Kirsty MacColl was a reluctant pop star. She made only five albums in a career of more than two decades. She worked in a variety of styles and her most recent records were heavily influenced by her love of Cuban music, but in everything she did she brought a much needed dash of wit and urbanity to the art of popular song - leading U2’s Bono to call her “the Noel Coward of her generation”.
Though she was the daughter of the stern traditional folk-singer Ewan MacColl, she did not grow up with her father, who left her mother Jean soon after she was born. For years she denied that his strong musical personality had had any influence on her, but recently she paid him an indirect tribute: “I think I did learn something from him, which was that you can have a successful career as a songwriter regardless of pop fashion. If you’ve got good songs, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a crap haircut.”
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Dropping out of school, she signed to Stiff Records as a 17-year-old in 1978, when the label was in the vanguard of the punk and New Wave explosion. She nearly had a hit single the following year with the first self-written release They Don’t Know, but somehow missed out. It was later taken into the charts by Tracey Ullman’s inferior version.
She had to wait until 1981 for her first hit single with the memorably witty There’s a guy works down the chip shop swears he’s Elvis, a song that established her droll style. “Vitriol and misery have always been far easier to express in song,” she said some years later. “People seem to think that humour implies you’re not serious about the music, but I don’t buy that.”
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In 1984 she married the producer Steve Lilywhite, with whom she was to have two children. One of the first records he produced for her was a version of Billy Bragg’s A New England, a Top 20 hit in early 1985. There was demand for her as a backing singer, too, on records by the Rolling Stones, Simple Minds, Robert Plant, the Smiths, Talking Heads, Van Morrison and Morrissey. But it was a collaboration with Shane MacGowan and his band the Pogues, that produced her biggest hit, Fairytale of New York, which reached No 2 at Christmas 1987.
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She admitted to suffering from writer’s block for long periods, but professed herself untroubled by them and advised others that “if you’ve got nothing to say, it’s better just to shut up”. She also suffered acutely from stage fright, and for most of the 1980s she refused to perform.
Yet her stop-start career gathered new impetus with two well-received albums in quick succession around the turn of the decade, when she also returned to the stage to sing. Her 1989 album Kite included the hit singles Free World and Days (a version of the old Kinks song). Two years later Electric Landlady found her co-writing with Johnny Marr of the Smiths and Mark E. Nevin of Fairground Attraction.
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The album also included My Affair, a song recorded in New York with top Cuban session musicians. She described the experience as “the most fun I’d ever had in a recording studio”, and it established her future musical direction. She made her first visit to Cuba in 1992 and began taking lessons in Spanish. At her language classes she met a teacher who also gave her Portuguese lessons in return for lodgings in her spacious Ealing home.
When she and Lilywhite separated she first made what she called her “sad divorce album”, Titanic Days (1994), after which she made increasingly regular trips to Cuba, continuing her love affair with Latin music. “I was completely consumed by it because it was so outside my own upbringing and different to everything else you hear,” she later said.
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When Virgin Records released her greatest hits album Galore in 1995, it featured a picture of her in a Castro-style military cap lighting a huge Cuban cigar with an American dollar bill. Her name became a fixture at Cuban Solidarity Campaign benefits, and she returned from her regular visits to Havana with suitcases full of records. Her interest in Latin rhythms also soon extended to Brazil, which she visited.
These trips eventually led to her last album Tropical Brainstorm, released earlier this year. She toyed with the idea of working with Latin musicians and attempting to produce an authentic Cuban album in the vein of the Grammy-winning Buena Vista Social Club, but instead opted to fuse the salsa rhythms she had heard on her travels with her own typically quirky and very British style of songwriting. “It’s an Anglo-Latin hybrid pop record that reflects some of the things I love about Cuban and Brazilian music,” she said on its release in April.
In recent months she had been working on a six-part series on Cuban music which she was due to present for BBC Radio 2. When the programmes were finished at the beginning of December she took her children to Mexico for a two-week scuba-diving holiday. It was there that she was killed in an accident.
Kirsty MacColl, singer and songwriter, was born on October 10, 1959. She died in a boating accident in Mexico on December 18 aged 41.