Hymn to her

Cover Kirsty MacColl was born in Croydon, south London, in 1959, the daughter of playwright, folk singer and social activist, Ewan MacColl, and Jean Newlove, a choreographer and dancer. She learned classical guitar and violin but grew up with the music of The Beatles, Neil Young, Frank Zappa and the harmonies of The Beach Boys, whose influence was later to be heard in her own multilayered vocal arrangements.

After leaving her south London school, she went to art college and, at nineteen, signed to Stiff Records. Her first single, They Don’t Know, was well-received and was later an international hit for Tracey Ullman. She left Stiff for Polydor, where in 1981, she recorded her first album, Desperate Character, which included the hit single, There’s a Guy Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis. She embarked on a hurried tour of Irish ballroom venues, an experience which was to give her a decade-long dread of live performance.

In early 1985, Kirsty MacColl’s version of the Billy Bragg song, A New England, entered the British Top Ten on the day she gave birth to her first son. A hiatus in her own writing and recording followed, with the birth of a second son and a successful career as a session vocalist — with Talking Heads, The Smiths, Simple Minds, Happy Mondays, Billy Bragg among others — and songwriter for other artists, including Frida, formerly of Abba. MacColl’s duet with Shane MacGowan on The Pogues’ Fairytale of New York in 1987 has become a Christmas-time classic. It was her tour with The Pogues which helped to dispel the stage fright she’d acquired seven years earlier.

She signed to the Virgin label and recorded Kite, a showcase album for her brand of literate, bitter-sweet and elegantly crafted pop music. The follow-up, Electric Landlady — the title a spoof of the Jimi Hendrix album, Electric Ladyland —was more successful in the United States, with the single, Walking Down Madison, about homelessness in New York City. Both albums were produced by her husband, Steve Lillywhite. Three years later, the album Titanic Days (on the ZTT label) included the track Bad, a song about female revenge which included a tongue-in-cheek reference to the familial baggage that has followed her around: ‘I’ve been the token woman all my life: the token daughter and the token wife.’

Among her television work, Kirsty MacColl has presented a BBC documentary on water pollution, and she appeared in her own, regular spot on the French and Saunders comedy series in 1990. Her writing for television included the title song to the Canton comedy-drama series, 'Moving Stories’.

Kirsty MacColl lives in London with her two sons.

I was very keen on music from as far back as I can remember. It helped that I had a brother who was nine years older than me, so he was bringing things home that I’d get to hear. I remember hearing Good Vibrations and playing it over and over again, thinking ‘this is fantastic, I want to learn all the parts!’ I must have been about four or five then. I was also very keen on The Beatles, who were still putting out albums every year at that point. It was always the biggest interest in my life, I don’t remember being particularly interested in anything else. I was very ill a lot as a child, I always had really bad asthma and I never got to lead a really normal life. Music was a kind of release that you could just get lost in and it saved me from the outside world. I suppose I was quite unhappy in my own environment and it was the only thing that lifted my spirits and made me feel good.

When I was in my teens, I’d get home from school and go to my room and fiddle about on the guitar and try to learn loads of Neil Young songs. Harvest was a really important album for me, it was one of the big milestones. I thought, ‘This is what I want to do, I want to write songs.’ It was a major breakthrough for me. I was never just listening to one style of music, I was always influenced by anything I could lay my hands on. I went through various obsessions. When I was fourteen, I was very keen on maths and I was really into Bach at the same time. I went through a spate of listening to twenty-year-old rockabilly records and the Shangri-las. Obviously I got into a lot of stuff that was current, things like Steely Dan and The Ramones.

I don’t ever remember my father living with us but I remember there was a very miserable atmosphere around so I think you inherit a bit of that. He’d bring his records over and leave them. I think I was so traumatized by my family, really, that I found it very hard to listen to anything that I associated with my parents. I couldn’t really listen to folk music for many, many years. I didn’t start listening to folk music until I worked with The Pogues. Also, I was very aware of the fact that he disapproved completely of anything that he regarded as commercial. It was a sort of sin really and there was probably nothing that his children could have done more to upset him than to want to become pop singers. The way I see it is that you write a song and the song isn’t good or bad because of the arrangement, the song is either good or bad. The arrangement is just how you dress it up, it’s the clothes it puts on when it goes out.

I was in an uncomfortable position because my father was very well-known to an older generation and there was a certain presumption among some people that I would be singing folk songs and doing his songs, and I was very determined to do my own songs, the way I wanted to do them. We were from completely different generations. My dad was quite old when I was born. As much as I loved him, I thought his outlook on what was valid and what was not was rather narrow-minded. It just seemed to be dated, and slightly hypocritical. There are things about pop music that are good, you can have a message; ultimately, a good pop single transcends all that and that’s why it’s popular among millions of people. It’s not preaching. it’s uplifting.

I never thought we were competing in the same field because my dad was very politically active and would play to large folk audiences but a lot of those people would never go and see a pop gig. They'd never go and see David Bowie. Whereas I was coming from a different angle, I came out just as punk was happening and it was a completely different outlook, you didn’t have to have spent fifty years learning [music] to go and do it. I didn’t grow up with my father and I didn’t have the benefits (or not!) of seeing him on a daily basis but I’d get people coming backstage after gigs and talking very knowledgeably about him and it was very uncomfortable for me, because I didn’t think I knew him as well as they thought they knew him. It was very hurtful and quite hard to deal with for a long time. It’s funny really because as you get older, you realize that you’ve taken on more than you thought you had from your parents.

I was very naïve when I started. When I had my first single out in 1979 the record company wrote a press release without telling me. The first time I did an interview, somebody started asking me about my dad and I said, ‘How do you know who my father is?’ and they said, ‘It’s in your press release.’ The record company had obviously thought, ‘Let’s angle it as, it's in the genes, it’s genetic music"’, which is just a real insult. I wrote a teen ballad, I was a teenager at the time so that’s what I did! What did that have to do with my parents? They’ve [music writers] got to have some angle; they can’t just say, ‘Here’s somebody doing their own thing, making the records they want to make.’ It’s never that straightforward, they’d rather see some Svengali in the background which is not necessarily true, but it’s what people want to imagine, especially where women are concerned. Independent women make people nervous.

I’ve been making records for fifteen years and I started off much more malleable and much more eager to please because I figured all of these people at the record companies were at least ten years older than me and they must know what they’re talking about. Then, after a while I thought, ‘If they know so much, why aren’t they making the records?’ I thought, ‘Maybe I do know what I’m talking about.’ Since I realised that, I’ve been more and more determined to do it on my own terms, and not to be pushed around. Certainly, artistically, I make all my own decisions and if people don’t like the records, then at least they don’t like the records I’ve chosen to make. They’re not listening to something that somebody else has created and I’ve just done the vocal on.

I don’t know if I was particularly naïve or not, but I used to think that if you just kept as true to yourself as you could, it would be all right in the end. But I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. Because you can’t say ‘all the most sincere artists have the most success’. That’s certainly not true but on the other hand, for me it would be worthless if I had a Number One record on someone else’s terms. What’s the point? It’s not what I’m about. Also, because I feel that I’ve been swimming against the tide for so long now, the last thing I’m going to do is say, ‘OK, I give up! What do you want me to wear?’ I’ve really got nothing to lose now, and that’s quite an empowering position to be in. It’s not always easy but at least I feel braver, to a certain extent.

I think I did fairly well to carve my own niche because I don’t fit into the stereotypical ideas of what a female pop-singer should be like. I’m not glamorous, I don’t go in for dance routines (in public anyway!). All I want to do is sell enough records to enable me to make the next record, and that’s the bottom line. I really love doing it and I don’t want to have to stop. It becomes harder and harder, the more determined you are to do it your own way. I never thought, ‘I’d love to be on television, I must be a celebrity!’ What I really want to do is just keep making music. It’s uncharted territory because there aren’t that many 34-year-old pop-singers who aren’t glamour-pusses! I feel to a certain extent I’m on this personal crusade.

I think there are more women around now who don’t conform to the original stereotypes, and that can only be good. There are still not that many in rock music — but Chrissie Hynde is the first and last rock icon for women to a certain extent. I’m like most women that I know: yes, I would like to be thinner but on the other hand, would it make my records! job/life any better? And is it so important to me that I have to go off and spend two months starving myself just to suit some kind of pathetic image of what people think I’m about? I’m not earning the sort of money where I can stand up and say, ‘Look, I’m doing just as well as those super-models!’ But on the other hand I think it’s good that women know that there are other women out there who are doing their own thing, without resorting to this ridiculous stereotypical behaviour and image. Nobody should feel forced to take on a completely alien persona in order to get the chance to be themselves, whether they are gay or heterosexual, or female or male.

Quite a few times in my career, I’ve suffered from not having someone around who could put things into perspective. To a certain extent, it was in the record company’s interests that I wasn’t too well informed because it made it easier for them to tell me to do things, and for me not to say ‘no’. After a while I just kept finding myself doing these awful German television programmes, and thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing here? I don’t enjoy this, I’m not even getting the slightest bit of satisfaction out of it and I don’t want to continue if it’s under these circumstances.’ So I retreated into my shell for a bit. I got pregnant with my first son, and recorded A New England which was a hit, then I made a follow-up when he was a couple of months old. Then I got ill for a while and then I was pregnant again, so that meant about two years out. The reason I was working with other people was because I wasn’t writing my own stuff when I was pregnant and I felt like all my brain cells had turned to jelly, so if I got a call from someone who I respected as an artist saying, ‘we’re making this record we’d like you to come and sing on this track’, then I’d be glad to do it, because it felt like I was still alive!

It was fun because I did the best I could on one song or a couple of songs. They’d ask me because they’d want me to make up a vocal arrangement; they didn’t ask me because they’d already got the parts and they just wanted me to sing ‘doo-wop, doo-wop’! I got all the freedom that I have with my own stuff but I didn’t have to worry about promoting it or dealing with a record company. I was still writing but there’s a world of difference between writing stuff and recording it, and having it released. I did a whole album that wasn’t released, and when you’ve worked very hard on something for about eighteen months, you feel like you’ve had a baby and left it in a telephone-box. [The record company] didn’t actually come down while we were recording it. I think they just decided that it was going to take too much effort to promote and they’d treat me as that year’s tax loss! You get used to it. Every time things have got bad I think, ‘Oh, no, this is terrible’ and feel really dreadful for a few months but then afterwards, I just really want to kick arse, and get up and say, ‘I’m going to show them!’ And that’s usually when I come up with my best stuff.

In 1989 Kite came about after my new-found confidence from touring with The Pogues. I’d gone from being pregnant twice and fairly housebound, and not doing so much, to being out on the road for a couple of months, living completely the opposite lifestyle and having all of this sudden freedom from domesticity. Because I hadn’t written anything for quite a while I had lots of things burning to get out. I was pleased with that album. I thought it was a landmark as far as my writing went.

Electric Landlady didn’t do as well as Kite in the UK, it did better in America. It was the first record that I’d had released in the States, simultaneously with the UK. Madison was the first thing I’d sung, not just written, that received some major air-play in the US. It’s a completely different thing, America. It’s a sort of animal on its own. Just to get something played on a regular basis on most of the relevant rock stations is a good thing. But it doesn’t transfer to sales necessarily.

Charisma, in the US, which I was signed to, wanted me to go out and capitalise on the Madison air-play. So we got a band together and rehearsed for three weeks, then we were told that we weren’t getting the funding, the night before the first warm-up gig. There were a number of things that probably contributed to that, partly the fact that [Virgin] were being bought out by EMI, and then they got rid of half of the artists roster and half of the staff so I wasn’t alone in that. I was just really unlucky in that it cost me, personally, lots of money.

It made me very determined to go on tour so I got another band together, with the help of Mark Nevin, and we went off round the UK and Europe under our own steam. I’d toured when I was twenty-one or so, after Chip Shop came out. I’d done this tour of Irish ballrooms that was absolutely disastrous, and I was so terrified every night that it was just absolutely overwhelming. I couldn’t cope with it at all, and that put me off for ten years. I didn’t do any live stuff until The Pogues many years later. It was gigging with The Pogues that made me realise that it could actually be enjoyable, you could enjoy being on-stage. I’d never experienced that before, and I could never work out why people did it. I realised that there was a lot of fun involved as well, and also it gives you a completely new approach to singing. I became a better singer after working live a lot.

‘Performing’ is a word that is over-used. My vocals tend to be fairly deadpan, I tend to be more expressive with words than I am with delivery. It’s that English [attitude]: ‘Don’t make a fuss, it’s embarrassing!’ I couldn’t do all that screaming and bleeding on the carpet, I’m too reserved and shy for that. Although I was quite reserved about displaying emotion when delivering a song, it’s a different thing to how I behaved in bars! I’m much too outspoken and mouthy to be a little English rose; I’m more Celtic in that sense. I’ve always felt more Celtic; my father was Scottish and my mother has Irish connections. All of the people I connect with best, artistically, have roots in the London or Manchester Irish scene.

When I did go out [on tour], it was because I’d said to myself, ‘I’m going to book this up and if I don’t enjoy it after two weeks, then I’ll just not do it again.’ I had to at least try it, I couldn’t let my whole experience of touring amount to just one naff tour I did when I was twenty. After the first few gigs I was getting better every show we did, and enjoying it more, and it got to a point where some of the shows would be fantastic. You progress every time, you become more selective about what you think is a good gig.

Promoting Titanic Days, we were on tour in America for six weeks and I really enjoyed it. I had no idea what to expect. I knew we were playing smallish clubs but I didn’t know if I’d have enough fans there or enough people who knew my work to even fill the clubs. So when I’d get to these places that I’d never been to before, in the middle of nowhere, and there’d be loads of people there, with loads of singles they’d got on import, it was quite a relief!

I like to make jangly, luscious, melodic pop music but with lyrics that are a bit more biting and down to earth than the average stuff you hear on the radio. For people who listen to music, they often enjoy that but I don’t think the majority of people ever listen to the lyrics otherwise they wouldn’t buy the records they do.

What I like to do, and what I enjoy about the people I enjoy listening to, is that they invest their energy into more real situations than a lot of the stuff that tends to get into the charts, which, if there are any lyrics, they’re usually meaningless twaddle about ‘oooh, baby, I can’t live without you!’ There are just so few people I know who can’t live without somebody! It’s just not true, is it? Women, especially, would always be singing these songs, when I was a kid; you’d hear them on the radio, and the songs were obviously written by a man and he was actually putting his words into the woman’s mouth and he’s making her out to be how he wants to perceive women, and not how women are. So where are all of these pathetic women who can’t live without their man? I don’t know any! A lot of the women I know tend to be the stronger partner in the relationship; they tend to be the one who is more reliable and they have to be. I think it’s true to say that, generally, women can do ten jobs at once which is the main difference between them and men, because men tend to be able to do one thing at a time; they may do it well but they don’t have to apply themselves to anything else.

People just assume that a woman should give up her career when she has children. You’d think that in the ‘90s they’d have gotten over this, but they still don’t ever say, ‘Has your husband taken a lot of time off since you’ve had the baby?’ It’s as if a man’s career just carries on as normal and all these families come and go but he carries on. It’s a bizarre concept really, that it should be so one-sided.

There are two ways of looking at it: You can say that you work in spite of having kids because you’re incredibly selfish and maybe they’re losing out because you’re working but I tend to think that if I wasn’t working, I’d be so bitter and twisted that they wouldn’t want me around! They don’t need me twenty-four hours a day, they’re their own people now. They’re well looked after and they see plenty of us, even if we’re away for a few weeks of the year. They know they are loved. They’ve got their own lives, their own social lives, and school.

The reason that some people don’t like your music is the same reason that other people do. So it’s all so subjective. You can’t say, ‘If I change this, everybody will like it.’ I think people appreciate the fact that I’ve stuck to my guns. I have experimented musically, I’ve worked with lots of different people and that’s often gone against me in the music press because they think you’re getting above yourself — you’re working with foreigners! I just really enjoy the learning process and if I thought I didn’t have anything left to learn, I’d just stop doing it. I like working with new people and trying different styles and pursuing different ends because it makes the whole thing much more enriching.

As far as Walking Down Madison goes, I wrote the lyrics walking around in New York and a couple of years later I had still not managed to come up with any music for it. I tried out various ideas on my own. Then out of the blue I got a tape from Johnny Marr, saying, ‘I came up with this idea, maybe you’d like to do something with it.’ I thought immediately, ‘I’ve already got the lyrics for this’, so it was just a question of writing a melody in order to finish it. I thought that the funk-type, hip-hop approach worked because of the nature of the song lyrically, because it was set in New York and because it was very urban, and the rap influence. There is something about rap music that conjures up American cities more than European ones, or pastoral scenes.

There are three people that I’ve written a lot of material with — Johnny Marr, Pete Glenister and Mark Nevin. Johnny and Pete are superb guitarists/composers and Mark is also a lyricist in his own right, but they all give me chord progressions. We never write together in the same room at the same time. They’ve all been extremely supportive of me in times of chronic confidence shortage, as has Morrissey, and I love them all dearly. We all need support when self-doubt threatens to overwhelm us.

With Johnny, I do a lot of it by post because he’s in Manchester and I’m in London. I’m quite lazy and it’s good to have a catalyst. If I get a cassette in the post from one of them, I’ll put it on and I’m away! There’s something ready to go, whereas if I’m left to my own devices, and I think, ‘I might start fiddling around on the guitar today’, I may or may not come up with something at the end of it. It’s quite a lonely business, song-writing, and the joy of writing with someone else is to have someone to bounce ideas off and to have input from another angle.

It’s certainly a talent and probably an art in itself, but I can’t identify with that Tin Pan Alley approach to song-writing where you go in at nine o’clock in the morning and write a song before lunch, then write another one in the afternoon. There are a lot of people who do that successfully, who can work that way; I’m not one of them.

I get regular writer’s blocks and the times when you are writing a lot are not always the times when it’s most convenient to write. Usually when there’s a lot going on, you don’t write about it when it is going on, you wait until that’s subsided and in the days that follow, that are more calm, you sometimes have more time to think about it and write about it. I find that once I get on a roll, I can’t stop writing. I try not to panic about the blocks now because I don’t think the panic helps the process, it just makes the block longer and more tedious and more traumatic. I just think, ‘OK, it’s not happening today’ and I do other things. I might be recording or working on some music and not coming up with any lyrics. I just wait till it starts happening again, really. I haven’t found the magic potion that turns it on.

Pop music is the natural habitat of the supremely superficial but ‘pop’ can cover a broad spectrum, and for every hundred disposable, inane songs there is one that strikes a chord with people, whether it is about pain and confusion, or nothing much at all! There’s a fine line that you have to tread — there tend to be an awful lot of songs written about the homeless, by people who only drive around in limos and probably don’t really see them unless they’re about to run them over as they leave a club! I’m not a spokeswoman by any means but I don’t think you can walk around any major city and not be aware of it; I don’t see how it can not cross your mind.

I feel lucky that I’m still able to make records whether or not I can make them here; or just in America, I can make records and that’s as much as I can hope for. In the face of all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that you have to look a certain way, and behave a certain way and promote things in a certain way — I still get a chance to be myself. You always feel that every record could be your last, because if you don’t sell enough, no one’s going to give you money to make the next one.

I see my career as a long-term thing and it’s been going fifteen years now, but I’ve had so many different record companies, it feels like I’ve got a new one every six months! They don’t all, obviously, see my career as long-term as I do. As long as I feel I really enjoy it and get a lot out of it, I’m going to continue doing it, whether they want me to or not. I feel it’s my duty to out-wit them at every opportunity!

If you really believe that what you’re doing is basically good stuff then you have to carry on with it. And if you’re not sure, then you should just give up. And most people do give up. That’s why there are not that many people still around who’ve been doing it for fifteen or twenty years. Some people might have a hit single or one hit album, and they’ll probably last about five years. It is hard to keep it going. That’s what separates the women from the girlies!

Review of this book by Caitlin Moran for The Times.

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Hymn to her

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