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The Kirsty MacColl web site
MEMORIAL
Daily Mail
Saturday April 14, 2001
Kirsty
was happier than ever. The last song she ever wrote was a love song.Any parent would be distraught at the death of their child. But, as Jean Newlove tells SPENCER BRIGHT, the loss of her daughter Kirsty MacColl in a freak accident was even more tragic as the singer songwriter had entered a new, happy phase in her life.
Like any mother, Jean Newlove expected 'to go' before her children and is still raw from the injustice of losing her daughter, the singer songwriter Kirsty MacColl, in a cruel accident. She recalls a chat with Kirsty over a year ago when they joked about what Kirsty should do if Jean became senile. They had just attended an annual gathering commemorating the life of Jean's late exhusband and Kirsty's father, folk musician Ewan MacColl, who died in 1989.
"As we were coming away in the car I said, 'Well, while I love my writing and my teaching, if I go ga-ga then I don't want to carry on any longer. That's the time to pull the curtains.' She looked at me and smiled. 'Yes Mum, but how will we know?' It was so funny."
Kirsty's deadpan wit and withering tongue can be found in many of her songs.
Theres A Guy Works Down The Chipshop Swears He's Elvis and
Don't Come The Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim are
two of the best known. Bono of U2 labelled her 'The Noelle
Coward of her generation'. But she
could also be tender, like the last night Jean saw Kirsty in December. "I
went round and had pizza with them,' says Jean who lived a street away from
Kirsty in west London. 'She brought me back. I called after her and said, 'I
love you.' She called back, 'I love you.' That was the last time we spoke."
The pain is still evident and, occasionally, tears are near the surface as Jean talks about her daughter killed on December 18 by a speedboat while scuba diving with her sons Jamie, 16, and Louis, 14, in the sea off Mexico. The eulogies that followed Kirsty's death testifying to her talents as a songwriter and her humanity felt unusually genuine. Kirsty, who after a career spanning more than 20 years with more dips than highs, had found a new creative strength and, finally, true love.
"She had new ideas in music. I feel so angry that it should happen now," says Jean. She takes solace from something Kirsty said she learned from her mum in an interview a few years back. 'Don't be limited by other people's narrow-mindedness.'
Kirsty grew up being encouraged to think for herself from an early age. Her father visited at weekends unless he was travelling. Ewan MacColl established his name as a playwright and co-founder of the pioneering Theatre Workshop with writer, producer and director Joan Littlewood, his first wife. Ewan and Jean split up about a year after Kirsty's birth. He concentrated on folk-singing, later joining musician Peggy Seeger, for whom he wrote the song The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.
There was no doubt that Ewan MacCoIl loved his children, but his relationships with them were difficult. "Ewan was not a person who could express his emotions," says Jean. "I think Kirsty would have loved to have had a dad around. She would have liked to have sung with him, but it never happened. He was terribly proud of her. When she made it, he said I don't mind what she does, as long as she's the best, whether she's a dustwoman or a singer. She said the one thing she learned from her father was that you don't have to follow a certain trend to be successful. You don't have to have a funny haircut or follow a certain way of dressing. If you're good at what you're doing, you don't have to dress up."
Jean was a single mum in the Sixties. While bringing up two children, she
worked as a choreographer and taught movement to actors, and she is writing
her second book on the subject. The onset of Kirsty's severe asthma at the
age of three, which was not properly diagnosed until she was nine, cast another
shadow over Kirsty's life. She spent much of her childhood in bed, though a
beneficial side effect was that she read a lot, expanding her knowledge beyond
her years. Jean was told that only one child in a 40-mile radius matched Kirsty's
IQ.
Kirsty was offered a half-scholarship to Millfield School on account of her IQ, but Jean was advised by a specialist to send her daughter to the local school for handicapped children. A year's course of injections enabled her to attend regular school and eventually Croydon Comprehensive, which had an excellent reputation. Once there, Kirsty could not understand why her peers did not share her desire to learn.
While Kirsty was growing up, she was inspired by the Beach Boys and Phil Spector's 'wall of sound' style, which contrasted with her father's folk music. She said she was not reacting against him, simply listening to what was new. Later, after her father's death, Kirsty told Jean she couldn't listen to his CDs because they made her too sad. Though Kirsty learned classical guitar and oboe, played the violin and sang in the school choir, Jean rarely heard her sing until her first record They Don't Know was released in 1979. The song was not a hit until Tracey Ullman recorded it in 1983. Kirsty had her first hit in 1981 with There's A Guy Works Down The Chip shop Swears He's Elvis. In 1987 she got to number two with the Pogues and Fairytale Of New York.
Kirsty never fitted easily into the role of a pop star. "She
said she always thought that the audience wanted much more than she was able
to give. They expected that she should dress and behave a certain way and
she wasn't prepared to do that,' says Jean. Soon after her marriage to Roiling
Stones and U2 producer Steve Lillywhite in 1984 and the birth of her sons,
Jamie and Louis, she took a few years off to concentrate on her family. But
by the mid-Nineties her marriage to Lilly-white was over and Kirsty sank into
a deep depression. 'She had worked hard at the relationship and was very sad
that it failed. People do grow apart. Nobody else was involved and both parents
loved the boys very much. Steve and Kirsty eventually became friends," says
Jean.
Her album Titanic Days charted the sinking of the relationship and she vowed she'd never put out another album unless she found something happy to write about. That soon arrived with her discovery of Latin music. In March 2000, her album Tropical Brainstorm and a series of live shows marked a return to form. It was at this time that she met and fell in love with saxophone player James Knight, 12 years her junior.
The success of the album meant she was travelling more than usual, and for whatever reason, she began to think about what might happen in the event of her death. "When you're travelling alone a lot," explains Jean, "you think maybe you ought to put something down, certain ideas she had about things if she wasn't around."
Despite this, Jean insists Kirsty was not depressed. "She was happier than she'd ever been. Her work was going extremely well. She was in love with James, who is taking her death badly. They were just so right for each other, and Kirsty knew. And to have it suddenly snatched away. 'I didn't see much of Kirsty the last year. I knew why, because she'd introduced me to James. I would ring up and say, Well I haven't seen much of you, but I'm very glad because I know why.''
A week before Christmas, Jean went to see a show in London. Returning home, she had a call from James, in which he broke the news of Kirsty's death. James was on holiday with Kirsty and her sons [pictured in 1998], though he wasn't in the water at the time of the accident. Kirsty, who had always been an enthusiastic swimmer, had gone diving with her sons. "It was instantaneous," says Jean. The incident is still under investigation and the inquest is not due until June.
Kirsty's ex-husband, Steve Lillywhite, now lives in New York with his new partner. The boys are being looked after by Jean and James and other family members and friends when they come home from boarding school at weekends.
"'I miss my best friend," says Jean. "We shared a lot. She was a very independent woman, but I think from what people tell me I did have a sort of influence on her." When visiting Cuba, Kirsty would fill her suitcases with children's clothes bought from charity shops to distribute to the poor. She supported the Music Fund For Cuba, raising money for musical instruments. Since her death, £8,000 has been raised from donations in her memory.
Before her final trip to Mexico, Kirsty had brought most of her Christmas
presents and a Christmas tree which she had planned to put up on her return.
After her death, the family were understandably not in a Christmas mood, but
put up the tree and put Kirsty's childhood Barbie doll on top as she had always
done. "We sat around on Christmas Eve, we didn't really
know what to do,' says Jean. 'So I said, 'Let's have a candle, lighten our
darkness a bit. We'll play her songs.'' 'It started very tentatively at
first with everyone choosing their song. And then Jamie said, 'I haven't felt
like Christmas, it feels a bit more like Christmas now.' When I heard this
music I said how nice it is to hear a good sound coming from this deck because
I had been without one after my CD player packed up. They laughed, and I wondered
why. The next morning there's a CD player under the tree." It was
Kirsty' s present to her mother.
So how would Jean like Kirsty to be remembered? "It would be very hard to encapsulate, but every single newspaper only had good things to say about her."
Donations to the Music Fund For Cuba can still be sent to
Major Minor Management, 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
Photographs by Steve Poole, Kerstin Rodgers, Redferns, LFI
© freeworld 1995 - 2008 [ www.kirstymaccoll.com ]
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