Amazonian

Kirsty MacColl’s In These Shoes is a Euro-hit and frames the new Adidas campaign. Taken from the Tropical Brainstorm album, her first album in seven years, it’s an earthy mix of wit, wisdom and Latin licks. The intrepid Max Reinhardt takes a trip up the A40 to find out why it was so long coming .

The highway to musical hell is strewn with debris, especially those albums made in exotic climes and aimed at rescuing the maturing rock star from a faltering career. Not surprisingly, Kirsty MacColl's Tropical Brainstorm navigates its way effortlessly and gracefully through those rock star cliche quicksands and stands tall as a 21st Century triumph of lyricism, wit, magical realism, melody and rhythm.

For a start, she never was a rock star with all the trimmings, trappings and an ego that wont fit through the doorway. She has been a unique presence in UK music for two decades: a pop diva/laureate, with a soulful distinctive voice, an acerbic wit and a bagful of original songs with tunes that get under your skin and lyrics that can blister the paint, make you laugh, cry and see life from fresh perspectives. And secondly, this is not "Kirsty’s Latin album". What she’s created is a hybrid, deliberately and dextrously filled with ambient/digital sounds as well as Brazilian and Cuban influences and samples. And that’s the way that she wanted it to be.

"I sang on David Byrne’s ‘Rei Momo’ (early ‘90’s) and it’s an album I still enjoy listening to. David had approached it by recording it mostly in New York but with really great Brazilian and Latin American musicians. But I didn’t want to try and recreate an authentic sound with just me singing. I couldn’t really see the point ‘cos first of all I’m not Celia Cruz and I’m not going to suddenly appeal to millions of people who don’t speak English, seeing as a lot of people like my music mostly because of the lyrics. And also I didn’t have a record deal when I started recording the album anyway, so I couldn’t have afforded to go off and find a top Latin producer in Miami or anywhere else. And I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to try and fail at being the Buena Vista Social Club. I wanted to succeed at being Kirsty MacColl."

"There was no way it was ever going to be an authentic record, because I’m not Brazilian and I’m not Cuban. It wasn’t going to be purist because I wanted to use elements of music from different countries — Brazil, Colombia and Cuba — and not be limited by the rules. The fact is, I deliberately recorded the album with two people who I’ve worked with a lot before and who have no history whatsoever of playing Latin music. If you don’t know what the rules are, then you don’t have to stick to them which is very liberating. If it sounded good we could do it."

Her compadres in subversion are rock drummer Dave Ruffy and rock/highlife guitar virtuoso Pete Glenister. Neither is a stranger to digital programming and Pete had just started up his studio in Bermondsey, which was handy since there was no record company backing initially.

"We started off, very unorganically if you Like, using samples from CDs that I’d brought back from my travels. I’d write the songs first and then I knew how I wanted them to sound, so I’d say to Dave, ‘This is the kind of rhythm I want,’ and he’d either be inspired by what I played him or we’d use it for the track. We added the organic stuff, the live players, after the tracks were down and I got a record deal and we could afford musicians (including Omar Puente, Luiz de Almeida, Chucho Merchán and Joe de Jesús)."

Even more crucially for that ambient edge she also invited down Lee Groves. "He provides weird samples basically. We used to work for a couple of weeks and then we’d have Lee down for a day or two every two weeks to add the weird sounds and short wave. He’d sit, working away at his little bit in the corner and it would be Like. ‘What’s Lee doing? It sounds like he’s playing video games’. I wanted it to be a contemporary record incorporating sampled sounds from 40 years ago and others from right now."

So what is it with Kirsty and Latin music? It turns out that long before her work with David Byrne or It’s My Affair — the Nueva Yorica salsa outing arranged by Angel Fernandez on her 1991 Electric Landlady album — Kirsty had a big thing going for Latin American music. When she was seven she was given her own record player ("one of those square ones and you open the lid, pile up the records and they drop down") and then her dad (Ewan) gave her three albums for a birthday or Christmas, one by Charlie Parker, one by Herb Alpert ("I don’t remember much about that") and a Mariachi record. It was the Mexicans that hit the spot.

"It had the most fantastic sleeve with a woman in the most amazing dress and all these guys with the traditional Mariachi trousers with the coins down the sides and they’re all standing around playing these huge weird looking things. And it sounded so fantastic I just used to play it to death. I think that’s where I got it into my head that anybody who spoke Spanish was having a better time than me and I think that’s persisted throughout my life. They were all whooping it up, it was full on party time and a lot of the violins were slightly out of tune. But it didn’t matter because it sounded like everybody was enjoying it so much. You know there’s worse things in life than being out of tune."

Teenage encounters with Santana and Fania All Stars records and Latin flavoured tracks by Stevie Wonder and Steely Dan reinforced the infatuation. Then, while she was charting, touring and recording in the ‘80’s, every time she heard Latin music ("This is like aaah!..so great, so exciting") she knew she wanted to know more about this stuff, sometime in the future. "I had to set aside quite a lot of space in my life to let new stuff in. You can’t keep going at your own thing hammer and tongs and doing all the stuff that you get into a rut doing and then expect to be able to assimilate a whole load of new things really."

That space came when she split up with her husband in the early Nineties and, since her children were growing up, she became mistress once again of her own priorities. It also coincided with a period of two years when she didn’t write any songs. "I used to worry about writer’s block — after every album basically! But I think this time it was God’s way of saying, ‘You’ve got nothing to write about so SHUT UP!’ If only more people could hear that, instead of this kind of musical diarrhoea you get with a lot of bands. I think its quite healthy to have a little break. And I didn’t want to just rush out and make another melancholy record after we’d split up and just be that woman who does those sad songs. That would have been really grim. I started to do some of the things I’d wanted to do since forever."

And that meant travelling to Cuba and just hanging out for the first time in 1992. But she was increasingly irritated by her inability to fully understand the language in Cuba and on the songs on the vast and unwieldy collection of Latin CD’s that had started to grow on her shelves. Through a mix of evening classes, CD Roms, conversation practice and more travelling in Cuba, she spent two years intensely learning Latin American Spanish and absorbing Cuban culture. Later she got tempted by Brazil, learned Portuguese from a lodger, in exchange for accommodation and traveled to Recife. This bonding with Latin American culture has undoubtedly transmuted her songwriting style. Most obviously she now writes and sings in Spanish and Portuguese.

"They’re just funny lyrics really — ‘cos obviously my Spanish and Portuguese aren’t up to my English so I can’t get bitter and twisted like I can in English!" But on songs like ‘Celestine’ and ‘Us Amazonians’, her writing style has a sensuous languor, cultural references and magical realism that seem to me to be entirely at home in Latin America — and I’ve dipped into the Picador book of Latin American Short Stories, so I should know, muchachos."

In spite of the fact that the blinkered wasteland that is "Radio 1 won’t play my singles now I’m over 30" other radio stations in UK and throughout Europe have fallen for the acerbic storytelling and salsa groove of her In These Shoes single. Currently charting and being dance remixed in Italy, it’s also been picked up by Adidas as the soundtrack to their current ad campaign (which means its going to re-released in the UK). So it looks like this could be Kirsty’s mambo summer.

And after that, where will the muse take her next? "Who knows ....I haven’t made it to Mexico yet. I didn’t plan this one in advance. But touring this album is so expensive, it might be sensible to take a smaller band on the road next time and if that involves me playing some very bad, loud electric guitar so much the better. It’ll probably be another hybrid, but who knows what the main influence will be, I don’t know... Croydon!"

Kirsty MacColl’s Top Five Latin Licks

TITO PUENTE - Que Lindo Es El Mambo
CELINA GONZALES - Mi Tierra Es Asi
CUNI - CHAPPOTIN - Nereyda
MILTON NASCIMENTO - Paixao E Fe
GILBERTO GIL - Ciencia E Arte

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Amazonian

Kirsty MacColl’s Top Five Latin Licks

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