In 1979, a young guitarist and songwriter called Mark Nevin was trying to put together a jokey soul covers band called Gina and the Tonics. A teenage Kirsty MacColl turned up to the first rehearsal, announced that what they were doing was “a waste of time” and suggested that Nevin should play guitar on some of her own songs. “So,” laughs Nevin, “we ended up in a studio in Islington that smelled so bad that your clothes stank of it for week afterwards, recording her demos.”
It is a very Kirsty MacColl story in that it involves straight talking – “Kirsty was opinionated, she didn’t take any shit,” says her ex-husband, the producer Steve Lillywhite – and people being dazzled by her songwriting talent. Among what she told Nevin were “teen ballads” lurked They Don’t Know, apparently written when she was 16, and evidence of a prodigious gift: three minutes of dazzlingly perfect pop, filled with yearning and haunted by the ghosts of 60s girl groups. “Very pop, very Brill Building,” recalls Dave Robinson, co-founder of the esteemed indie label Stiff, who signed her off the back of her demos. “An English person writing teen pop was very unusual, plus she was definitely writing from a female point of view.”
Twenty-three years after her death, and with a lavish eight-CD box set, See That Girl, now presenting her oeuvre, MacColl remains a more complex figure than her everywoman public image suggested. For all her songwriting skill, her biggest hits came via cover versions or guest appearances on other artists’ songs. She was a striking live performer, but was crippled by stage fright. She barely mentioned being the daughter of a key figure in the 50s folk revival, the singer-songwriter Ewan MacColl, but her troubled relationship with her father – who left her mother shortly after Kirsty was born – seems to have informed her lyrics, live performances, even her choice of singles. Lillywhite thinks her first hit, the 1981 new wave novelty There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis, was made “to embarrass” her pop-hating father.
“His rejection was so deeply in her,” says Nevin. “With most artists, you can boil their lyrics down to one message, and the message for Kirsty’s songs was: ‘Men – you’re all bastards; don’t leave me, I’m just a little girl.’ When she walked on stage, I think all she saw in her mind was loads of people who might reject her, which wasn’t true. And I remember playing a folk festival in Belgium once, with all these finger-in-the-ear singers. We had the amps turned up to 11 and you could see the pained look of horror and disgust on the audience’s faces. She liked that, because it was a sort of ‘up yours, Dad’ thing.”
From the outset, MacColl’s career progressed in weird fits and starts. One theory is that she put the music industry’s collective back up by dint of being an opinionated female artist. “She never pandered to fashion about music. She knew what she liked, and she had very good taste,” says Pete Glenister, a frequent collaborator. “She was always deemed difficult, whereas if she’d been a bloke, they’d have just said: ‘Yeah, he knows what he wants.’ That was the real difference. It was amazing how sexist it was, particularly in regard to Kirsty. She would get a record deal and then get dropped just because she had a view.”
Her career ran into problems right away. Incredibly, Stiff couldn’t make a hit out of They Don’t Know: its release was scuppered by a strike at the label’s distributors, while Robinson says MacColl was “reticent about promotion generally”. She decamped to a major label, got a hit with There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop, then watched as her subsequent singles and debut album, Desperate Character, failed to make the charts at all and her second album, the more synth-heavy Real, went unreleased (it appears for the first time on See That Girl).
Then fate intervened. At a hairdresser’s, Robinson’s wife, Rosemary, found herself seated next to the actor and comedian Tracey Ullman. When Ullman expressed interest in making a record, Rosemary gave her a tape of MacColl’s songs. On the drive home, Ullman claimed she played They Don’t Know “about 50 times”: it was, she said, the kind of song “that makes you tingle and cry”. Ullman’s version went to No 2 in the UK and made the US Top 10, kickstarting what became a wildly successful career in the US.
Robinson, meanwhile, had suggested that MacColl come back to Stiff. “I didn’t like what was going on in her life,” he says. “She was best friends with my secretary, and when my secretary looked like she hadn’t been home the night before, she’d always been out with Kirsty. It was obvious that Kirsty’s life was wearing her a bit. She decided she’d take the offer and went off to Champneys or something for a couple of weeks just to get her head together. She came back looking absolutely gorgeous, went to a party and pulled Steve Lillywhite!”
MacColl’s Lillywhite-produced cover of Billy Bragg’s A New England became her biggest solo hit, reaching No 7 in 1985, but she never followed it up. By the time the video was shot, the couple were married and MacColl was heavily pregnant. Instead of making her own records, she accompanied Lillywhite to the studio. “The 10 years we were together, she must have sung on pretty much everything I produced with the exception of U2: [that’s] Talking Heads, the Rolling Stones, the Smiths and Happy Mondays,” says Lillywhite. “When I was working with the Stones, we ended up backstage at Live Aid in Philadelphia with Keith Richards, Ronnie Wood and Bob Dylan. I introduced Kirsty to Dylan and he looked at her and went: ‘Oh my God, your dad hated me.’”
It was via Lillywhite that MacColl made her most famous guest appearance. “The Pogues had these quite lofty ideals as to who was to sing on Fairytale of New York; Chrissie Hynde was mentioned,” he says. “But I took the tapes home with me over the weekend and got Kirsty to sing it. It’s as good a vocal as I’ve ever recorded with anyone and it’s much more complicated than you think. Many people have tried to cover it and no one can sing it with her nuance and swing.”
The couple made two MacColl albums together, 1989’s Kite and 1991’s Electric Landlady, which minted her two songwriting partnerships with Glenister and Nevin (she called the latter out of the blue more than a decade after the Gina and the Tonics debacle, apparently unaware that he spent some of the intervening years as a member of Fairground Attraction, co-writing their No 1 single Perfect). Neither album was huge commercially, although Kite spawned another hit cover, this time of the Kinks’ Days. And both were crammed with fantastic songs that showed MacColl’s ability to, as Glenister puts it, “break your heart with something wistful, then make you laugh with her wit”.
But by the time of 1993’s Titanic Days, her marriage to Lillywhite was unravelling: the victim, he says, of too much “recreational partying … she didn’t want to carry on with that lifestyle and I decided the drug-taking had to increase.” The album is brilliant, but frequently bleak listening, alternately coruscating in its anger and unbearably sad. She didn’t make another album for six years.
When she did, however, everything appeared to have shifted. On Tropical Brainstorm, MacColl sounded re-energised by a love of Cuban and Brazilian music, applying her customary wit and bite to songs from a perspective that you seldom hear in pop music: that of a middle-aged divorced woman, struggling to navigate dating again on England 2 Columbia 0 and Wrong Again, spitting bile at an ex and his new, younger girlfriend on Designer Life, and struggling with the dictats of fashion on In These Shoes? She had a new relationship and even appeared to be enjoying playing live, albeit with some assistance. “Oh, she’d smoke a lot of dope backstage,” laughs Nevin. “So she was pretty stoned by the time we went on.”
But two months after the Tropical Brainstorm tour ended, she was dead, killed by a speedboat while scuba diving on a family holiday in Mexico. She managed to push her sons out of its path before being struck herself. Her death left a lot of artistic what-ifs, and a sense that the music collected on See That Girl should have – and still should – reach a wider audience.
But, as Glenister says, you could hardly describe MacColl as a forgotten figure. Thanks to Fairytale of New York, her voice has become an annual part of the fabric of British life. And, of all her songs, it is In These Shoes? that has enjoyed an unexpected afterlife: covered by Bette Midler, a regular on soundtracks – everything from Sex and the City to Kinky Boots to The Catherine Tate Show – and latterly, a favourite on TikTok, accompanying performances by drag queens, videos in which people show off their collections of high heels and messages of feminine empowerment. “I had to approve it being used in another film this week,” he says. “It still has a life.”
And then he goes quiet. “I still miss her, actually,” he says. “I do. I really do.”
• See That Girl 1979-2000 is out now on Universal
