![[Go up a level]](../../../../common/elements/badge.gif "Go up a level"){kind=icon}
![[Send E-mail]](../../../../common/icons/email.gif){kind=icon}
The Kirsty MacColl web site
MEMORIAL
The Observer
24 December 2000
Neil Spencer
Her last record was her best. That would have been important to Kirsty MacColl.
'Whenever I go into a studio, I always operate on the principle
that I might get hit by a bus tomorrow,' she said earlier this year. 'I'd
hate the obituaries to read, "And her last album was her not-very-good album".' No chance
of that; Tropical Brainstorm, her Latin-drenched finale, was superb. And it
wasn't a London bus which cut off Kirsty MacColl's life and career in mid-sentence
but a Mexican powerboat, striking her as she swam in a reserved area off the
coral island of Cozumel, close to the Yucatan peninsula. She had taken her
two teenage sons on holiday there after one of them had lost a close friend;
to ease his loss. Instead, she added her own.
The senseless accident that took her life was one reason why the death of Kirsty MacColl is so shocking. Early deaths in pop music usually come surrounded by caveats; drugs, drink, car accidents and plane crashes are almost occupational hazards for lives lived on the road and often at the edge. This was a 41-year-old mother who long ago put her career second to raising her kids, and who sought a life unwarped by a business she often spoke of contemptuously and which, she declared, 'gets slightly less to do with music every year'.
That MacColl should vanish just as Christmas was unfurling added a further poignant note. Rare is the seasonal compilation that doesn't include Fairytale of New York, her 1987 hit with The Pogues, on which she and Shane MacGowan play a quarrelling pair of Irish immigrants in the Big Apple, MacGowan soused on nostalgia and false hope, MacColl tanning him with gritty realism. It's a perfect seasonal item, packed with regret, drink and optimism, and now tinged with tragedy.
If Fairytale confirmed MacColl's place in the public's heart, she had plenty of other claims on our affections. She may not have had many hits, but her songs, and her inspired cover versions, sank into the national psyche in a way that the chart-busters of more successful acts did not. It was a MacColl song - They Don't Know, written when she was 17 - that gave Tracey Ullman a number one on her way to thespian stardom. MacColl's 1987 cover of Billy Bragg's New England helped bestow anthemic status on the song, and her 1989 version of Days reminded a new generation of the national treasure that is Ray Davies.
Davies was one of her influences and idols, along with Morrissey; writers of catchy, literate songs in the English kitchen-sink tradition. Her own brand of acerbic wit and social commentary was apparent from the start, when she dropped out of school in Croydon to sign up with Stiff Records, one of the bastions of the punk uprising. She had first picked up a guitar at 13 after hearing Neil Young's Harvest album. As a redheaded 17-year-old with an attitude to match her flame-coloured hair, she fitted into the feisty atmosphere of the times, though she had to wait until 1981 for a bona fide hit, with There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis.
Surprisingly, given her self-confidence and forthrightness, Kirsty was dogged by stage fright, which she ascribed to 'a bad experience on my first tour. I just thought, why subject yourself to such humiliation?' She tried hypnotism, among other things, though the remedy proved to be a bout of touring with the Pogues.
Her 1989 album, Kite, confirmed her as a songwriter of real class, albeit one who didn't fit into the stereotypes of rock chick or what Kirsty witheringly termed 'the Laura Ashley school of singer-songwriters'. Electric Landlady, two years later, followed Kite's pattern of critical adulation and disappointing sales. She accurately summed up her songs as 'happy and melodic but with bitter, twisted lyrics - jolly little numbers with snarling attitudes'.
Despite the protracted absences, she stayed active. She lent back-up harmonies to The Smiths, Happy Mondays and Simple Minds among others. A natural singer, she had the gift of perfect pitch, and though she declared 'there are worse things in life than being out of tune', she never was. She sang a beautiful version of Miss Otis Regrets for Aids charity Red Hot & Blue album, and with Evan Dando a winning cover of Lou Reed's Perfect Day.
Back at the start of the 1990s, she also had her own regular spot on an early French and Saunders series. 'I look incredibly pissed off and unhappy on those programmes,' she said later. 'In fact, I was just terrified.' If she had cared to compete a little harder, been able to play the celebrity TV slots with the necessary fake gusto, Kirsty MacColl might have become more of a household name. She, however, clung to her belief that what ultimately mattered was her work. 'I've never been fashionable, which is a definite advantage when it comes to longevity. I've always just concentrated on the quality of the songs,' she told this writer back in 1994, in an interview to promote her Titanic Days album.
It was an instructive encounter, conducted at the offices of her latest record company; since she invariably undersold their expectations, she was always hopping labels. MacColl was just what I expected: bright, funny and caustic, with a laugh like a tray of breaking crockery. When I proved less knowledgeable about her new album than she liked, she was quick to put a bluebottle in my ear about it. She was also very charming. We ended up discussing garden water features, on which subject she proved formidably informed, talking about the virtues of reed beds with an enthusiasm most stars reserve for their record collection.
Kirsty also put me straight about my assumption that her musical gifts were some kind of ancestral heritage passed on from her father, Ewan MacColl, the pre-eminent British folk singer of the 1950s and composer of Dirty Old Town and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face - songs that have become minor institutions in themselves. Not a bit of it, said Kirsty. Everything she knew about folk music she had learnt from The Pogues. Her father had been an almost remote figure whom she saw only at weekends. He had left her mother, the choreographer Jean Newlove, shortly after Kirsty was born, and taken up with his fellow folk singer Peggy Seeger. In any case, Ewan, a politically active Scottish Communist, regarded the pop music Kirsty loved (the Beach Boys, for example) with the contempt of the folk puritan. (It was he, for example, who led the attack on Bob Dylan for his lack of folk purity.)
Kirsty's attitude to her famous father was ambiguous. At times she seemed almost dismissive of him, at others proud, citing his songwriting as an inspiration. 'I didn't realise it for years, but I was brought up to agitate,' she said recently.
One of the songs on Titanic Days, Bad, alluded to her familial baggage. 'I've been the token woman all my life/ The token daughter and the token wife,' it started, referring not just to her father but to her husband, the record producer Steve Lillywhite, with whom she had just broken up. 'The implication is sometimes that I only went into music because certain men guided me that way,' she complained,'whereas I'd been making records for five years before I even met Steve.' Kirsty was fiercely righteous about the deal the music business hands to women, especially the idea that having a couple of children meant she had given up the creative ghost: 'I'm constantly asked, "How do you combine a career and a family?" They never ask my husband or Sting that question. It's plain old sexism, really.'
The demands of motherhood must, nonetheless, have played their part in the six-year break between Titanic Days - which she referred to as her 'sad divorce album' - and this year's magnificent Tropical Brainstorm. For two years she didn't write any songs at all. 'I used to worry about writer's block, but I think this time it was God's way of saying: "You've got nothing to write about, so shut up." In any case, I didn't want to make another melancholy record. That would have been grim. Instead I started to do some of the things I'd wanted to do since forever.'
One of those things was travelling to Cuba, which she did first in 1992, and thereafter on a regular basis. MacColl, who had a Latin track on Electric Landlady and had sung on David Byrne's Rei Momo album, had liked Latin music for a long time. Her fascination stretched back to her childhood, when her father gave her an album of Mexican mariachi music.
The young Kirsty was fascinated by the gaudy cover, the band's exotic clothes and instruments, the carnival atmosphere of the music. 'I think that's where I got it into my head that anybody who spoke Spanish was having a better time than me.'
Once she'd visited Cuba, the Latin bug bit hard. When her Best Of compilation appeared in 1995, there was Kirsty on the cover dressed in Castro cap, lighting a fat cigar with a US dollar bill. She became a regular at Cuban Solidarity Campaign shows, and took Spanish classes. Here she met a Brazilian who became her lodger at her Ealing home, paying his rent with Portuguese lessons. Her love of Cuban music extended to Brazil, which she also visited.
Her travels, many of them alone, fed into Tropical Brainstorm, a record which fused her songwriting with her passion for Latin music. In a more just world, she would have been back in the UK charts this summer with one of the record's highlights, In These Shoes, a salsa tale of lust and non-sensible footwear that was picked by Adidas for an ad campaign. The single became a hit in Europe, but not at home. Kirsty, who complained that, 'Radio 1 won't play my singles now I'm over 30', had made a documentary series on Cuban music for Radio 2, which was due to kick off last week, but which has now been deferred.
'I didn't want to recreate an authentic sound,' she said of Tropical Brainstorm , 'first of all cos I'm not Celia Cruz, and a lot of people like my music mostly because of the lyrics. I didn't want to try and fail at being the Buena Vista Social Club. I wanted to succeed at being Kirsty MacColl.'
Kirsty MacColl, singer and songwriter, born 10 October 1959, died 18 December 2000.
Neil Spencer
Sunday December 24, 2000
© freeworld 1995 - 2010