with dark humour She wrote of The Best Of Black Sabbath: 'You can't really use this record to frighten small children any more as they can retaliate with much scarier music by Westlife and Steps.'
Being funny is not too hard if that's all you are trying to do. Being funny while being wise and touching is a trick very few songwriters even attempt. In the whole of rock music, just three people have done it consistently: Randy Newman, Leonard Cohen in later life, and Kirsty MacColl, the only Briton in the club and the only woman. That's how good she was.
Tim de Lisle
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