The Royal Festival Hall, London

Review of Kirsty's tribute.

Monday 23 September 2002

Article Two years ago Kirsty MacColl, the wittiest woman in pop music, was killed in a bizarre accident, struck by a motorboat while diving off the coast of Mexico with her teenage sons. Paying tribute is a tricky thing to get right, but you wouldn't know it from the way MacColl, who was 41, has been remembered by family, friends and fans.

There was no rush to reissue her work; no hastily assembled tribute concert, just a few thoughtful, well spread-out events. In January 2001 there was a memorial service at St Martin-in-the-Fields, a warm, intimate, largely secular occasion with songs from Billy Bragg and others. In August a memorial bench was unveiled in Soho Square: a neat reference to a MacColl song entitled Soho Square which talked about love, death and 'an empty bench'.

Finally, this week, there was a memorial concert. Organised by MacColl's own band as part of a festival called The Song's The Thing, it had a quite different feel from most tribute gigs. Kirsty, daughter of the protest singer Ewan MacColl, was a very British pop star - funny, self-deprecating, apparently unaware how good she was - and the evening glowed with British stoicism. The performers were so resolutely cheerful it brought a tear to the eye. The tone was set by the compere, comedian Phill Jupitus. He looked like a balloon, in a big red suit, but acted more as a drawing-pin, puncturing any sentimentality. The format, he said, was 'Kirsty-oke': songs she had written or recorded, sung by her music-business mates, most of whom, like her, have more talent than fame.

Christine Collister, Roddy Frame of Aztec Camera and Boo Hewerdine brought a quiet excellence to lesser-known tunes, but it took the folk-belter Eliza Carthy, in a see-through top and a Kirsty-print skirt, to light the fuse with an earthy version of England 2 Colombia 0, a song about kissing a man who forgets to mention he has a wife and three kids. After her divorce from record producer Steve Lillywhite, MacColl became as good at capturing the singleton life as Helen Fielding.

Mary Coughlan confused the punters by dressing as if for a tribute concert to Elizabeth I, but maintained the momentum with a rumbustious stab at In These Shoes and a moving version of Bad, the ballad that goes: 'I've been a token woman all my life/The token daughter and the token wife/I've collected tokens one by one/Till I've got enough to buy a gun.'

David Gray, who is now a big star, flew in from Boston to add his lived-in voice to the funky Walking Down Madison. Johnny Marr and Evan Dando lent glamour to the proceedings and Coughlan joined Mark Nevin and a Pogue or two to make it Christmas in September with Fairytale Of New York.

Tracey Ullman returned to London after 18 years in American television to sing They Don't Know, a perfect pop song written by MacColl as a teenager, which would have put Ullman at Number One in 1983 had Karma Chameleon not got in the way. Then everybody piled on stage - some cliches cannot be avoided - for There's A Guy Works Down The Chipshop Swears He's Elvis, which was amazingly good considering it was performed by 27 people.

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The Royal Festival Hall, London

Review of Kirsty's tribute.

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