![]() ![]() Granted, she took time off to be a parent (having two sons, Jamie and Louis, with her husband of ten years from 1984, producer Steve Lillywhite) but she was never really not making music. She could turn her hand brilliantly to country, folk, jazz, trip hop, synth pop, girl group-doused dream pop, tropicalia, mambo, British kitchen-sink miniatures, epic balladry, and much more.īut in those 21 years, I was surprised to learn that she only released 21 singles and five albums. Music royalty like Johnny Marr and The Hollies’ Graham Gouldman counted her among the best songwriters they’d ever worked with, although not being a man, she never got the same kind of coverage. She also wrote songs that launched artists’ careers in other countries (Tracey Ullman’s version of Kirsty’s ‘They Don’t Know’ was a top 10 US hit, becoming a springboard for her becoming a personality, which led to an award-winning chat show), and interpreted songs by other people so well they felt like her own (The Kinks’ ‘Days’, Billy Bragg’s ‘A New England’). “She had these huge reserves of talent.”) Even before we get to her own music, she was in a bluesy punk band, the Drug Addix, co-wrote songs for Frida from ABBA, sang backing vocals for The Smiths, Happy Mondays, and Talking Heads (she’s in their video to ‘(Nothing But) Flowers’) and sequenced the tracks for U2’s The Joshua Tree (“She gave the album a beginning, a middle and an end,” her ex-husband Steve Lillywhite confirmed to me. The second doesn’t speak of her life.īetween 19, Kirsty MacColl showed us her life through her music as a singer, instrumentalist, lyricist, arranger, producer, solo artist and collaborator of real depth, full of dynamism, insane amounts of ability and range. The first is her peerless vocal, all guts, grit and tenderness, on The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale Of New York’. When I was asked to write the liner notes for the new Kirsty MacColl box set, a 161-track celebration of her work, it struck me that only two things crop up when she's usually mentioned. ![]()
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