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Kirsty MacColl (October 10, 1959 - December 18, 2000), the daughter of folk singer Ewan MacColl and dancer Jean Newlove, was a British pop singer-songwriter, who died tragically while saving her son's life.
Her initial career with Stiff Records was uneventful and patchy to say the least. Her debut single "They Don't Know", released in 1979, was an airplay hit but never reached the shops due to a distributors' strike. After another single, "You Caught Me Out" failed to chart, MacColl felt she lacked Stiff's full backing and moved to Polydor Records in 1981.
She had a UK Top 20 hit with the witty yet meaningful "There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis", but again lasting success failed to materialise and in 1983 she returned to Stiff. Pop singles such as "Terry" and "He's On the Beach" went nowhere, but a cover of Billy Bragg's "A New England" in 1985 got to Number 7 in the UK charts. This included two extra verses specially written by Bragg for MacColl, and caused sniggering when she released it, as she had to sing the line you put me on the Pill while heavily pregnant.
Her most famous writing credit was with Tracey Ullman's version of "They Don't Know" which, helped by a video guest-starring Paul McCartney, reached Number 2 in the UK in 1983; it was also Ullman's only Top 40 hit in North America.
MacColl's humorous pop lyrics were often lost on the British public. Her cause was not helped by severe stage fright, which first struck during her early tours and which she never truly overcame. She was also a fiercely proud family woman, and spent long periods away from work to care for her children.
Her talents meant she was rarely short of session work as a backing vocalist, and she frequently sang on records produced or engineered by her husband, Steve Lillywhite, including tracks for The Smiths, Van Morrison and Talking Heads, amongst others. (The couple later divorced.)
Kirsty re-emerged in the British charts in December 1987, reaching Number 2 with The Pogues on "Fairytale Of New York", a duet with Shane MacGowan. She then bounced back as a songwriter and artist of substance, with the sublime Kite LP in 1989, widely praised by critics and featuring David Gilmour and Johnny Marr. She continued to write, releasing the album Electric Landlady, including her most successful chart hit in North America, "Walking Down Madison", in 1991.
Titanic Days, inspired by her divorce from Lillywhite, followed in 1994, and the world music-inspired (particularly Cuban and other Latin American forms) Tropical Brainstorm, often described as her finest work, was released in 2000.
On December 18, 2000, while swimming in a restricted diving area with her family on a holiday in Cozumel, she was killed in a collision with a powerboat while managing to drag her son out of its path. The boat was owned by Mexican supermarket millionaire Guillermo Gonzalez Nova, who was on board with several members of his family. A boathand, Jose Cen Yam, claimed to have been driving the boat and was found guilty of culpable homicide and, under Mexican law, allowed to pay a fine of 1034 pesos (about US$90) in lieu of a prison sentence of that many days. However, eyewitnesses contradict Cen Yam's claim to have been driving and also Gonzalez Nova's claim that the boat was travelling at a speed of only one knot. MacColl's family are campaigning for a judicial review into the events surrounding her death.
Since MacColl's death, Billy Bragg has always included "her" extra verses when performing "A New England".
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