No Strings Attached

Kirsty MacColl is much in demand as the single-handed supplier of "Beach Boys" backing vocals to the discerning megastar. Now, with a bold and characterful solo album, she threatens to move centre stage.

In a London hotel room Kirsty MacColl perches on a pink bedspread beneath an exquisitely fussy rose-print canopy which might more aptly have framed a portrait of Barbara Cartland and remembers something quite horrible - playing live. She has hardly stepped on to a stage for eight years now because the last time she did, it scared her to death.

"When There's A Guy Works Down The Chip shop Swears He's Elvis was a hit in 1981 , I did a tour of the Irish ballrooms", she says, laughing as you do at terror recalled from a safe distance. "The audiences were nice, they just wanted to hear the single, but all I felt was fear. When that happens I throw up and I gabble. Our set was supposed to last an hour and a half and the first night I got through it in 35 minutes! I remember all these bemused faces in the front row staring at me. I came off and while I sat in the dressing room shaking, the band went into a couple of blues standards. I could hear my manager shouting at them, 'Drag it out! Drag it out!' I had to do the whole set all over again to fill in time."

So she removed herself from the concert firing line which, in terms of active pop stardom left her with only two problems being photographed ("I hate having my picture taken, I always look such a dog") and walking the streets ("I can't stand it when people recognise me") With so little of the sheer brass neck normally regarded as essential to her calling, it's no wonder her career has been such a sporadic affair thus far. Strange really, because she grew up in the business, though not the deep folk background often presumed.

Her famous father, Ewan MacColl, a doyen of British folk music renowned for writing Dirty Old Town and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (successfully covered by Roberta Flack), split with her mother, a choreographer, when Kirsty was still a toddler. He went on to sing with and marry Pete Seeger's sister Peggy. Kirsty just saw him for Sunday visits so the music which entered her bloodstream came from a very different source. She swears that, at age six, hearing Good Vibrations changed her life. "My brother had the single and to me it was, That's it! I knew that that was what I wanted to do" She meandered through school then a year of art college in Croydon, her home town. She cleaned flats, worked in a record shop, "Waiting for my life to happen", she says.

It began for real in '79 when Dave Robinson, MD of the then-magical Stiff Records, took a temporary shine to her. Her first single, They Don't Know, was an "airplay hit" and a good enough song to give Tracey Ullman her best seller when she covered it (on the same label) in '83, but Stiff dithered over Kirsty's follow-up and then dropped her, ironically just prior to her Top 20 breakthrough with Chip shop. Polydor, the lucky beneficiaries, clearly didn't have a clue what to do with her either, perhaps failing to accept her proven appeal because there was no convenient category to explain it. Bimbo sexpot? Mercifully not. Singer-songwriter then? You couldn't give them away with Green Stamps in the early'80s. An album and another single flopped. A second album was never released She concluded that she had become a tax loss. By mutual consent, further options on her recording career were not taken up - and she moved back to Stiff on "a better the devil you know" basis.

Meanwhile, though, working as a backing singer on Simple Minds' Sparkle In The Rain, she'd met producer Steve Lillywhite, initially without paying too much attention to him "I was so in awe of singing with Simple Minds that it never occurred to me," she says. "When he rang up a couple of times I thought, Oh, maybe he'll ask me to do Big Country too". But that wasn't it. They married in '84 and by the time she was shooting the video for her version of Billy Bragg's A New England she was, very visibly, seven months pregnant. Within an hour of Stiff ringing to say the single was up to Number 7 she went into labour That was Jamie. Louis followed 18 months later.

"It was weird. I'd never imagined having babies", she says "I'd never imagined getting married, thought I'd be, well, a full-time miserable old sod." Instead, she loved it. But, not surprisingly, she hit writer's block and, alarmed by visions of herself turning into a "glob" of earth motherhood, she took every chance of session work that came her way. Naturally, her husband's connections as one of the decade's hottest producers, with credits from U2 to Peter Gabriel and XTC, was no hindrance. She had something special to offer too, though: the call for MacColl goes out when the regular two or three-woman teams of backing singers just don't fill the bill. What diverse luminaries like The Rolling Stones, Talking Heads, Robert Plant, The Smiths and Van Morrison want is her female "Beach Boys bit": banks of harmonies, sometimes 16 or 20 tracks thick, with the particular sound that derives from being fashioned entirely from one voice She can slot her vocal lines in with the precision of a programmer and much faster, a more than useful stock-in-trade.

In '87 she bought herself out of the Stiff deal, and for a lot less than it would have been if she had waited until after her duet with Shane McGowan on The Pogues' Fairy Tale Of New York reminded the music industry of her existence. This time it was Virgin who took her on, doubtless appreciating the renewed marketability of witty, intelligent women. They also knew that Kirsty would be relatively cheap to run, while guaranteeing state-of-the-art sound because she planned to do all the groundwork with her husband in their home studio in Ealing, West London, and would secure musical quality control by pulling in an array of super sessioners the album eventually featured contributions from Johnny Marr, Dave Gilmour and Pine Palladino, the electric bass maestro, among others. "Studios are usually enormous, womb-like places where you can't tell whether it's day or night," she says. "At home the studio has window, you can actually look out at real life."

Anyway, their kids would hardly let them forget the time: early rising, barging in from nursery school for lunch. Helped by a live-in nanny, they wrapped their traditional rock'n'rolling day around the children's needs and got stuck into the album from "bedtime" to the small hours - and even managed to keep their relationship on an even keel. "It's easy working together because he knows what I want and I know he knows and he knows I know he knows, although I must say when I do a session for him I always think I should be louder. But then, he's responsible for the overall sound and I'm just listening to me, me, me. Given the choice I'd always want him to produce my records because I think he's the best".

The result of their collaboration, Kite, goes a long way towards meeting her ideal of "really good pop songs", a humorous accessible record that avoids appearing to be her bid for "serious" solo artist credibility. Contradictory musical ingredients help: her own lead vocals surely, if involuntarily, harking back to the hard finger-in-the-ear style of traditional folk while guitars jangle around like The Beatles on their early Buddy Holly covers and her massed tiers of Beach Boys backing honey up the harmonies. Lyrically the first single, New World, typifies her barbed approach to sex and politics. An attack on Thatcherite yuppiedom, it implies that the harsh attitudes responsible for closing hospitals and schools will inevitably carry over into people's approach to all opportunities. especially emotional ones pointed up by the ribald chorus 'Got to take it, got to grab it/ Got to get it up and shag it". Words like "tits" and "sod" appear in the other songs, her deliberate stance against the "girly" coyness traditionally associated with the solo female singer.

And she will beat her stage fright. She's determined. "Doing a few gigs with The Pogues gave me the chance to get back into it without being the star who's got their name up over the building. I still shake at the prospect but, God, nearly 10 years on, I should be able to deal with it. After having two kids you ought to be able to do anything. If and when, there could be employment opportunities on offer for anyone who can sing exactly the way she sings (she thinks) "The hardest thing is reproducing my harmonies live. I'm interested in hearing from people who sound like me - asexual, deadpan no bleeding all over the carpet. Boys or girls. It doesn't matter as long as they're not trying to do the big warm thing like Aretha. It's more Hank Williams I aspire to, like cheese wire going through you. That would be brilliant."

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No Strings Attached

Kirsty MacColl is much in demand as the single-handed supplier of "Beach Boys" backing vocals to the discerning megastar. Now, with a bold and characterful solo album, she threatens to move centre stage.

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