Angela McCluskey was a film publicist in London when her producer friend Alison Owen called in distress. Owen’s husband, the actor Keith Allen, had walked out days before she was due to start filming the movie Hear My Song (1991) in Dublin and she needed help with her three young children, including Lily Allen, the future singer-songwriter and actress.
“Angela swooped in, picked me up and came to stay with me for four months at Castletown House [in Co Kildare],” Owen recalled. “She transformed the dusty old wing of the stately home by stapling swathes of silk and old bits of velvet to the furniture, so it looked like a French bordello. We had soirées in the ballroom with Marianne Faithfull, who was living down the drive.”
By way of thanks Owen flew McCluskey to Los Angeles for the film’s premiere. “I remember getting dragged there, I really did not want to go,” McCluskey said, but within three days she had vowed not to leave. “The thing about America is, instead of saying I’m in publicity, I’d say I’m a singer,” she recalled. “They’d say, ‘Sing then’ and before you know it, I’m in a band.”
By February 1992 the bluesy Glaswegian was being billed by LA Weekly as the “British singing sensation”. Another lucky break came when she was chatting to the producer Michael Siegel in a Santa Monica café. He had just bought the film rights to several Roald Dahl stories, was about to move house and needed an interior designer. “Without missing a beat, I said, ‘I’ll do it’,” she said.
By night she was enjoying jam sessions with musicians including her future husband, the composer Paul Cantelon, at Café Beckett, an Irish pub in Los Angeles. One customer asked them to play at a memorial event for a friend who had died but needed their name for the posters: “I said we don’t have a name, we’re not a band, but then I started looking through the songbook and I saw the song, Wild Colonial Boy, and I said, ‘We’re the Wild Colonials’.”
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Their take on Celtic folk-rock was heard at Molly Malone’s in Los Angeles, while a Tuesday night residency at Café Largo produced a contract with DGC Records. Albums such as Fruit of Life (1994) and This Can’t Be Life (1996) followed. Through gigs at the Troubadour they formed friendships with Winona Ryder, Jennifer Aniston “and this kid Rufus Wainwright”.
The down-to-earth McCluskey was soon singing with Lisa-Marie Presley (obituary, January 13, 2023) and became godmother to Presley’s daughter Riley Keough. In the 1990s McCluskey and Cantelon lived in an apartment owned by Riley’s father Danny, throwing parties for guests including Keanu Reeves, Elizabeth Hurley and Pierce Brosnan.
The friendship with Owen and Lily Allen continued. “Years later when Lily was in New York working with Mark Ronson, her record company had booked her into the Mercer Hotel, but the only place she wanted to be was on Angela’s couch,” Owen recalled.
Angela McCluskey was born in the Dennistoun area of Glasgow in 1960. At night she was often roused by her mother to sing her party piece If I Ruled the World in her pyjamas for late-night guests. Friends inquiring about her backstory typically received the reply: “Well, darling, I just sing because when I was young, I found out that I had this wee voice, I don’t know where the f*** I got it from.”
She was educated at Our Lady and St Francis School and in her teens attended drama classes. Moving to London in 1985 she was a cocktail waitress, joined Channel 4 as a publicist and later worked in the video department of EMI Records.
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McCluskey was having dinner with Hugh Grant at the Star of India restaurant in South Kensington in 1989 when she noticed Cantelon playing the piano and was smitten. During his break she casually wandered over pretending to be French. He immediately rumbled her, but they became an item and were married in Las Vegas in 1993. Cantelon survives her.
After DGC Records was bought out by Seagram in 1998, the Wild Colonials were put on the back burner and McCluskey went to work in Paris with the French electronic band Télépopmusik, whose chain-smoking she found suffocating. “I’d come in every night to warm up and I’d be like, ‘Just breathe, another day, just breathe’,” she said.
She collaborated with Cyndi Lauper, appeared at Carnegie Hall and released her own albums starting with the heartbreaking The Things We Do (2004). She also wrote and performed Catch a Falling Star (2014), a show about her journey from a Glasgow tenement to New York via Los Angeles including a brief but extraordinary encounter with Nina Simone.
Yet McCluskey had no desire for fame: “I had years and years of looking after artists. It was fun, but I saw how boring their life was.”
Angela McCluskey, publicist and singer-songwriter, was born on February 28, 1960. She died following surgery for an arterial tear on March 14, 2024, aged 64
