‘She never pandered to fashion’: why Kirsty MacColl’s vivid pop career was no fairytale
In 1979, a young guitarist and songwriter called Mark Nevin was trying to put together a jokey soul covers band called Gina and the Tonics. A teenage Kirsty MacColl turned up to the first rehearsal, announced that what they were doing was “a waste of time” and suggested that Nevin should play guitar on some of her own songs. “So,” laughs Nevin, “we ended up in a studio in Islington that smelled so bad that your clothes stank of it for week afterwards, recording her demos.”
It is a very Kirsty MacColl story in that it involves straight talking – “Kirsty was opinionated, she didn’t take any shit,” says her ex-husband, the producer Steve Lillywhite – and people being dazzled by her songwriting talent. Among what she told Nevin were “teen ballads” lurked They Don’t Know, apparently written when she was 16, and evidence of a prodigious gift: three minutes of dazzlingly perfect pop, filled with yearning and haunted
