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Kirsty MacColl’s Voice Was Singular. A New Box Aims to Bring It Wider
The singer-songwriter, who died in 2000, is best known for duetting on “Fairytale of New York.” But in an unusual career, she also made her mark behind the scenes.
During a fitful 20-year solo career, the singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl released just five full-length albums, achieving a modicum of success in her native England, and little notice in America. Yet MacColl — who died at 41 in 2000 — is omnipresent each holiday season: It’s her voice offering tart rejoinders to Shane MacGowan in the Pogues’ cockeyed Christmas anthem “Fairytale of New York.”
But the woman with the soaring alto, whom Bono once called “the Noelle Coward of her generation,” was far more than her best-known work. Last week, Universal released “See That Girl: 1979-2000,” an eight-disc boxed set with 161 tracks that follows MacColl’s musical journey — which included an attempt at teen pop stardom, years of accomplished studio craft and global musical exploration.
Those who knew her best, including the folk-punk musician Billy Bragg, have long extolled MacColl’s fierce wit, spiky charisma and gift for sharp-detailed songwriting. “It was all about attitude with Kirsty,” Bragg said in an interview. “Her personality came across so strongly in the songs.”
But her career was sporadic and often secondary to her family obligations, and her untimely passing precluded the usual late-career reappraisal and appreciation. “See That Girl” not only recovers many of MacColl’s lost recordings, but puts her in conversation with bold female singer-songwriters of today who perhaps unknowingly bear her influence.
“Her songs were brilliant, funny, they broke your heart, had wonderful chords and these magnificent bridges — and they were about girls,” said the actress and singer Tracey Ullman who, 40 years ago, scored an international hit with MacColl’s grand pop proclamation “They Don’t Know.” “I played that song at my wedding. I played it at my husband’s memorial service. It’s a song you can carry with you through your entire life,” she added. “Kirsty wrote those kinds of songs.”
Beyond the Black Eyed Dog: Why Nick Drake Deserves more than ‘Indiefication’
On the fiftieth anniversary of Nick Drake’s death, Rob Chapman argues that his legacy has been let down by a culture that allows his mental health struggles to overshadow his art, and that turns his songs into fodder for wellness-adjacent twee whimsy
By Bob Chapman
50 years ago, in the early hours of 25 November 1974, Nick Drake died by suicide, a sad anniversary will no doubt be commemorated extensively in media new and old. Those who knew Drake and musicians who were touched or influenced by his music will be solicited for a quote. Drake ‘experts’ will file their 1,500 words and they will all say pretty much the same thing. It will be by and large a tick box exercise in repeating what by now is a well-established party line in which his reclusiveness will cast an all-encompassing pall over his life and work. Someone will mention how they were once in a room with Drake, and he said nothing. There will be general agreement about the beauty of those three Island albums. And that will be it. No new light will be cast. There will be no fresh insight into the music.
That’s the trouble with the Drake story. Everything written about him has become predictable and terribly on message. Devotees seem to have settled for a fixed narrative which freeze frames the legacy and preserves the musical output in aspic. With Drake, the received wisdom now comes wrapped in a certain ‘don’t touch’ preciousness that does him, the flesh and blood artist, a considerable disservice. It leaves little room for critical manoeuvre or original interpretation.
When I read these set in stone eulogies I ask myself, where is any sense of the ambitious young artist who honed his guitar skills to perfection, not by osmosis but by sheer perseverance and graft? Where is the shrewdly career-minded musician who actively sought out record company attention and approval? Where is the proactive young man who offered John Cale guidance on what to play on ‘Northern Sky’ and ‘Fly’? Where is the innovator who, as Joe Boyd once observed, sat in the studio prior to recording ‘Cello Song’ on his debut album and ran obsessively through the drone tones of that instrument until he heard what he wanted, something that Boyd always regretted not taping? Where is the fledgling songwriter who took as lyrical inspiration for Bryter Layter’s ‘One of These Things First’, not some wistful folkie epistle about self-identity but Smokey Robinson’s ‘The Way You Do The Things You Do’? And where is the normal young man who, as Richard Morton Jack’s 2023 Drake biography notes, wrote dreadful and earnest teenage poetry like the rest of us. (Sample line. “Forced, jerked rhythms and sweating eyes/Hysterical enjoyment and unnatural benevolence/How can man so delude himself?”)
I quite like this version of Nick Drake.
Emmett Miller – The Vaudeville Star Who Helped Shape Country Music
By Charles Wolfe
There are dozens of unsung heroes in the annals of country music; some are instrumentalists, like the legendary Georgia fiddler Joe Lee, who introduced the “long bow” style to greats like Clayton McMichen; some are songwriters, like the gospel singer Grady Cole, who wrote Tramp on the Street; others were promoters and radio personalities like the late Eddie Hill, who helped introduce the music of the Louvin Brothers to a wide audience. But one of the most unsung, and one of the most mysterious, was a remarkable blackface comedian and singer named Emmett Miller. He flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, made a handful of records and left an indelible impression on several generations of major country singers.
How major? Try Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan, The Callahan Brothers, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard. Hank Williams had Miller’s old 78s in his personal record collection; Merle Haggard dedicated his I Love Dixie Blues album to Miller. What kind of musician could inspire such a wide variety of imitators? Miller’s story is as fascinating as his music.