US NEWSWIRE JULY 18, 12:00 EDT

NEW YORK (AP) - Sarah Jessica Parker and her impeccably dressed friends on HBO's Sex and the City' were suiting up for another evening of action in the opening scene of the HBO comedy's third season. Playing in the background was the saucy Latin swing of In These Shoes?, Kirsty MacColl's hilarious song about a woman whose obsession with fashion trumps all other interests. She would have loved the moment. Sadly, MacColl, who died in a boating accident in Mexico in December, wasn't around to see it.

MacColl left behind an album, Tropical Brainstorm, that was both a striking change of direction and the best of a 20-year career that was largely overlooked outside of her native England. The disc marries her talent - songwriting with a wry British wit - to a growing passion, the music of Cuba and Brazil. MacColl used Latin musicians in New York to accompany her 1991 song My Affair and kept in touch with them. She gradually immersed herself in their culture, learning Spanish and Portuguese and making frequent trips to Latin America for solace as her marriage broke up.

She told her manager, Kevin Nixon, that she wanted to make an album that would please fans of her songwriting yet turn them on to new music. "I encouraged her," Nixon recalled. "But it took me a month to really believe that she could convincingly keep the best of both worlds - authentically paying tribute to Latin music but still maintaining her own character. The penny dropped with In These Shoes?' . In the sly Here Comes That Man Again, MacColl tells of a randy computer relationship with a pornographer from Amsterdam, ending with a "sha-la-la" chorus we can't quote here. "Who'd have thought I'd have as much fun," she sings, "with an anonymous Dutchman."

A married Central American cad who asks MacColl out to watch a soccer game gets his comeuppance in the song's title: England 2, Colombia 0. The song Treachery has MacColl stalking a former fan who bought some other female singer's CD.

MacColl was without a record contract and considered yesterday's news when she made the disc. "When I signed her in 1997, a lot of labels laughed at me," Nixon said. "When the industry heard this record and saw how it was selling, a lot of people were astounded because they didn't think she had it in her. Together", he said, "we felt that we had reinvented her career."

Released in England last summer, the disc had no American distributor until Patrick Carmosino, an Instinct Records executive, fished a copy out of an import bin at a Manhattan music store. "The record came alive," he said. "It just leaped off the stereo." Although MacColl's previous discs were released in the United States, her success here was limited. Many Americans know her voice as the duet partner of Shane MacGowan in the Christmas song Fairytale of New York, or her work as the songwriter of They Don't Know, a 1984 hit for Tracey Ullman.

Carmosino arranged for Instinct to release Tropical Brainstorm. But since MacColl's schedule was filled and she could not commit to concerts in the United States until spring, he scheduled it to come out in April. Then, on Dec. 18, MacColl was killed when a speedboat struck her while she swam off the island of Cozumel. Upset by the accident, Carmosino felt he couldn't work on the disc and didn't think that MacColl's family - which put out the word not to exploit her music after her death - would want to go ahead. Instead, they urged him to release Tropical Brainstorm. "The family is very proud of this album," Nixon said, "because Kirsty made a big deal about it being the best she ever made. She went out on a real high."

The American release contains three bonus tracks and a new cover. The British version had a cover painting of a flying fish soaring over a sun-dappled tropical sea. Given the circumstances of her death, Instinct replaced it with a portrait of MacColl. After MacColl's death, her family started a charity to fund music education in Cuba. Tropical Brainstorm is selling modestly in the U.S., despite the absence of the artist to promote her work. Soundscan reported 13,000 discs sold in early July, a third of MacColl's best-selling album here, 1994's Titanic Days. Hope for more rests with continued radio airplay for In These Shoes?, which was also covered by Bette Midler. In MacColl's 1995 "best of" compilation, Galore, artists including Bono, Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Billy Bragg and David Byrne wrote tributes to her. In her own liner notes, she acknowledged them with a dry wit that stings now: "Special thanks to my friends who contributed liner notes and made it possible for me to revel in the glory without the inconvenience of actually dying." Now she's getting posthumous praise.

"She's probably laughing right now," Carmosino said. "She was the queen of irony." Source - RKB

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US NEWSWIRE JULY 18, 12:00 EDT

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