The first time Kirsty MacColl ever sang “Fairytale of New York” with the Pogues wasn’t in the studio – she’d recorded her vocals at home – but onstage in concert on 17 December 1987 at Glasgow Barrowlands, a month after the song had been released. And if you want an indication of the esteem she was held in, just listen to the newly unearthed recording of that first-ever live performance of the Christmas classic: before the song’s unforgettable piano intro begins, the 2,000 strong Glaswegian audience are shouting “Kirsty! Kirsty!” like a football crowd.
“Oh, the way that starts,” says Steve Lillywhite, MacColl’s ex-husband, who produced both the original track and this remastered live take, which is out now on a new Pogues vinyl EP. “It’s just fantastic. It was lovely. When Kirsty walked on, it was as much about her as it was about ‘Fairytale of New York’. Historically, she had stage fright. But she managed to get rid of it, just for this one version of the song. And her vocal was almost perfect.”
MacColl died 25 years ago today on 18 December 2000 in a tragic speedboat accident in Mexico at the age of just 41. It cruelly cut short the life of a unique talent. While most famous for her sardonic and moving ripostes to Shane MacGowan on the broken-dreams ballad “Fairytale of New York”, her own idiosyncratic career – genre-mixing songs of depth and spirit that were wry and witty, sad and poignant – made her a beloved cult figure. “If a record doesn’t make you think, laugh or dance – ideally all three – then it’s a waste of vinyl,” she once said.
MacColl became a beloved cult figure (Photo: Fin Costello/Redferns)
MacColl released just five albums in 21 years amid label issues and bad fortune, and had one only true hit of her own, 1981’s deceptively novelty-ish country-pop track “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis” – though she had hits by putting her own indelible stamp on covers of Billy Bragg’s “A New England” and The Kinks’ “Days”. Yet she was very much a songwriter’s songwriter: Keith Richards was a fan; Bono called her “the Noël Coward of her generation” and let MacColl sequence the tracklisting for U2’s world-conquering 1987 album The Joshua Tree; Johnny Marr said MacColl had “the wit of Ray Davies and the harmonic invention of the Beach Boys, only cooler”.
“People who knew, knew,’ says Lillywhite. “They were all great musicians. And they all got Kirsty.”
Friend and collaborator Billy Bragg said: “I just thought what an incredible songwriter she was. That’s the great thing about Kirsty. Everyone talks about a brilliant voice, but she was a brilliant songwriter as well, and the two often don’t go together. She was blessed in that way.”
MacColl was born in Croydon, south London, in 1959, the daughter of Scottish folk legend Euan MacColl. But theirs was an uneasy relationship: just after she was born, Euan left her mother for fellow folk singer Peggy Seeger (they’d already had a child together). It is often said they were distant – that MacColl carried with her a desire both to rebel and to impress him.
“It was no different from anyone who’s divorced from their father,” Lillywhite says. “She would love to have spent more time with him, but she didn’t.” A folk purist, Euan was disparaging about MacColl’s more mainstream music. “But frankly, she didn’t like what he did about folk music,” Bragg says. “It wasn’t her cup of tea. And that’s fine. She was like, ‘I don’t want to be the daughter of Euan MacColl. I want to be myself.’ I totally understand that.”
MacColl in 1979, the year her single ‘They Don’t Know’ was released – it later became a hit for Tracey Ullman in the US (Photo: Mike Lawn/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty)
The story of MacColl’s 1979 debut single “They Don’t Know” – released after a spell in punk band Drug Addix – perhaps encapsulates her commercial misfortune. A truly great song that married 60s girl groups with Blondie-esque New Wave, it was A-listed by Radio 1 and a surefire hit. But a distribution strike at her record label Stiff meant the vinyl never reached the shops.
A cover by Tracey Ullman did go top 10 in America, however, giving MacColl some cachet, which helped soften the fact MacColl’s 1981 debut album Desperate Character, released on her new label Polydor, didn’t capitalise on “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis”.
MacColl recorded a follow-up album, the synth-heavy Real, but Polydor lost interest and quietly dropped her without releasing it (Real eventually came out in 2023 as part of a career-spanning box set). “It’s like having a baby and then leaving it in a phone box,” was how MacColl later put it. She wouldn’t follow up Desperate Character for eight years, until 1989’s Kite.
“She never followed a hit with a hit,” Lillywhite says. While stage fright certainly negated her ability to build an audience – “I think that hampered her career somewhat, and I can’t reconcile that with the woman who would take control in the studio,” says Bragg – MacColl’s reputation for being difficult didn’t help in the male-heavy music industry. “She was the friendliest person you could meet,” Lillywhite says. “But she could cut you down with her sharp tongue. She didn’t suffer fools. And the sad thing is, if you are like that as a man, you’re tough. If you’re like that as a woman, there’s a possibility of being called a bitch.”
Performing with Shane McGowan (Photo: Brian Rasic/Getty)
Bragg first met MacColl when she came to his gig in Fulham in 1984. “I remember how open she was, how funny she was, just, gregarious,” he says. MacColl loved Bragg’s song “A New England” – “I was blown away by that” – and wanted to ask a favour. “She invited me round to her place and said if she cooked me a full English breakfast, we could write a new verse for her,” recalls Bragg. That’s exactly what happened, with a new gendered lyric. MacColl’s 1985 version was her biggest solo hit, reaching number seven. “It was incredible. She did me a huge, huge favour recording the song.”
“A New England” was the first time Lillywhite produced MacColl. They’d met in 1983 when Lillywhite was producing Simple Minds, and were married in 1984, having two sons. Over the next 10 years, she would sing on most of Lillywhite’s productions: everyone from The Rolling Stones to Happy Mondays. “She was my secret weapon as a producer,” Lillywhite says. “She loved doing it. It wasn’t like, ‘I’m gonna sound like Kirsty McColl.’ She was so good at doing the right thing on the right song.” None more so than “Fairytale of New York”, many people’s favourite Christmas song, where MacColl embodied one half of a warring couple ground down with resentment but bound in hope with rare charisma: the versatility in her voice, from forceful to tender resignation (“you took my dreams from me when I first found you”) perfectly counterbalances MacGowan’s punch-drunk poetry.
MacColl truly found her voice on 1989’s Kite, a brilliant album that even Euan had liked. “We had a playback with him,” says Lillywhite, “and at the end he said, ‘Well done Kirsty, that’s very good.’ That was the first time he’d ever really said anything supportive. And she was very happy that he liked it.” Many songs centred the female experience, particularly around the inadequacies of men: her frequent collaborator Mark Nevin once said you could sum up MacColl’s lyrics as such: “All blokes are gonna lie, cheat and let you down.”
“That wasn’t fashionable at the time,” Bragg says. Lillywhite adds: “The Spice Girls took the girl power thing obviously full on, but Kirsty was one of the first female empowerment type artists. Her lyrics were funny, but tinged with sadness as well.”
Her lyrics eviscerated the inadequacies of men (Photo: Patrick Ford/Redferns)
After 1991’s Electric Landlady – so named by Johnny Marr as a play on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, because Marr would often stay at MacColl’s Shepherd’s Bush flat – 1993’s Titanic Days was full of melancholic balladry that contained the beautiful “Soho Square”. Lillywhite says: “It was her divorce album. She was very sad.” The couple divorced in 1994, or as he puts it: “That’s when she told me to f**k off.” He wasn’t willing to give up the partying. “It was literally 10 years to the day, because of my lifestyle. All of a sudden she realised that I was not particularly nice to be with.”
They did end up back on friendly terms once Lillywhite got sober. But MacColl took a while to regroup, saying she would only release another record when she felt happy. In 2000, she released her final album Tropical Brainstorm, a brilliant pivot to Latin-inspired rhythmic pop she’d fallen for during a holiday to Cuba. “Kirsty was a great artist,” Lillywhite says. “She always wanted to change what she was doing.”
“She was in a good place,” Bragg says. “And she seemed to have got her mojo back. That album was just incredible. I was like, ‘Wow, you’re doing something completely and utterly new here. You’re not following the pack.’” It contained the superb “England 2 Colombia 0”, a vengeful evisceration of a man who took her on a date to watch the 1998 World Cup match in the pub, who it turned out was married with three kids. It wouldn’t be out of place on Lily Allen’s West End Girl.
Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan of The Pogues in 1987 (Photo: Tim Roney/Getty)
Her death in Cozumel, Mexico, where she was holidaying with her sons and her boyfriend, musician James Knight, was tragic beyond comprehension. MacColl was swimming when a speedboat owned by Mexican supermarket tycoon Guillermo González Nova entered at high speed an area restricted to watercraft. MacColl managed to push her 15-year-old son Jamie out of the path of the speedboat before the collision. It was, says Lillywhite, “a ridiculously random thing that makes you question the existence of any sort of God”.
Since she died, Bragg, in concert, always sings the third verse of “A New England” in tribute. “I always shout to the audience, ‘We’re going to sing a verse for Kirsty.’ And they all cheer. They love her.”
They both say Christmas can be bittersweet given it coincides with the anniversary of her death, and how strongly associated she is with the festive period thanks to “Fairytale of New York”. Lillywhite says: “Fairytale is probably her legacy, which is funny as we all think of her as a great songwriter. But her biggest hits were covers. The sad thing was that she didn’t have so many hits of her own writing.”
“I’d like people to focus on her own songs and what she did,” Bragg adds, “and the person that she was. Because she was great to be around.” Both he and Lillywhite independently say the same thing: “I’ll raise a glass for Kirsty over Christmas.”
‘Fairytale of New York (Live at Glasgow Barrowland 1987)’ Limited Edition Zoetrope 12” vinyl EP, by the Pogues, is out now
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