Kirsty Mac Coll flies her ‘Kite’

Press, 26 July 1989, Page 26

Kirsty Mac Coll flies her ‘Kite’

ALAN JACKSON

meets a media-shy songwriter

She arrives straight from a doctor’s appointment with all the relish of one who must undergo an hour in the dentist’s chair. Kirsty MacCpll’s reticence can be partly blamed on a heavy cold, but it also has to do with her unease at the media process — what she calls “all the nonsense” — that accompanies her return to the pop arena with an excellent single, “Free World,” and the album “Kite.” “It takes up so much time. I could be at home demoing new songs.” In the past, her distaste for talking about herself has led journalists to swallow received wisdom about her. One popular misconception is that her parents are folk artists, Ewan Mac Coll and Peggy Seeger. Mac Coll is her father, but she was born to, and brought up by, his first wife, a dancer and choreographer. That makes redundant any visions of an Aransweatered upbringing, privileged in its musicality.

“I only saw him on Sundays, so I don’t think it was any big deal. I wasn’t interested in the sort of music he did, anyway. I liked pop, the Beach Boys, stuff the rest of the family would have looked down on as being trash.”

Her own career has been stop-start. She first came to public attention in 1979 with “They Don’t Know,” a single she wrote that would become a top 10 hit in Britain and America for Tracey Ullman.

Two years later, her song “There’s A Guy Works Down The Chipshop Swears He’s Elvis” was a big success here.

Silence followed, broken in 1985 by her verson of Billy Bragg’s "A New England,” which reached the top 10 on the day she went into labour with the first of two sons from her marriage to producer Steve Lillywhite. “I played the pop game for a while, but very badly. I tried to please

everybody and ended up pleasing nobody at all, least of all myself. I think I probably gave the impression of being pretty much a bimbo like everybody else.

“But I wrote most of my own stuff and had a strong idea of what I wanted the records to sound like — fairly guitar-orientated. I never wanted to do a two-synths-and-a-peaked-cap job.”

There followed three years during which she largely abandoned songwriting. “I had to wait until I was really angry. Musically, the songs on the album are quite up and melodic. They’re happy, but with bitter, twisted lyrics.” She gives a short laugh. “Yes, jolly little numbers, really, but with snarling attitudes.”

Growing older has given her a different perspective: “A lot of the things that worried me at 19 seem terribly petty now at 29. You’re more worried about the effect of politics on your life than about the latest boyfriend. It’s a bit more global.” “Free World” is a good example of her new concerns. Behind the rollercoaster guitars of a classic, jangly pop song lurks a lyric that, in spite of the much vaunted emergence of a women’s movement in British pop, could never have been written by a Julia Fordham or a Tanita Tikaram.

Citing such pop-taboo subjects as school closures and National Health Service cuts, it boasts an eloquent summation of contemporary greed: “Gotta take it, gotta grab it, gotta get it up and shag it in the face of this free world” — “but we changed it to ‘wag it’ for radio,” she says.

Elsewhere on “Kite," she casts a sharp eye at macho role players (“Don't Come The Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim") and the “personalities” who people shows like “Blankety Blank (15 Minutes).” 4

There’s neither a cliche nor a keyboard in sight. “I've always loved guitars, and anyway, you can’t look sexy behind a piano unless you’re Little Richard,” she says. Although her songs paint a bleak picture of Britain, she denies she is a cynic. “I don’t think, it’s a down record — it’s just realistic. I write about what I see around me, and I think that whenever you have a particularly repressive government you get more committed artists because they’ve actually got something to channel their creativity towards.

“The one thing we’re brilliant at right now is producing great comedians — it’s probably a reaction to being so bloody depressed.” With its resolutely guitar-based sound and barbed lyrics, “Kite” is a distinctly English record. It’s not surprising, then, that two of the songwriters Mac Coll most revers are Ray Davies and Michael Morrissey, both doyens (if from different eras) of this bittersweet, kitchen-sink realism.

“Kite” includes a cover of a Davies song, “Days.” She met him only once, but has had a little more contact with Morrissey, having worked with The Smiths. Former Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr cowrote and plays on two songs on the album.

If you get people you really admire taking an interest in your work, it spurs you on,” she says. “Johnny was always ringing up, saying ‘What are you up to?’ ‘Nothing.’ ‘Well, why not? Get out on the road, do something. Get off your arse.” That, in spite of what she recalls as an unhappy first tour in 1981, is what she plans to do next. “I used to listen to records all the time and write songs at school,” Mac Coll recalls of her teenage years. "And I always thought it must be great, wonderful, to do it for a living, it is.” London Observer