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Tributes: Jan Fairley

High on spiky teeth and Cuba

I met Kirsty, with her long red hair and smashing smile, on November 11 in Havana, making Kirsty MacColl's Cuba, eight music programmes due for transmission on Radio 2. She worked at record pace.

Decisive, with strong opinions, she had been in Cuba several times in the last 10 years. She regaled us with tales of driving, with her sons and a Cuban doctor friend, the length of the island to Santiago in the early 1990s, of giving hitchhikers lifts and avoiding potholes and goats on the road. She was proud that her picture had, just the week before, been on the front page of Granma, Cuba's main newspaper, for handing in a petition in London supporting the island's struggle against the US embargo.

Returning from a heavy day recording in Santa Clara, at the new mausoleum for Che Guevara, then down at the Bay of Pigs, she insisted on us buying a bottle of nine-year-old Havana Club rum, which we consumed, while telling all the jokes we knew: Kirsty had more than anyone - and they were the most wicked. We sang her finest piece, an a cappella music-hall ditty learnt from Ewan when she was young: "It's a great one if the sound goes wrong on stage and you've got to keep the audience pacified, it stops them in their tracks."

She talked gardens; she was passionate about her own, with its two ponds, naming every tree and plant she had. We went to visit Ibrahim Ferrer, of Buena Vista Social Club, then to interview José Luis Cortés, of NG La Banda, Cuba's most controversial street cred group.

Kirsty was half-hearted about Cortés until she met him. By the time we left, they were talking of writing and recording a song together. She left Havana, enthusing over her extra bag, packed with beautiful etchings of armour fish discovered in the market, and "more papier-maché fish, but these ones have got real spiky teeth".

Jan Fairley

Related Pages:

• Billy Bragg in Folk Roots
• Philip Chevron in Hot Press
• Frances Dickinson in The Guardian
• Wes Eichenwald on his Web Site
• Sharon McGovern on her web site The Cobra's Nose
• Mark Nevin's personal memories are on his web site
• Jean Newlove remembers her daughter in the Daily Mail
• Dave O'Grady in Muse
• James Wickham in the Croydon Advertiser
• NPR's tribute is also online

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