Kirsty MacColl

Track	Album
There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop…	Desperate Character
Innocence	Kite
Fifteen Minutes	Kite
You And Me Baby	Kite
My Affair	Electric Landlady
Walking Down Madison	Electric Landlady
Soho Square	Titanic Days
Angel	Titanic Days
In These Shoes?	Tropical Brainstorm
England 2 Colombia 0	Tropical Brainstorm

Kirsty MacColl Kite

Kirsty MacColl playlist

Kirsty MacColl

Contributor: Mike Press

On one of the benches that ring London’s Soho Square is a small metal plaque, easy to overlook unless you know its significance. It bears the lyrics of a song: “One day I’ll be waiting there / No empty bench in Soho Square.” The words belong to Kirsty MacColl, and every year on October 10th, her birthday, fans from around the world gather in her honour. They cluster around the bench, some laying flowers, others singing her songs, their voices weaving through the trees like a breeze. This is their tribute – an annual celebration of the music and memory of one of Britain’s most brilliant singers and songwriters.

Soho Square is a tender and bittersweet ballad capturing themes of love, loss, and the passage of time. She’s been stood up on her birthday, let down again by her lover yet still hanging on to the enduring power of love. The music showcases MacColl’s flawless melodic craft – a warm, lilting melody that complements the song’s emotional depth. And, of course, there’s her distinctive voice that carries the song beautifully in layered harmonies.

If this was Desert Island Discs, and I had one record to save from the waves, then this is it. Which is not to say that I’d be happy to see the other nine swept away. It’s not as witty as some, it doesn’t deliver the sharp barbs of others, or the complex wordplay of a few. No. It’s just a simply beautiful song: sad, resigned, yet at the same time resilient and still believing in love. It showcases her gift for storytelling, blending sharp lyrical insight with heartfelt emotion. The song stands out as a highlight of her third studio album, Titanic Days (1993), an album often regarded as one of her most introspective works. Its appeal reflects her knack for capturing human experience in a way that feels both specific and timeless, making it a cornerstone of her legacy as a songwriter and performer. In the song, and for her fans today, Soho Square is a place for remembering and longing.

I came to Kirsty MacColl relatively late, a decade into her recording career that tragically only had one more decade to go. In 1989, a friend suggested I buy Kite, what was then her new album. The album stood apart from the prevailing musical trends of the time – this was the year of the Stone Roses, Fine Young Cannibals, Soul II Soul, the so-called ‘second summer of love’. But I adored it. I was brought up with the Great American Songbook and the Beatles, so to me it sounded like a hip, acerbic Ira Gershwin had written lyrics for a rejuvenated Paul McCartney. But there was a raw honesty and melancholy in both the lyrics and the voice that made the album utterly unique.

The story of Kirsty MacColl too often gets lost in aspects of her life that overshadow her extraordinary talent and her remarkable contribution to our musical culture. I’m going to pick a path through her contribution with the help of just ten of her songs. Though very much a performer and writer of her generation, with a post-punk sensibility and an impressive command of diverse musical styles, MacColl also shares qualities with an older era of songwriters. Her gift for crafting memorable melodies, her sharp wit, inventive wordplay and her ability to collide humour and pathos within her storytelling, places her alongside Noel Coward and Cole Porter.

As Billy Bragg aptly put it: “She writes like a playwright, sings like an angel.” David Byrne echoes this, describing her as “the voice of an angel, from a mind and heart inflamed by Thatcher’s England”. Beneath the beauty of her voice lies a simmering anger, one that often surfaces in her songs to challenge, awaken, and provoke the listener. Her songs demand your attention. Kirsty herself described her songs as “happy and melodic but with bitter, twisted lyrics – jolly little numbers with snarling attitudes”.

Born in 1959 and raised in Croydon, South London, it was her older brother’s record collection – especially the Beach Boys – that may have given her perfect pitch and a rare ability to nail harmony vocals on the first take. Her talents as a vocal arranger were not only inspired by Brian Wilson but also comparable to his. She vividly recalled hearing her brother’s copy of Good Vibrations when she was just seven years old: “I played it so much he eventually said, ‘Have it.’ I spent about twelve hours a day playing it, working out all the different parts and harmonies.”

In June 1979, just one month after Margaret Thatcher came to power, Kirsty released her debut single, They Don’t Know, on the Stiff label. The song reached number two on the UK airplay chart, but a strike by the distributors prevented it from charting officially. Written when she was only seventeen, the song’s catchy pop melody cleverly disguised its emotional depth, exploring themes of being misunderstood in love. Although it would later become a chart-topping hit, it wasn’t by her.

There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis was her first hit in 1981. After leaving Stiff, Kirsty signed with Polydor, and her first release on the label climbed to 14 in the UK singles chart. The song showcased her humour and storytelling, touching on themes she would revisit throughout her career – deception, self-delusion, and the unreliability of men. Two years later, Polydor dropped her from their roster.

I’m going to fast forward in our story to the very end. Don’t worry we’ll return to the early 1980s shortly. Her first hit in 1981 takes us into a chip shop to tell us that men are liars. From her final album released in 2000, England 2 Colombia 0 takes us into a pub to tell us exactly the same thing – but in a totally different way. It’s a storytelling gem of a song that blends wry humour, melancholy, and social observation with a light, melodic delivery.

These songs are two decades apart but demonstrate the remarkable leap she made in her songwriting craft, and perhaps reflects something of her own personal confidence. The song tells the story of a woman discovering her partner’s infidelity. It’s a song grounded in the mundane details of life and provides just enough detail to take us into the pub with her to watch the football match. Here, national pride, masculinity, and competitiveness are woven together in a commentary on relationships.

To an upbeat rhythm, breezy latin arrangement and a catchy melody, she variously describes the man as a serial liar, a bastard and a lying git, lyrics which are delivered with conversational ease, as though she is recounting the story to a friend. But while the betrayal and hurt is well expressed, she maintains a sense of agency and self-awareness. She’s dumping the bastard and moving on.

Her experience of being let down, betrayed and dumped by the music industry, and her resilience no doubt contributed to her songcraft. Talking of which, let’s return to the 1980s.

She returned to Stiff, releasing a series of unsuccessful singles, while Tracey Ullman’s cover of They Don’t Know became a top ten hit in both the UK and the US. In 1985, MacColl herself scored a UK top ten hit with her version of Billy Bragg’s A New England. It appeared that the recognition her talents deserved was finally within reach. But just months later, Stiff Records went bankrupt. Under insolvency law, she could only record as a solo artist if someone bought her contract from the official receiver. Nobody did.

Yet the hours spent at seven years old mastering the harmonies to Good Vibrations paid off. Although she was prevented from recording her own songs, she became an in-demand backing vocalist for artists like Simple Minds, Talking Heads, the Rolling Stones, the Smiths, Happy Mondays, Big Country. During this time, she recorded what is perhaps her most famous vocal performance – a role she only landed after both Chrissie Hynde and Suzi Quatro were unavailable. Kirsty MacColl became the female voice on the Pogues’ iconic Christmas song Fairytale Of New York. The song has now charted in the UK Top 20 twenty times and is the fifth most-charted song of all time. According to Shane MacGowan “she could make a song her own and she made Fairytale her own”.

With the legal issues surrounding Stiff Records resolved, Virgin signed MacColl to a two-album deal, which she approached with a fierce sense of determination: “With ‘Kite’, I felt I had to prove that I wasn’t this bimbo girl-next-door I’d been portrayed as. That had hung around my neck like a fucking albatross for so long, and I wanted to make the point that, yes, I can write a fucking song, pal!”

There’s twelve songs on Kite. Any ten of them would have worked for this Toppermost. It’s an extraordinary album, showcasing remarkable songwriting and performance. Beautiful and emotionally resonant, the songs touched on social commentary, the position of women in the music industry, and the complexities of relationships. As in all her work, MacColl’s mastery of melody, harmony, and lyrical inventiveness shone through. Pete Glenister, her collaborator on the album, described how her songs could “break your heart with something wistful, then make you laugh with her wit”.

Glenister is the co-writer of Innocence, the song that opens the album. There’s a Beatles-like bounce, melody and overall feel to the track with jangly guitars that sound not unlike Johnny Marr. Surprisingly it’s one of the few songs on Kite that he doesn’t contribute his jangly guitars to. It’s a song with bite. It’s about betrayal, deceit, self-awareness, and people who project false personas or manipulate others while claiming innocence. Yes, it’s a song about the music industry.

Fifteen Minutes, with its upbeat tempo and sardonic lyrics, critiques the fleeting nature of fame and the superficiality of celebrity culture. MacColl takes us into a world of ambition, self-delusion, and our insatiable appetite for glamour and fame. Again, her insights into the music industry feed her songwriting.

By way of contrast, You And Me Baby is an achingly beautiful break-up song about enduring love and companionship, delivered with warmth. Her rich multi-layered harmonies, that would make Brian Wilson proud, are much in evidence on this song, as they are across the whole album. According to the song’s co-writer, Johnny Marr, her expertise was melody, lyrics and harmony, and an openness to inspiration: “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. You And Me Baby was written like that.”

For an album of such brilliance, the reviews in Melody Maker, Sounds, and NME provided more measured praise calling it “thoughtful and mature”, “charming rather than classy”, with “fine tunes about life and love” and “pleasantly down to earth.” It’s worth noting that all the reviewers were men. While the album didn’t break into the top 20, her cover of the Ray Davies song Days was a hit.

Glenister later remarked on the sexism MacColl faced: “She was always deemed difficult, whereas if she’d been a bloke, they’d have just said, ‘Yeah, he knows what he wants’. That was the real difference. It was amazing how sexist it was, particularly in regard to Kirsty. She would get a record deal and then get dropped just because she had a view.”

Electric Landlady (1991) marked Kirsty MacColl’s second and final album for Virgin Records. Like its predecessor, it showcases her signature blend of stylistic diversity and sharp, lyrical brilliance. But while Kite was driven by a desire to show that she can “write a fucking song, pal”, with that now proven, she adopted a creative process that was deeply collaborative, enriched by partnerships with musicians like Johnny Marr, whose contributions were central to her distinctive sound. Throughout her career, collaboration wasn’t just a feature but a driving force, allowing her to shape eclectic influences into something uniquely her own. There are many standout songs on the album, but we will concentrate on two of them.

Like You And Me Baby, My Affair was a breakup song, but of a very different character. The song begins with teenage lust, being caught by parents, and a full and frank conversation with them about boundaries. The lust continues into the early stages of marriage which, very swiftly, hits the rocks of her husband’s infidelity, but with no moist eye in sight she asserts her right to sleep with whomever she chooses, and sends him packing. She dances off into the sunset accompanied by the most infectious Latin dance rhythm. As she said of the recording of the song, “That track I think was the most exciting, the happiest experience in my life, really.” So let us briefly discover why.

Working with Johnny Marr, she had learned how Morrissey and Marr wrote together – Marr recorded an instrumental demo that he sent on a cassette to Morrissey who then sang over the top of it. She adopted this approach, which was new to her, in a collaboration with Mark E. Nevin, of Fairground Attraction. She took his demo with her added vocals over to New York to record at the Electric Ladyland studio (see what she did there?). Having worked with David Byrne on his Rei Momo album, and determined to explore more Cuban-inspired music in her work, she brought some of Rei Momo musicians into the studio, recorded live to create a brilliantly infectious latin dance song with her trademark witty storytelling.

The album’s standout single, Walking Down Madison, gave MacColl her first U.S. hit, pairing infectious melodies with a piercing social commentary. The song vividly contrasts the extremes of wealth and poverty in New York City, capturing the inequality she observed with unsettling clarity. True to her style, MacColl delivered biting critique wrapped in catchy hooks and a pulsing beat – making her message both accessible and unforgettable. The track, co-written with Marr just one week after his departure from the Smiths, exemplifies the alchemy of their partnership, merging his jangly guitar sensibilities with her sharp lyrical wit.

Despite its merits, the album was met with lukewarm reviews from critics at NME and Melody Maker. Steve Lamacq described it as “an adult but very confused record” and it achieved only modest sales. Within months, Virgin was sold to EMI, and her new label dropped her.

Her 1993 album, Titanic Days, was, in her words, created “back to front”. Without a contract, she recorded the album at her own expense, writing songs, performing them live, and ‘knocking them into shape’ before recording them in her home studio. ZTT declined to sign her but agreed to release the album as a one-off.

Titanic Days captures a traumatic period in MacColl’s life. Her marriage to producer Steve Lillywhite, with whom she had two children, was falling apart, leaving her to navigate single motherhood while maintaining her career. Jude Rogers, who wrote the sleeve notes for the recent MacColl box set, describes how, despite the personal turmoil, the album “Still swirls with some of her most beautiful songs. Soho Square and Last Day Of Summer are studies in deep melancholy; Big Boy On A Saturday Night shows Kirsty’s raging power; and the soft house beats of Angel and Just Woke Up show how easily she could absorb the sounds of the times.”

Angel is a song that shares with Soho Square the same sense of change and a break from the past while embracing hope for the future and an underlying resilience. MacColl herself described it as a “euphoric song … a feeling of being protected”. It’s a song that has many dance remixes.

Describing her 2000 album Tropical Brainstorm, MacColl said “Whenever I go into a studio, I always operate on the principle that I might get hit by a bus tomorrow. I’d hate the obituaries to read, ‘And her last album was her not-very-good album’.” It was nine months after the release of Tropical Brainstorm that she was killed by a powerboat in Mexico in December 2000, and the album is considered her finest.

During the seven years since Titanic Days a writer’s block, followed by increasing time in Brazil and Cuba, and a new relationship had led her to consider leaving music altogether to become a teacher in South America. As it was, a resurgence of creativity took her back into the studio. The album sparkles and sizzles with her love of Latin music, to which she brings her own unique singing style and songwriting.

Themes of romance and desire are tackled with her biting wit and humour, exhibiting far less of the bleakness heard on Titanic Days. Indeed, in the song Alegria we hear her “filling my senses with happiness and joy”. There’s real joy, along with a few other emotions, in England 2 Colombia 0 which we described earlier on. But it’s the song In These Shoes? where we hear a joyous exuberance. The song sees the protagonist as a woman who encounters various men trying to persuade her to join them in adventures, but she dismisses their advances with humour and a sense of self-determination. Her refusal to conform to their desires is both comical and empowering.

There’s a confidence and musical brilliance in evidence on the album, suggesting new departures for her songwriting. Despite Tropical Brainstorm’s commercial success, the label V2 dropped her just prior to her death.

Too often, the stories of women in music are reduced to two extremes: trivia or tragedy. While there are exceptions, this narrow lens frequently overshadows their artistic contributions, creative agency, and broader cultural impact.

The story of Kirsty MacColl is often filtered through such a lens, focusing on her tragic death, her relationships with her famous father and even more famous husband and her stage fright. Musically, she’s known for the chart topper she wrote for Tracy Ullman, her hit of Ray Davies’ Days and the Pogues’ Christmas hit. But these are not the reasons why, every October, her fans gather in Soho Square to celebrate her life and legacy.

They meet under the trees because Kirsty MacColl was one of the greatest songwriters of her generation. Her fans come together to honour her artistry, her resilience, and her unmistakably fearless voice. She had a unique ability to weave humour, wit, and vulnerability into her songs. Musically, she pushed beyond the boundaries of post-punk, blending it with other genres – most notably Latin music – while always maintaining her distinct voice. She took creative control over her work and her career, asserting her artistic integrity in an industry that too often sidelined women. Kirsty MacColl carved out her own space, refusing to be confined by others’ expectations.

So next time you find yourself in Soho Square, sit for a moment on that bench beneath the trees, listen to her songs, and remember the remarkable woman who defied convention – in music and in life.

Kirsty MacColl bench
Memorial bench, Soho Square – Photo: Mike Press