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The Kirsty MacColl web site
MEMORIAL
Evening Standard.
Matthew Norman
In my favourite song of hers, On The Beach, Kirsty MacColl sang wistfully of a friend she'd run into from time to time, and with whom she used to share a taste for wine, who had escaped the drizzly melancholy of Britain by emigrating to Sydney. "And he says it's brilliant there! there's something in the air," runs the chorus, "And sunshine everywhere! he's on the beach."
In the time-honoured studiedly callous way of journalists, you would have expected to hear someone say, within 30 seconds of the news of her death becoming public, that she'd have been all right if only she'd stayed on the beach. In fact, I haven't heard one facetious remark about Kirsty MacColl. Quite the reverse, I cannot remember a celebrity death that provoked such genuine if understated sadness, partly perhaps because, for all her talent and success, she didn't have any aura of celebrity, as the subject matter of her recordings (from drunken bums serenading each other in New York at Christmas to chip-shop fantasists) tended to imply.
Nothing so little became her, indeed, as the manner of her death. From the plane crash that accounted for Buddy Holly along with the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens to the death by ligature of Michael Hutchence, via innumerable overdoses, fires and shootings, stars of rock and pop have found such spectacular and glamorous modes of dying that even Marc Bolan's car crash seemed a bit of a swiz, what with the vehicle being a Mini and not an E-type Jag. But there was so little that was melodramatic or glam about this daughter of a Scottish folk singer that the idea that she was doing the scuba-diving off the Mexican coast while Madonna was on her way up to the Highlands has the appearance of some farcical travel agency cock-up.
What was so engaging about Kirsty MacColl was a genuine lack of self-regard that extended to the stage fright that limited what might have been an even more glorious career. Still, it was quite glorious enough, and the loss of both her and Ian Dury - two Left-wing ironists (and you can imagine what a crowded field that is in pop) who inspired more affection than any other British performers you can think of - in the same year seems as tragically wasteful as the incongruous manner of her death.
Matthew Norman
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