Raging Against the Machine

There are many ways to describe Kirsty MacColl, but `female singer-songwriter' is not one of them, she tells Paul Sexton.

The next time somebody uses the phrase "female singer-songwriter" to describe Kirsty MacColl, he - and it will be a he - had better take cover. "People always talk about 'female singer-songwriters'," says the woman who, instead, describes herself as Angry and Sad of Ealing. "They never talk about 'male singer-songwriters'. So 'singer-songwriter' means a man, does it? You have to qualify a woman by pointing out that she's female, so it's like not being in the same league as men. It's so ingrained, people don't even know they're being sexist."

Such an entirely justified broadside may come as a surprise from an artist who has specialised in light, airy, elegantly crafted and uplifting pop songs. But MacColl's dark side is more in evidence than ever on Titanic Days, only the fourth album of her 15-year career, and she admits that her natural state is, to put it mildly, peevish.

"I'm quite an angry person a lot of the time," she says. "I don't bear grudges, it doesn't last, but when it's there it's furious and terrible to behold. It doesn't happen when I'm working much. It tends to happen with parking more than working. Other drivers, the Government, stupid people on television ..."

Although the album has its more carefree and upbeat moments, such as Big Boy On A Saturday Night and Angel, the track released as a single towards the end of last year, Titanic Days is a gloriously harmonious melange of frustration and melancholy, seemingly far removed from MacColl's earlier, sunnier compositions such as There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis, her hit from 1981, and They Don't Know, an international success for Tracey Ullman two years later.

It would be wrong to assume that MacColl has become some embittered misanthrope with a brimming inkwell of vitriol. But the circumstances under which she made the album, having been dropped by Virgin Records and in some uncertainty about her future, explain the emotional outpouring of songs such as You Know It's You, which opens the album with the words: "I want to shake up this world and not feel so useless".

"I think that's something a lot of people can relate to," she says. "Especially in England, when you get really gloomy, you can just let the apathy set in, and it's like, 'Oh, this bloody Government', but I do want to change everything, and I don't think that goes away. Some people chill out as they get older, I still seem to be pissed off all the time. There is so much injustice people just switch off, but I would change it if I could."

"I suppose I was quite melancholy when I did the album, it just seemed like time to assess my life, and there was all this other stuff going on in the world which was much more important than my life. Everything seemed so huge and overwhelming. I always thought I'd make another record, but I didn't know if anybody would get to hear it, because you never do. Every time you make a record it could be the last one. It's harder than ever to survive in the music business, and I don't fit the mould as far as pop stars go."

MacColl's stop-start career began as a teenager on the Stiff label in 1979 and she has flitted in and out of view since then, appearing to build up a good head of steam on two excellent albums for Virgin, 1989's Kite and Electric Landlady in 1991. Then, with her standing apparently better than ever, and after weeks of rehearsal for a major tour, she was informed that she was now a former Virgin artist the night before her first warm-up date.

MacColl has learnt to be philosophical about such practices. "If it wasn't them, it would have been someone else. I'm fed up with thinking about that stuff. You've got to move on, otherwise you'd just get too annoyed to function. You have to let go another day, another company."

Her attention to harmony on her records has sometimes typecast MacColl as some kind of Pet Sounds obsessive, but her influences and interests run the gamut "I don't live in a vacuum, I don't sit around listening to stuff that's 30 years old. We've had the bass pumping at the back of the bus, I can tell you" and she has been a voracious music consumer since she was a toddler.

The daughter of folk legend Ewan MacColl, she made a remarkably early discovery of the wonders of vinyl. "D'you remember when singles were 7/6d? I think I was about five, and I got a record token for 15 shillings for Christmas and I remember being really excited, and my brother went to the record shop for me because I was ill, and I got Keep On Running by the Spencer Davis Group and Day Tripper by the Beatles."

When she heard a classic Neil Young album released in 1972, MacColl discovered what she wanted to do when she grew up. "Harvest was what really turned me on to songwriting and made me learn to play the guitar. There are certain records that just sound timeless. We do use quite a bit of technology, but I like using real instruments and real musicians as opposed to synth versions because they don't date as quickly."

Now removed from the mindless machinations of chart music at large, MacColl has no illusions about her position in the industry. "People are too scared of signing people up and spending money on long-term careers, they'd much rather get some people with pecs who can dance and make a lot of money over a period of, say, two years while their fans are growing up. Then they get another lot. You can see countless examples of that over the past ten years. So I'm quite lucky that I still get to make records, I suppose."

Titanic Days is released by ZTT Records on Monday

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Raging Against the Machine

There are many ways to describe Kirsty MacColl, but `female singer-songwriter' is not one of them, she tells Paul Sexton.

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