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The Kirsty MacColl web site
MEMORIAL
Folk Roots
fROOTS magazine
March 2001
When the 1995 collection of her best songs was being prepared, Kirsty MacCoIl contacted various friends within her musical community and asked them to write tributes to her for the sleeve notes. In a way this was more fitting than using press cuttings because she never got the credit she deserved for her talents. A notoriously shy live artist, it was those of us who had seen her perform, albeit in the studio, who were in awe of her abilities as a singer and songwriter. Words of praise duly poured in from the likes of Bono, Morrissey and Shane MacGowan. She thanked us all in the CD booklet for making it possible for her to “revel in the glory” of reading her obituaries “without the inconvenience of actually dying”. In a dark twist reminiscent of one of her own songs, when her real obituaries appeared in the week before Christmas, it was from these sleeve notes that almost all of the quotes were taken.
Kirsty’s musical career began on the same day as mine in June 1978, when Chiswick Records simultaneously released 3 EPs as part of their Suburban Rock’n’Roll series, amongst them my punk band Rift Raft and Croydon’s answer to the Velvet Underground, Drug Addix, featuring Kirsty, disguised as ‘Mandy Doubt’ on backing vocals. Me and my mates returned to obscurity but Kirsty was spotted by Stiff Records who signed her as a solo artist. I bought her first single, They Don't Know, and admired her ability to sound like The Shangri-Las. As a singer, she was a one woman all-girl vocal group and in a previous era would have made a tidy living writing songs for Phil Spector’s stable of artists.
When I first met her in late 1983, Tracey Ullman was riding high in the charts with her version of They Don’t Know. Those penny pinchers at Stiff had Tracey sing over Kirsty’s original backing track and when Ms. Ullman couldn’t quite reach the high notes, they kept Kirsty’s vocal. It is unmistakably she who sings the high “bay-bee” that begins the third verse.
Kirsty had come to see me because she wanted to record a version of my song A New England which duly appeared in 1984 and marked the arrival of a new pop sensibility in her work. She had recently married whizz kid producer Steve Lillywhite and together they fashioned a huge chart hit out of my spartan original. Kirsty lifted me out of the indie ghetto and into the Top Ten. My debut album Life’s A Riot went gold as a result.
The collaboration also had the effect of gaining me entrance to her community of friends who gathered at her large suburban house to drink, eat and listen to great music. She knew so many people, not just in the music industry. There was always someone there who seemed totally out of place but who was dear friend of the hostess. Once, someone came dashing up to tell me he had just met Bob Hoskins. “Look, look! Here he comes now,” trilled the star struck guest and we all turned around to see that “Bob Hoskins” was in fact Lionel Bart.
One time I arrived just too late to hear her and Brian Kennedy sing folk songs to Joan Littlewood, her father’s first wife. This surprised me because she could be very dismissive of folk music. Being Ewan MacCoIl’s daughter had not been easy. He was not around much during her formative years and her relationship with his third wife, Peggy Seeger was somewhat frosty. As for her father’s legacy, I don’t recall her ever recording one of his songs. Only once was I able to coax her into performing one — she made the exception for a good cause. In the mid-nineties we did a benefit for the miners at Tower Colliery in South Wales. She joined me in the encore to sing a moving version of her father’s mining song Schoolday’s End. Later on the long journey back down the M4 in thick fog, she regaled us with a boozy selection of music hall songs her father had taught her — amongst them her famous rendition of Lydia, The Tattooed Lady.
But that night was an exception. Once, when we sat and pondered whither our recording careers might go in a music business that she once described as “getting less about music every day”, I suggested we make an album of folk songs together. My idea was shot down in flames when, echoing comments her father might have made about pop, she said “I fucking hate folk music."
She had a better idea anyway. On her 1991 album Electric Landlady she had recorded a track in a New York club with a bunch of Cuban musicians. My Affair was the first hint of her growing obsession with music from Latin America. A year later she travelled to Cuba for the first time and fell in love with the place and its people. Always willing to back up her politically charged lyrics with action, she became a stalwart supporter of the Cuba Solidarity
Campaign and made numerous trips to the island throughout the nineties. Following her divorce from Steve Lillywhite, Kirsty devoted much of her time to bringing up their two sons Jamie and Louis. During these years, Cuba revitalised her. She learnt Spanish and, travelling to Brazil, became fluent in Portuguese.
Last year, all her influences came together on an album of which she was justly proud. Released to rave reviews, Tropical Brainstorm was the record on which Kirsty finally seemed to have found a way to mix her Latin influences with her natural wit which, as she got older was becoming nicely sardonic. She even toured with her band of mostly British musicians, including her partner James on saxophone. In him she had found the love of her life and her love for life again.
And perhaps she was beginning to reconcile herself to her own roots. On 7th of January this year, she was due to unveil a plaque commemorating her father at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. A mutual friend told me that she intended to take the boys along to introduce them to their grandfather’s memory.
Ironically, it may be for her performance on what is probably be the most popular folk song of the past thirty years that Kirsty will be remembered. But that’s okay because, although it wasn’t her record, she brought something of herself to the Pogues’ Fairytale Of New York. When Shane MacGowan cries into his beer “I could have been someone!”, Kirsty’s quick as a flash response — “Well, so could anyone” — was very much in keeping with her attitude to life. All of us who sat whingeing in her kitchen about fickle husbands, lovers, record companies, reviews etc got the same short shrift. She would laugh, get you another beer and play some fabulous Celina Gonzalez track, inviting you to dance your cares away.
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