Category: Kirsty MacColl

It was just a week after the break-up of The Smiths in 1987 when Johnny Marr came up with a tune he felt was worth getting some lyrics added to.

He knew his good pal Kirsty MacColl was going through a tough time of it with writer’s block, and his hope was that she would somehow be inspired from him sending her a tune.  It eventually did do the trick, although it would be almost four full years before Walking Down Madison took her back into the charts and onto Top of The Pops.

mp3: Kirsty MacColl – Walking Down Madison (7″ edit)

Incidentally, my wee bit of research for this shows that this was Kirsty’s fourth and last solo Top 30 hit.  Her first had been There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis (#14, 1981) while Walking Down Madison, a full decade later peaked at #23.  There’s a real irony that such a talented songwriter had her two biggest hits courtesy of cover versions – A New England (#7, 1985) and Days (#12, 1989) – I still think it’s a huge injustice that Free World stalled at #43 just a few months before Days was such a hit.

Free World had been a commentary on how the 80s had seen an ugly rightwards drift in UK politics, and the social conscience side of Kirsty was again to the fore on Madison, especially via the rap delivered by Manchester-born DJ and rapper, Aniff Akinola.

It’s quite damning on society that the scenarios mentioned in the song are very much still with us more than 30 years later.

Here’s the b-side of the 7″ side:-

mp3: Kirsty MacColl – One Good Thing

I’ll be kind by saying that it was always likely destined to be a b-side rather than fitted on to the consistently good album, Electric Landlady, released a few weeks after Madison.

JC

Album: Kite – Kirsty MacColl
Review: Rolling Stone, 31 May 1990
Author: Steve Mochman

Kirsty MacColl does not suffer fools gladly: “It’s a bozo’s world and you’re a bozo’s child” is just one of a quiverful of arrows she slings at both men who are self-centered manipulators and women who put up with them. “I’m no victim to pity and cry for/And you’re not someone I’d lay down and die for” is another. The effect, at least lyrically, is a sort of distaff Elvis Costello: sharp-tongued, literate and – in its own distinctive way – charming.

The charm is derived in no small part from MacColl’s songwriting skill. (Remember Tracey Ullman‘s 1984 hit “They Don’t Know”? MacColl wrote it.) She is, after all, the daughter of the late Scottish folk singer Ewan MacColl, whose “Dirty Old Town” was recorded by the Pogues and many other artists. She’s also the wife of producer Steve Lillywhite, and with help from him and the likes of guitarist Johnny Marr, MacColl has created a sparkling, modern folk-rock sound that at turns bounces, forces and eases her scoldings on, with her plain but attractive voice layered throughout.

“Free World” slams home a warning of women’s frustration in the world with U2-like frenzy; “Fifteen Minutes” is a tart kiss-off to a fair-weather lover; “What Do Pretty Girls Do?” makes a case that it’s the plain Janes that learn the best lessons from life; and rounding out the package are two lovely, bittersweet tracks: an eye-watering version of the Kinks‘ “Days” and the closer, “You and Me Baby.” The real bittersweet fact about Kite, though, is that it’s only MacColl’s second recording and her first in almost ten years. It’s unfair for someone with this much to say and this much skill at saying it to be so stingy.

JC adds…….

A couple of things to mention.

By the time this review was published, Kite had been out for more than a year in the UK, where it had sold enough copies to qualify for a silver disc from the British Phonographic Industry.  Four singles had been taken from it, but only Days had been a hit.  I’ve had a look on-line, but as far as I can make out, Kite was released in the USA at the same time as elsewhere in the UK and Europe.  It may well just have been the case that the journalist, who was clearly a fan of the album, took a punt by submitting a speculative review which was picked up by the editorial team – it was probably the reference to U2 that clinched it ….

The good thing for Steve Mochman, and indeed all of us who were fans of Kirsty back in the later 80s/early 90s was that she was already hard at work on her third album, and Electric Landlady would be released in June 1991. I’m sorry to say that I haven’t been able to track down a Rolling Story review of that particular LP.

mp3: Kirsty MacColl – Free World
mp3: Kirsty MacColl – What Do Pretty Girls Do?
mp3: Kirsty MacColl – Days
mp3: Kirsty MacColl – You and Me Baby

 

Many thanks for such great and supportive feedback to the first installment of this new feature.  The suggestions that have been made will feature in coming weeks, but for today I want to focus on a song that is very dear to me.

I don’t think anyone will disagree with my proposal that A New England is a classic.  Written in late 1982/early 1983, it has always been one of the most popular of Billy Bragg songs, one that gets as loud a cheer as any when he plays it live.

It’s a song that came to wider public attention back when Kirsty MacColl covered it and took it all the way to #7 in the UK charts in the early months of 1985.

Wiki tells the story quite accurately:-

The opening lines of the song (“I was 21 years when I wrote this song/I’m 22 now, but I won’t be for long”) are identical to the opening lines of Paul Simon’s song “Leaves that Are Green”, which appears on Simon and Garfunkel’s 1966 album Sounds of Silence. During a concert in Winnipeg, Canada on 27 September 2006, Bragg stated Simon and Garfunkel had a strong influence on him and that he took the line from their song intentionally.

Bragg has said the song had its origins in seeing two satellites flying alongside each other. Searching for romantic inspiration, he had to make do with “space hardware”. He told a BBC interviewer he “stole” the melody from Thin Lizzy’s “Cowboy Song”

Kirsty MacColl recorded the song the year after its release by Bragg. Her version was produced by her then-husband Steve Lillywhite. Entering the UK chart in 1985, it was her biggest solo hit, reaching number 7 in the UK Singles Chart and number 8 in the Irish Singles Chart.

Bragg’s original version of the song had only two verses. MacColl thought the song was too short, and so Bragg wrote a further two verses for her which she consolidated into one. Since MacColl’s death, Bragg has included the additional verse in performances of the song as a tribute.

The recording of “A New England” was the first collaboration between MacColl and her husband Steve Lillywhite on one of her own solo recordings.

MacColl first discovered Bragg in 1983 when she went to see one of his live performances. One of the songs Bragg played was “A New England”, which MacColl immediately identified as having hit potential. MacColl told Smash Hits in 1985: “I always thought ‘A New England’ would be great with loads of harmonies, it’s such a good melody. Billy does it in a very rough way, and it’s like a busker doing a really good Beatles song. She added to Gilbert Blecken in 1994: “I knew the song was fantastic, but [Bragg’s] version was just the skeleton of the song, so I wanted to dress it up.”

I bought the single on, or very shorty after, the day it was released, without ever hearing it, which is why my copy has the quite rare ‘bombsite’ cover on the front of the sleeve rather than on the reverse.  The purchase was on the basis that I was a Billy Bragg fan who had enjoyed previous singles by Kirsty MacColl, so there was very little that really could go wrong.  The piece on vinyl has remained a favourite ever since, with it now being quite poignant given the tragic and horrific death of Kirsty back in 2000.  I’ve also managed to take good enough care of the vinyl that It remains free from cracks and hisses.

Credit does have to go to both Kirsty for the way she re-interpreted the song, turning it into a bonafide pop classic while keeping the innocence and charm that was such a hallmark of the original, and to Steve Lillywhite whose deft and crisp production has ensured the song hasn’t dated.

mp3: Kirsty MacColl – A New England (extended version)

The 12″ version is almost eight minutes long, with a very lengthy fade-out.  I trust this 320kbps rip meets with your collective approval.

JC

There’s a couple of reasons why I still adore this single more than 30 years after it was released (I know, I was staggered and left speechless by that fact too!!),  For one, crashing into the Top 10 took Kirsty McColl away from ever having the stigma of ‘one-hit wonder’ given her lack of chart success since the 1981 success of There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis. Secondly, it helped raise the profile of Billy Bragg and showed the world there was an awful lot more to his song-writing talents than rabble-rousing anthems for left-wingers.

I remember paying a few shillings extra to buy the 12″ version of this single at the time – a move I have never regretted. Yes, the song is more than double the length of the version played on the radio, but there’s not a single second wasted on what is a superb production by Kirsty’s then husband, Steve Lillywhite uber-producer of the 80s who was rich and famous from his collaborations with U2.

And the b-sides, both penned by Kirsty, aren’t bad efforts either:-

mp3 : Kirsty MacColl – A New England (12″ version)
mp3 : Kirsty MacColl – Patrick
mp3 : Kirsty MacColl – I’m Going Out With An Eighty Year Old Millionaire

Enjoy

I won’t insult anyone by recounting the life and times and ultimately the tragic and untimely death of Kirsty MacColl.

Like most of you who are aged 40 and upwards, I’m guessing the first time she would have appeared on your radar was when she took this into the charts back in the spring of 1981:-

mp3 : Kirsty MacColl – There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis

Released in an era when many refused to believe the ‘King of Rock’nRoll’ had really died four years earlier, this is a  humourous pop song that just stays on the right side of novelty from the pen of someone who Johnny Marr has described as one of England’s greatest-ever lyricists….and from a man who has worked so closely with Morrissey and Matt Johnson, then that has to be seen as praise of the highest order.

It’s a single I picked up cheap quite recently and outside of maybe a couple of plays on radio I haven’t heard it much over the past 33 years.  Sad to say, I found myself a bit underwhelmed by it – it was a lot duller and far more mainstream that I had ever remembered and I found it all a bit disappointing.

For a long time after ‘Chip Shop’ it looked as if Kirsty was going to go down as a one-hit wonder, but thanks to her cracking cover of a Billy Bragg song she was able to kick-start her career in 1984, and while she rarely made an impact on the higher echelons of the chart, all of her records were afforded critical acclaim and respectable sales.

There were two b-sides to ‘Chip Shop’, one of which is features an alternative take on the single:-

mp3 : Kirsty MacColl – Hard To Believe
mp3 : Kirsty MacColl – There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis (country version)

Again, I was left a little disappointed by these.  They are certainly not as good as the later material she would release.

Enjoy.

The 1980s was a decade when pop and politics were mixed like no other, certainly here in the UK.

The threat of a nuclear holocaust, the miners’ strike, the struggle for democracy in South Africa, homophobia, the efforts to bring an end to the Iron Curtain, famine in Africa, the worries around the growth of a fascist state in the UK, the ever-increasing gaps in living standards between those who had and those who hadn’t, the Falklands War, the UK riots and the ‘greed is best’ ethos were common subject matters in pop music during the Thatcher-era which began and ended just either side of the 80s.

There’s loads of great and memorable songs from that era, none more so than Nelson Mandela which helped take a decades-old campaign to places it hadn’t been before or Ghost Town which perfectly captured the grim despair that many parts of the UK felt as the full effects of laissez-faire capitalism took a firm grip.

In 1989, Kirsty MacColl slipped out a tremendously jaunty sounding single whose lyrics encapsulate much of what the previous decade had been all about:-

I thought of you when they closed down the school
And the hospital too
Did they think that you were better?
They were wrong
You had so many friends
They all left you in the end
‘Cause they couldn’t take the patter

And I’ll see you baby when the clans rise again
Women and men united by a struggle
Going down
You’ve got to walk into the water
With your sister and your daughter
In this free world

If I wore your shades could I share your point of view?
Could I make you feel better?
Paint a picture, write a letter?
Well I know what you’re saying
But I see the things you do
And it’s much too dangerous
To get closer to you

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
I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t care

I’ll see you baby when the clans rise again
Women and men united by the struggle
And the ghettos are full of Mercedes Benz
And you’d never hurt a friend
Who wouldn’t tell you

It’s cold and it’s going to get colder
You may not get much older
You’re much too scared of living
And to die is a reliable exit
So you push it and you test it
With Thunderbird and Rivin

I’ll see you baby when the clans rise again
Women and men united by the struggle
In this free world baby
Got to take it got to grab it
Got to get it up and shag it
In this free world

Going down
You’ve got to get into the water
Like a lamb goes to the slaughter
In this free world baby
Going down
With a pocketful of plastic
Like a dollar on elastic
In this free world
I wouldn’t tell you if I didn’t care

Sadly, the single didn’t crack the charts and so has become one of the many forgotten political protest songs of the era:-

mp3 : Kirsty MacColl – Free World

The 12″ of this had an exceptional cover version:-

mp3 : Kirsty MacColl – You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby

Johnny Marr himself contributed guitar to this particular recording and in doing so, combined with Kirsty’s tremendous vocal delivery, has made this a rare instance of when the fresh take was better than the original.

The final track was this:-

mp3 : Kirsty MacColl – Closer to God?

I really wish the record bosses had made this a double-A side of Free World and You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby for I’m certain there would have been more airplay and sales.  And who knows, there might even have been a wonderful post-Smiths appearance for Johnny on Top of the Pops.

Enjoy!!

PS : I’d like to invite T(n)VV readers to contribute their own favourite or memorable political protest songs along with a few lines of explanation with the idea of starting up a new series.  If you fancy joining in, please send it over to thevinylvillain@hotmail.co.uk

Cheers.