Member-only story
They Don’t Know Kirsty MacColl
Despite widespread critical acclaim, Kirsty MacColl never achieved commercial success commensurate with her incomparable voice and consummate songwriting skills.
Some assume that she drew musical inspiration from her father Ewan MacColl, the Scots folk singer best known for writing “Dirty Old Town” and “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.”
In fact, he played no meaningful role in his daughter’s early life, having abandoned the family soon after her birth yesterday in 1959.
“Everyone assumes that we lived like the Waltons, sitting around a campfire and playing acoustic guitars all day,” Kirsty said. “But I grew up alone with my mother, and I spent all my time alone in my bedroom listening to records.”
It started at age four, when she first heard the Beach Boys. Transfixed and transported, she wore out every single, deciphering the harmonies and teaching herself to sing every part.
Her first recitals took place in front of the television. During his variety show, when Andy Williams would sing, “Kirsty would take her violin out of the case and accompany him,” her mother remembers. “I would have a quiet laugh to myself, but she took it very seriously. Then she’d put the violin away until Andy Williams came out for another song, and out would come the violin.”
She grew up in Croydon, a brutal borough in South London. “I felt like an alien all the time,” Kirsty recalled. “I was quite scared at school, because it was a rough one and I’d insisted on going there. I kept thinking, ‘Boy, if I can only survive school. If I can only survive ‘til I’ve left home, everything will be all right.’ And it was.”
In 1978, she cut an EP as a backing vocalist with a punk band called the Drug Addix. Stiff Records rejected the band, but signed Kirsty because her voice blew them away.
Despite her prodigious talents and this early apparent break, she had a consistently star-crossed career.
For her debut single, Kirsty crafted “They Don’t Know,” a perfect distillation of defiant love in the style of ‘60s girl groups. It rose to…
