The Last Waltz

Walking down Madison, her recent collaboration with Johnny Marr, has finally put paid to the idea of KIRSTY MacCOLL as a dull folkie bimbo, and her forthcoming Electric Landlady LP promises an even more radical departure from her previous work. DAVE JENNINGS reports.

Article "The Times and Rolling Stone have both got me down as an Irish folk singer" observes a bemused Kirsty MacColl, stretched out on the sofa at home in Ealing. "which must have made Walking down Madison very confusing for them..."

And not just for them. The folkie tag which remains firmly attached to MacColl was never really appropriate - working with the Pogues and getting in the Top 10 with a Billy Bragg song was the nearest she ever came to justifying it. Kite, the 1989 album which finally established her as something more than an occasional purveyor of novelty hit singles [Aaargh! Not again! FW], was a glossy, thoroughly contemporary sounding piece of literate adult pop.

Even so, it's strange to think of that clear, precise funk-free voice floating over club dance floors. Walking down Madison with its firm pulse and angry rap break is the furthest either MacColl or the song's co-author Johnny Marr have publicly ventured into the dance arena - though Kirsty did, she says, attempt a similar step some years ago, only to see he record company of the time shelve the results.

"I was listening to Kite for the first time in a while", she says, "and I thought, Well that's really good, but I could make the next album even more enjoyable for myself if I could actually dance to it without being paralytic! But I didn't want to make an album with computers. A lot of people think that dance means you have to have the beats per minute on the sleeve but to me a waltz is a dance. Walking down Madison was written at walking speed - you can walk to it, you don't have to dance!"

"It was quite an observational song, I really did see a beaming boy from Harlem, even if it wasn't on Madison. It's a nod to Bob Marley, it's I shot the sheriff, really isn't it! That idea of being pulled for something you may or may not have done, and that you're more likely to get pulled if you look a certain way."

Aniff Cousins, the Manchester based rapper whose furious commentary on the fate of the homeless punctuates Madison, is Kirsty's current hero. "He's the Agent Cooper of Rap!" she enthuses, "He's got a band called Chapter and the Verse. They made a record called The Black Whip which I heard and thought 'My god, this guy's a star!' Even if we'd never worked together, I'd really be pleased to know him, because he's such a cool guy."

Electric Landlady, Kirsty's new album, contains one more hard dance track in the belligerent Lying down - "it's KWA that one isn't it?" she suggests - and numerous more subtle variations on the theme, with fluid Latin rhythms offering fresh routes to the dance floor. One particularly boisterous Hispanic shuffle, My affair, is virtually certain to be the follow-up single - which is good news, as it's both a vibrant dance track and an entertaining, salacious soap opera in song. My affair follows its narrator's progress from childhood, through sexual awakening to the point where she has to tell her adulterous spouse "it's no concern of yours if I sleep with the President".

"It's very Fifties Havana, that one", says Kirsty, "Carmen MacColl doing her damndest. The bitch is back..."

Elsewhere on the LP comes another collaboration with the Pogues, The one and only (not the Chesney Hawkes number). There are a couple of shadowy ballads, and just a little of the upbeat guitar pop that characterised Kite. The songs on that earlier album were almost entirely Kirsty's own work, but this time round she's co-written all but two of the tracks. Marshall Crenshaw, the Pogues' Jem Finer, Pete Glenister and Kirsty's brother Hamish all appear in the composer credits at least once.

"With Kite", she explains, "I felt I had to prove that I wasn't this bimbo girl-next-door I'd been portrayed as. That had been hanging around my neck like a fucking albatross for so long, and I wanted to make the point that, yes, I can write a fucking song, pal! I didn't feel that I had to prove myself this time."

It's probably not coincidental that MacColl also collaborates with two men who've provided melodies for Morrissey. His current tunesmith Mark E Nevin is involved with Kirsty's Landlady along with Marr, whom she'd first worked with years ago when she sang backing vocals on the Smiths Ask. The connection seems apt, because lyrically if not musically Electric Landlady makes Mozzer's "Uncle Sam" seem downright chirpy. Landlady features the genuinely moving Children of the Revolution which marries a gorgeous Marr composition to images of the world's dispossessed. "It was like a load of news images flashing in front of my eyes - it seemed that you couldn't get away from the horror anywhere. It's like Apocalypse now - 'the horror, the horror...'", she says.

There's also a wistful, understated ecology song, Maybe it's imaginary where apocalyptic concerns are blended with MacColl's customary mordant humour. But strangely, her most cheerless lines are often those concerned with relationships. True, there's usually (not always) that caustic wit to lighten things a little, but you'd never think that these songs were the work of someone who'd been happily married for years.

"Yeah", she acknowledges, "but maybe they're not about relationships with your partner. Maybe they're about relationships with your parents, or whatever. If it means something to you about your girlfriend, then it works, and if it means something to the guy down the road about his relationship with his dog, then it works. That's what makes a song universal."

"I hope the album's not generally seen as more mournful than Kite. The music's not necessarily sad. After Kite a couple of people said to me 'God, you must have had a shitty life!' But on Children of the Revolution for instance, the music Johnny sent me was so beautiful it made me cry. Johnny's playing moved me a lot, so I didn't want to write something flippant to go with it."

The same concerns that inform Maybe it's imaginary were spread over 40 minutes of TV recently, when Kirsty presented a BBC "By-line" documentary on water pollution. Having graphically illustrated the unsavoury state of the nation's seashores and cast serious doubt on the wisdom of drinking what comes out of your kitchen taps, the show went on to propose a kind of solution: a new system of filtration, involving the planting of large beds of reeds. The show illustrated how MacColl was serious enough about the subject to have a miniaturised version of the system installed in her back garden, capable of turning bath water into something pure enough for fish to swim in.

"What I've got is a prototype which cost me a lot of money: I'm not expecting people to copy what I did", she says, "but it's not just a pop star's folly, I wanted to put my faith into this method of dealing with the problem, and to put my money where my mouth is. Some people go out and buy a car, don't they?"

Kate Adie needn't fear for her job. Kirsty doesn't intend to pursue a career in TV - though she does hugely enjoy life on the other side of the camera, co-directing her own videos. She will, however, be carrying on her sideline as an exclusive session singer, simply because she enjoys it. Her most recent engagements have included contributions to the Wonderstuff's Never loved Elvis album, Billy Bragg's new single Sexuality and a forthcoming Tom Tom Club LP. Mostly, these days, such sessions are a matter of helping out mates, "but", she confides, "there have been some that I've done just for novelty - like Robert Plant! They asked me to sing on his album a few years ago. I thought 'Blimey, I'm supposed to be doing the low notes...'"

Though she's nobody's idea of a hell raiser, Kirsty does seem to have hung out with some of the most renowned over-indulgers in the music over the years - The Pogues, Happy Mondays, even the Rolling Stones when hubby Steve Lillywhite became their producer. She's commendably reluctant to gossip about her famous chums, but she does acknowledge an attraction to the old-fashioned wild-man-of-rock types. "I suppose like attracts like, doesn't it?" muses Kirsty. "I'm the wild woman of rock!"

Oh come on. You seem like one of the most sober, sensible, solid characters in the business. "Maybe. But you don't see me when I'm out! You should come round at three in the morning..."

The interview concluded, we retire to the kitchen, where one of the world's most famous record producers is peeling vegetables for his and Kirsty's dinner. We end up back where we started, discussing her severely strained relationship with some of the more wilfully witless sections of the media.

"The question I usually get asked", she says wearily, "is 'How do you juggle the demands of a career and a family?' I usually just say 'Like this!' (mimes juggling). I mean nobody asks Sting how he juggles two families, a career and the rainforests..."

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The Last Waltz

Walking down Madison, her recent collaboration with Johnny Marr, has finally put paid to the idea of KIRSTY MacCOLL as a dull folkie bimbo, and her forthcoming Electric Landlady LP promises an even more radical departure from her previous work. DAVE JENNINGS reports.

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