Recorded at Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London, 10 October 2010.

A Concert for Kirsty MacColl.

The CD release contained three additional songs (tracks 13-15) as “bonus material”. When ‘Kite’ was released, CDs were still in the process of taking over from vinyl, and an extended track list would have been still fairly novel. While ‘You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby” is a nice fit for the vinyl tracks, the two French language songs still sound tacked on to me.

For album commentary please see the page for the LP version.

US release

The artwork for the Charisma US release is very similar (apart from the disc design):

This 2013 collection from Union Square was an attempt to do what it says on the tin and collect the ver best, and as such covered the whole range of Kirsty’s career:

Galore/ singles (3, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12, 21), Desperate Character (20), Kite (5, 7, 13, 16, 18), Electric Landlady (2 – albeit in a good rarer mix, 4), Titanic Days (15, 17, 19), Tropical Brainstorm (1, 8, 14).

This was also issed as a deluxe fold out digipak with a DVD of her promo videos, and souvenir postcards of previously unseen photos.

Here’s a print review, and an enthusiastic review from YouTube (starts about 9 minutes in):

All the songs are from BBC Radio sessions.

• Tracks 1-4 were recorded for Nicky Campbell on 8 November 1989 (first transmission 4 December 1989)
• Tracks 5-8 were recorded for Nicky Campbell (first transmission 26 June 1991), with Billy Bragg
• Tracks 9-11 were recorded for Simon Mayo (first transmission 7 March 1994)
• Tracks 12-15 were recorded for Kevin Greening on 20 February 1995 (first transmission 21 February 1995)