The singer Johnny Marr hailed as a true artist: “She believed in magic”
“If you get people you really admire taking an interest in your work it spurs you on,” Kirsty MacColl said in 1989. “Johnny [Marr] was always ringing up, saying, ‘What are you up to?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Well, why not? Get out on the road, do something. Get off your arse!’”
Both during and after his own time with The Smiths, Johnny Marr was a not-so-secret admirer and champion of Kirsty MacColl’s music, even when MacColl herself didn’t feel like getting in the studio or booking any tour dates. While her struggles with stage fright and self-confidence were a problem through much of her career, MacColl rarely generated any doubts in her collaborators. She was, as many fans are well aware, far more than just the lady we hear at Christmas singing ‘Fairytale of New York’.
In Marr’s case, he first befriended the London-based MacColl in 1986 after she had provided guest vocals on The Smiths’ track ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’.
“We hit it off straight away and became very close friends,” Marr told The Arts Desk in 2012. “I was between flats in London and she told me I could live at her place in Shepherd’s Bush, so I became her tenant! We hung out and started writing together. It would be three in the morning, I’d be picking away absentmindedly on the guitar and she’d say, ‘What’s that?’ The next morning she’d have turned it into a song.”
MacColl is probably better remembered today as a song interpreter, considering that her biggest hits – a 1984 cover of Billy Bragg’s ‘A New England’ and that aforementioned 1987 Christmas classic with the Pogues – weren’t her own compositions. One of the very first songs she wrote and recorded, however, 1979’s ‘They Don’t Know’, wound up becoming one of the biggest pop hits of the early ‘80s when comedian Tracy Ullman covered it (Ullman couldn’t hit the high note in the song, so Kirsty’s original vocal was sampled in the last chorus). Many of MacColl’s other charting originals, like 1981’s faux-honky-tonk tune ‘There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis’ and 1989’s ‘Free World’, showcased a remarkable skill for both witty wordplay and heavier social commentary.
“Oh darling, you’re so popular,” begins one verse of ‘There’s a Guy’. “You were the best thing new in Hicksville / With your mohair suits and foreign shoes / News is you changed your pick-up for a Seville.”
Perhaps partially as a result of her relative shyness or disinterest in the trends of the 1980s, though, MacColl was rarely talked about in the same breath as the songwriters she was working with, be it Bragg, Morrissey, Marr, or Shane MacGowan. It didn’t help that she didn’t release a full-length studio album of her own between 1981’s Desperate Character and 1989’s Kite.
“I played the pop game for a while,” MacColl said in 1989, “But very badly. I tried to please everybody and ended up pleasing nobody at all, least of all myself. I think I probably gave the impression of being pretty much a bimbo like everybody else. But I wrote most of my own stuff and had a strong idea of what I wanted the records to sound like.”
“Her expertise was melody, lyrics and harmony,” Marr said of his friend, who died tragically in a speedboat accident in 2000. “She’s one of England’s greatest ever pop lyricists . . . and above all she was a brilliant record maker. She knew the technicalities and artistry of making records. Everyone wanted to play with her, and she got the best out of them”.
“She came from Stiff records and she was well suited to that no bullshit mentality,” Marr added. “’A good pop song, get it right, don’t fuck about, we’re not hippies.’ She was no nonsense, but at the same time she believed in magic. A true artist, in a class of one, and irreplaceable.”
