A Conversation With Singer-Songwwriter Kirsty MacColl
Droll humor, lyrical twists and dark-edged pop are hallmarks of this British pop star.
THE MORNING CALL | March 11, 1995
If she could say one thing to the American public, Kirsty MacColl was asked during a recent interview, what would it be?
“Send me your money,” she replies with a laugh.
Humor is the key to MacColl, who has scored several hits in her native Britain but is still not well known on this side of the pond.
MacColl’s songwriting dances on the edge of dark-edged pop, like Elvis Costello, and includes unexpected twists. “I’m always looking to do something from the point of view that hasn’t been done in from overkill. I invent characters to live out my cruel world,” she said over the telephone from London, as she was preparing for a month-long club tour, which stops Wednesday night in Philadelphia.
That includes characters like the housewife whose token existence so bothers her, she buys a gun to change it. Or the woman whose boyfriend talks more about football than her. MacColl’s new single, “Caroline,” (from her latest disc “Galore,” a retrospective of her 15-year career) is an answer to Dolly Parton’s classic victim song, “Jolene.” “A lot of the songs I heard growing up were written by men for women. There was a lot of, ‘Oh, I can’t live without my man.’ I don’t write songs about women as victims. I think it’s been done to death.”
Equally interesting is MacColl’s alluring vocal delivery, which adds an edge to her music. She can take Ray Davies’ “Days” or Cole Porter’s “Miss Otis Regrets” and make them her own. “The thing with songs like that is that I tend to deliver things deadpan because I find it hard to emote in front of an audience. I’m not from the Michael Bolton school. I won’t bleed all over the carpet; it comes across as phony. You can write from your own experience, but you don’t have to make it obvious. You don’t have to hit people over the head.”
Her taste in music varies. “I listen to jazz, some ’70s soul and a lot of Latin music. I speak a very colloquial 1950s Cuban. Ninety percent of the best music I’ve heard isn’t on the radio.”
Kirsty MacColl’s father, Ewan MacColl.
Although her father, the late British folk traditionalist Ewan MacColl, frowned on pop music, she spent most of her childhood listening to the radio in bed because of illness. ” ‘Good Vibrations’ was the first song I remember getting really worked up over,” MacColl said. “Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’ also made a big impression. I realized you didn’t have to be a virtuoso to write a lot of songs.”
Of course, it still took a while to get noticed by a record label. “I had been in a really awful punk band and they had approached Stiff Records. I was the token woman. Stiff wasn’t interested in the demos, and so the band sack ed me,” she says with a laugh.
The band never went anywhere, but MacColl did. “After the band sacked me, Stiff called and said, ‘We hear you’re not with that horrible band anymore. Would like to record some demos?’ “
That started her career. She recorded “They Don’t Know,” a song taken to No. 4 in the states by Tracey Ullman. “Just my luck, there was a distribution strike at the time,” said MacColl. “It didn’t sell anything, but it went to No. 2 in airplay between ABBA and Wings.”
Since then she has recorded four albums, some produced by ex-husband Steve Lillywhite. She’s also collaborated with Johnny Marr of The Smiths and Marshall Crenshaw, among others.
How does she think time has treated her songs? “I think my songs stand up well,” she replied. “I was never really very fashionable. So I never had to live down being a New Romantic.
“ ‘Titanic Days’ was my biggest album in America and got loads of airplay. But the British record company treated it like a half-eaten pizza.”