Reliably, in the lead-up to Christmas, someone will lose their shit in the online media about “Fairytale of New York”, Kirsty MacColl’s duet with Shane McGowan and the Pogues. “Fairytale of New York” is an unwelcome reminder of a time when people lived their lives in close contact with each other, when a phone was something you found in phone-boxes or something a barman might hand you, before people put on masks entirely, isolated themselves, and argued with their disembodied ideas of each other.
If there’s any defining feature of “white” culture today, it’s that it’s a culture of snitches. All art that had the power to give your life its deeper meaning is problematic, made by people who did, said, or thought a bad thing, or made in a bad time for bad money, and this has become the meaning of your lives. Millions of people seem to have gotten themselves into debt and wasted the best years of their lives to learn ways of finding out and exposing this cultural badness online or, if they’re lucky, back in those debt factories. I hated watching Charlie Kaufmann’s I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, which poetically depicted the end-state of a culture depleted and disconnected by memetic critique, with its bloodless husks and cobwebs and failed conversations.1
It’s ironic that this song privileged people choose to illustrate the Procrustean etiquette that has replaced morality for them was written by Shane McGowan, a man whose roots were radically under-privileged, from the complex reality of his own messed-up life and his people’s history (it’s not, like, just his opinion), and sung by him with Kirsty MacColl, whose own moral language was as acute and searching as that of Iris Murdoch. And it’s ironic that their song is now part of the great game of woke and anti-woke attitudes, a pseudopolitics critical to the “cancellation of the future” discussed last week.
For a lot of Kirsty MacColl’s songs are political; money, class, family and sex shape her characters, she’s there in the room, “the fly upon the wall”, part of the story that her keen and careful intelligence describes.
Kirsty MacColl was the daughter of dancer Jean Newlove and Ewan MacColl, the old-school activist folkie who wrote “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”, “Dirty Old Town”, and “the Ballad Of Stalin”, and who left Kirsty’s mother before she was born for Peggy Seeger, daughter of Ruth Crawford Seeger and half-sister of Pete. Kirsty first comes to our attention in the late 70’s, the DIY years for UK singer-songwriters, with a handful of kitchen-sink singles on Stiff Records, one of which is a cover of Billy Bragg’s “New England” both faithful and re-invented, as if she’s Bragg’s twin sister (he wrote two new verses for her); she owns the song and its style. Her first album, Desperate Character (1981) fails to take off, she’s dropped from Polydor (with a second album Real in the can but unreleased), returns to Stiff, and is stuck in a contractual limbo for many years when the label folds (of all the Smiths’ songs, she’ll later choose to cover “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby”). In the interim, she’s married top producer Steve Lillywhite (also a sublime violinist), and her fantastic voice and harmonic sense – she’s a one-woman Beach Boys – are used on records by The Smiths (“Bigmouth Strikes Again”, “Ask”), Happy Mondays, Talking Heads, Simple Minds, Alison Moyet, and many others, as well as that famous Pogues song (1986), as she learns to use the studio, and grows in confidence.
MacColl’s position at the heart of the music industry also allows her access to the world of the nouveau riche of Thatcher’s London, its rock stars and media players, the background to several of the songs on the album she recorded once free to do so, Kite (1989).
As in the first track, Innocence, which demonstrates all her skill; the arrangement is a country two-step, the theme is the defects of a former partner, generic limitations which are brushed aside in a flurry of careful detail and observation as if they’re just there to hold the ball while she kicks it into space. An honest, recognizable and funny character study, generous in its disappointment, if clear in its moral vision. Unusually, the heart of this song is in its choruses:
Oh innocence has passed you by
A long long time ago
I was the fly upon your wall
And I saw what you know
Your pornographic priestess left you for another guy
You frighten little children and you always wonder why
Oh innocence has passed you by
A long long time ago
I was the fly upon your wall
And I saw what you know
The supermarket checkout girl
Once smacked you in the eye
When you eat no one else does
But you always wonder why
Oh innocence has passed you by
A long long time ago
I was the fly upon your wall
And I saw what you know
Degeneration suits you, now I'm going home to cry
You won't be seeing me again
But you'll always wonder why
“Mother’s Ruin” is the first of many songs on Kite to feature Johnny Marr, a close friend of MacColl’s, from the recording of “Bigmouth Strikes Again” to the end of her life. It’s an important part of Kite’s charm that Marr and Lillywhite et al. will do anything to fulfil Kirsty’s painstaking musical visions, some of the most elaborate on record (I lose count of the overdubs, but they’re perfectly integrated into the sound; a Kirsty MacColl track, even in the early days, was an intricate mosaic, her “simplicity” a wonderful trick). There are moments in “Mother’s Ruin” that remind me of “That Joke Isn’t Funny Any More”, but MacColl effortlessly steps into The Smiths’ idiom, which Marr hands her on a plate, especially on “Children Of The Revolution” on the next album, Electric Landlady (Marr’s title). If you love The Smiths, you should own these albums.
Mother's ruin, their own little girls
Keep them dreaming, there's more to this world
But turn her the other way
And every day is 'Father's Day'
He stays until there's nothing left to say
MacColl understands men, their unreliability and emotional inadequacy and their delusional ambitions, very well; she deals with us firmly and fairly enough to keep us listening in; women are more complicated subject matter for a woman, the adversary that isn’t the Other; songs like “Mother’s Ruin” and “Tread Lightly” are mysterious meditations on the edge of self, while “What Do Pretty Girls Do?” pulls off something very difficult, imagining the fall of a rival without complaint or cruelty.
She's got a cabin in a town upon the border
She gets in trouble with the local law and order
Everybody's happy when she isn't at the door
She sends out invitations to everyone, they don't come
And the phone ain't ringing for her now
You should have seen her with her head held high
Now what do pretty girls do?
She used to be the same as me or you
Now what do pretty girls do?
Well they get older just like everybody else
She never thought she'd have to take care of herself
Collecting all the records and the posters
Of the people that she knew and they knew
That she'd get older just like everybody else
She never thought she'd have to take care of herself
MacColl’s folk heritage informs her pop songs in an interesting way that I’m tempted to call post-folk; she knows very well where she stands in the social order, so that her social concern is expressed without false identification. A good example of this is “Walking Down Madison” from Electric Landlady, where a light and playful imitation of rap that’s almost Blondie carries us into a vision of Heaven and Hell.
Walking down Madison
I swear I never had a gun
No I never shot no one
I was only having fun
Walking down Madison
Swear I never had a gun
I was philosophising some
Checking out the bums
See you give 'em your nickels
Your pennies and dimes
But you can't give 'em hope
In these mercenary times, oh no
And you feel real guilty about the coat on your back
And the sandwich you had, oh no
From an uptown apartment
To a knife on the A train
It's not that far
From the sharks in the penthouse
To the rats in the basement
It's not that far
To the bag lady frozen asleep in the park
Oh no, it's not that far
Would you like to see some more?
I can show you if you'd like to
It's the wonderful harmonies and plaintive, lilting vocal lines attached to those sentiments that have the power to make me cry; Kirsty knows when and how to melt a heart; her voice is a weapon of social justice. “Free World”, the single from Kite, is her most direct attack on Thatcherism, a vision of a worker’s struggle worthy of her father, with pity for those who sold out for the easy money of those years.
I thought of you when they closed down the school
And the hospital too
Did they think that you were better?
They were wrong
But I will see you baby when the clans rise again
Women and men united by the struggle
Going down
With a pocketful of plastic
Like a dollar on elastic
In this free world
“Lying Down”, from Electric Landlady, is a more murky protest song, things seen in a glass darkly, and a decent imitation of the Happy Mondays sound:
Reach for the stars reach for the earth
We took the earth and made it worse
And there was never any doubt
We ate it up we spat it out
And still we love to say we did it our way
On this voyage of discovery
I'm blinded by the things I see
I've seen before I'll see again
I'll look along a line of men
And fall into the lion's den
Now you can pray your head is bared
And I'm not saying I'm not scared
But I'm not going to take this lying down
Kirsty MacColl’s eagerness to express herself through such an over-eclectic mix of musical styles was a fault that bothered critics, but her combination of innate musicality and anxious perfectionism rarely failed her. Latin rhythms and instrumentation interested her throughout her career and her last album, Tropical Brainstorm (1999), is entirely set to Cuban and Brazilian beats, and is one of her most successful collections. She’s written about woman’s experience of sex, especially short-term relationships and casual hook-ups, throughout her career, in tones of hope, disappointment, encouragement and adjustment, in tracks like “No Victims” and “Don’t Come The Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim!” on Kite, and on Tropical Brainstorm she seems relatively fulfilled and confident, matched by a change in her voice, a little deeper, less deadpan, and most often solo, less reliant on the layering that gave her confidence on Kite. “Here Comes That Man Again” might well be the first realistic song about internet porn or cybersex, with its dial-up tone intro, and “Autumngirlsoup” is as beautiful as it gets.
Get me on the boil and reduce me
To a simmering wreck with a slow kiss
To the back of my neck
Carve up my heart on a very low flame
Separate my feelings then pour them down the drain
Close my eyes and sweeten me with lies
Pierce my skin with a few well-chosen words
Now you can stuff me with whatever you've got handy
And on a cold grey day a cold grey man will do
I'm an autumn girl, flying over London
With the trees on fire it looks like home
I'm an autumn girl on the endless search for summer
'Cause I need some love to heat my frozen bones
So give me something to whet my appetite
And chill my soul with a sudden lack of interest
Oh, but the winter freezes on and the candle's burned low
Fill me with the hot stuff then say you've got to go
Take my mind, marinade it in red wine
Grate my thighs with your chinny chin chin
And I will let you in
Oh on a long dark night a long dark man might...
Although Tropical Brainstorm went gold on CD, MacColl was dropped by her record company (it was finally released in vinyl in 2021). With cruel irony, Kirsty MacColl, daughter of communists, despiser of neoliberalism, and lover of Cuba and its music was killed by a supermarket multimillionaire’s jetboat while swimming with her sons in Mexico in December 2000.
In 20 years she had released just 5 studio albums. Three of these – Kite, Titanic Days, and Tropical Brainstorm – sound like masterpieces to me, the others have their fair share of her best songs. There also many singles, several fantastic remixes, many occasional covers, and her work with other artists. If she was alive today, she’d fit right in, with her love of latin beats and languages. But she’s not, and her early death adds a extra layer of meaning to her music that does it no harm at all.
Your little algorithmic friend is suggesting that you listen to “Circumspect Penelope” by Look Blue Go Purple next.
Last year I was distracted by Christmas shopping at the mall when some slick version of “Baby It's Cold Outside” came on the PA. Taken by surprise and completely forgetting years of critique, I felt a burst of pure joy on perceiving the thing-in-itself.