Singer-songwriters can definitely help us by holding up a mirror to our lives and helping us articulate our emotions, and by making us realize that We Are Not Alone In This. But I think the very best thing they can do is, through their work, and sometimes their actions in the world, to act on us as an internal agent of change to bring us around to our better selves.

After learning of her mind-blowingly needless death when struck by a powerboat off the coast of the Mexican holiday island of Cozumel on December 18, 2000, I was surprised to read that British singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl had struggled with stage fright for years. When I saw her at the Paradise nightclub in Boston on a Sunday night in March 1995, she was easy with her modest contingent of local supporters. Only about a hundred people had bothered to show up, but Kirsty appeared in good spirits, teasing us from the stage as "you Sunday night rockers, you," and giving us a generous sampling of the varied gems that belonged to her; everyone loved the show and was glad they'd come. This woman is our little secret, we thought; what a shame the world doesn't know.

Before the second and last encore, Kirsty hinted that an appropriate tune to close out the evening would be something soft, gentle, filled with reverie. Then she and the band slammed into "I Wanna Be Sedated," loud and even faster than the original. It was one of those moments when the hairs stand up on the back of your neck and you realize: oh, yeah, she's one of us. I went home that night with a big grin plastered to my face.

After her tour Kirsty returned to England and other projects, and the following year I packed up and moved to Slovenia, leaving the few CDs of hers I owned back in storage stateside. Until the moment I learned of her death, I'd hardly even given a thought to her for years. So I was completely unprepared for the sense of real grief and profound loss that washed over me, feelings unlike any others I've ever had on the death of anyone else I hadn't known firsthand. For over a week, I thought of little else. I even felt guilty that I hadn't paid closer attention to her before her death. Thank God, I thought, I'd had the sense to see her perform that one time, which would now be the only time.

Seeking like-minded souls, I signed onto an Internet bulletin board group of MacColl fans, all of whom were trying to cope and pay tribute in their own ways. After learning there would be a memorial service in London on January 20, I decided I had to be there - to bear witness, as an act of solidarity for an artist I respected. I wasn't alone. (Click here to read my account of the service, published in the Boston Phoenix on January 26, 2001.)

I couldn't pretend to journalistic objectivity for this assignment, and didn't bother trying. Kirsty was close to my age, and we shared some other things besides that and a passion for music: a youthful fascination with punk rock as a way out and possible salvation; a love of traveling, especially to warm climates, and finding alternatives to urban stress; insatiable curiosity about new things; distrust of the powers that be and middle-class suburban values; an oft-employed and often caustic sense of humor; a late-blooming interest in foreign countries and languages (Kirsty made many trips to Cuba, immersing herself in the local music and culture before it was fashionable). Years before Kirsty did, I'd even swum in the waters off Cozumel, where she met her end.

At my age, I've experienced the deaths of enough family members to hold me for awhile, as well as those of numerous more-or-less casual acquaintances, though not, happily, any real friends to date. I scoff at media-manufactured grief for the kinds of celebrities whose deaths engender People magazine special issues. But Kirsty was...different.

Beginning in her teens when she wrote and recorded "They Don't Know," which later became a top-ten hit for Tracey Ullman in both England in the USA (though Kirsty's original 1979 recording is superior), Kirsty, especially from her 1989 album Kite forward, excelled as a songwriter at putting subversive messages in candy-coated shells, with the sensibility of a razor-sharp essayist. Only Kirsty wrote lines like "I'm just a lonely alcoholic teenager in love," or penned a song from the point of view of a woman feeling guilty about stealing her best friend's boyfriend ("Caroline"), or of a singer stalking one of her errant fans ("Treachery"). One of her best - and most overtly political - songs, 1991's "Walking Down Madison," co-written with the Smiths' Johnny Marr, is a taut urban dance number positing that "From the sharks in the penthouse to the rats in the basement...it's not that far." Her ever-present barbed humor, and total lack of self-righteousness and self-importance, kept her from didacticism.

Kirsty's clear, fine-milled voice, which she could turn edgy, dreamy or matter-of-fact as the song required, was equally at home inhabiting smoky '40s-style ballads, Brit-Latin hybrids, Brill Building pop and English pub rock, interpreting the Smiths, or matching the Pogues on tour, shot for shot ("Fairytale of New York," her 1987 vocal slugfest with Shane MacGowan, has become a welcome alternative Christmas standard in Europe and some outposts of the USA). After her death, Tim de Lisle of the British paper The Mail on Sunday (to which she had contributed occasional book and music reviews) wrote that Kirsty was one of only three people in the entire history of rock music to consistently combine "being funny while being wise and touching," Randy Newman and later-period Leonard Cohen being the others. Kirsty was the only Brit and only woman on the list; also, you could add, the easiest to listen to.

The bad luck she encountered throughout her career, littered with should've-been-hits and shabby treatment by various labels, didn't help the spells of depression she frequently experienced until a few years ago; nor did the 1994 breakup of her decade-old marriage to producer Steve Lillywhite, out of which period emerged a brooding minor masterpiece, Titanic Days. From there, it was a long six years to her next full-length collection of new material. In the interim, while raising her boys, she learned Spanish and Portuguese, traveled repeatedly to Cuba and Brazil, and resolved that her next album would be upbeat.

She delivered on her resolution. The cover of the UK release of Tropical Brainstorm (only issued in the US posthumously) shows a flying fish leaping out of a turquoise sea - an eerie presentiment and allegory of her death. The subtext of the record, which, although liberally peppered with Spanish lyrics and marinated in Latin rhythms, remains purely MacColl, is how a city girl learns to loosen up and enjoy life, reveling in hedonism and her own sexuality, while retaining her moral compass, sense of humor and sense of self. Her career was on the rebound, she had a new romance, and it was likely that she was as happy, engaged and plugged into life as she'd ever been. Then she was gone.

There are some things that are too sad for words, and certainly flippant remarks. One of these was Kirsty's death. As I've said, I couldn't believe how deeply I cared, or was affected. It hit me that I should have been paying closer attention these past few years, that perhaps Kirsty's work, and life, contained elements I could learn from. And that perhaps they even contained the key to a dilemma that had troubled me for years.

I've figured out at least this much: For me, Kirsty represents a model of how a former punk, or sympathizer, or rebel in general, can grow older without becoming corrupt, or embarrassing, or losing one's bite; but on the contrary, grow and improve as a person, become whole, who they were meant to be from the start. In her words (in an interview she gave in 1991), "Life's a bitch, but that doesn't mean we have to play it as a dirge." Kirsty also knew that the work, not society's window dressing, is the important thing.

Most journalists, erstwhile critics certainly included, like to think of themselves as seen-it-all cynics, but the circumstances of Kirsty's death seem to have pierced the armor of a great many of the jaded ones. Which is a good thing; everyone needs to be reminded of their humanity now and again. Especially the sophisticated cynics. I think they were genuinely sorry partly because they saw something of themselves in Kirsty, but also recognized that there was more to her than simply a talent for expressing cynicism cleverly.

After she died, I also realized anew the preciousness of life and the slender threads we all hang our dreams on. Many more of us faced up to this truth after the September attacks on America; for me, losing Kirsty was bad enough, the wake-up call received. (The two events had at least this element in common: fools piloting machines of destruction, taking away precious lives.) Not to minimize the later, magnified tragedy at all, but back in January 2001 I'd written that losing Kirsty was like losing "one of the truest, best parts" of myself. What then can I say about the thousands of strangers who died on September 11? (Fifty thousand lire for your thoughts.)

Kirsty MacColl believed in truth-telling,'messing with the forms,' using her creativity to its fullest extent; she was both just another imperfect human and a kindred spirit to all smart creative individualists everywhere. If you're a singer-songwriter looking for an inspiration, you could do a lot worse; from what I can tell, she already seems to be cherished by a good many of these (among only the "musicians for the real world" on this site's companion page, Christy McWilson, Amy Rigby, and the Young Fresh Fellows have all covered a Kirsty song either on record or in concert).

Kirsty need not be made more of in death than she was in life. She had fans' empathy because they could tell she was one of them, a fully realized adult and mother of two who occasionally struggled with her own demons; but in the end, she proved herself to be one of our better selves, inspiring some of us to rise to our own glorious occasions.

There was no room in her world for false sentiment; she knew that those words and deeds which arose out of a genuine impulse, including a need to talk about things the way they are, were the only ones that lasted, or deserved to. In Soho Square, in central London, there is a memorial bench, bought and placed during the summer of 2001 by fans of hers around the world - the same ones I'd encountered on the Internet the previous January - with a plaque, based on one of her better-loved lyrics, that reads as follows:

Kirsty MacColl
1959-2000
One day I'll be Waiting There
No Empty Bench in Soho Square

It's the truth; you can sit on it.

As for me, though I haven't started writing songs and singing them in public - be thankful for small things - she has inspired me, and affected my life, in strange and wonderful ways and continues to do so. (There are no coincidences, is all I can say.) Besides a general desire to be a better person, one of the changes I've most noticed in myself has been a renewed appreciation for music in general and for singers and songwriters in particular; I must, we must, treasure the underappreciated ones that still walk among us, and do whatever we can to get them more widely noticed.

When I think of Kirsty now, there is still inescapable sadness, but my heart also sings with joy as I feel I'm nearing a knowledge of something profound, almost sacred, springing from what her loss has taught me. I feel I can almost reach out and touch something eternal...and I've never been so close to it before...

With me in the valley, you out on the hill
I can just see you if I close my eyes
Climbing those mountains I picture you still
I see your smile just as I see the sunrise...

On the horizon the eagles are flying
And I mean no more than a cloud in the sky
I never know if I'm laughing or crying
The hardest word is the word goodbye

Many of her fans hear these same lines, which Kirsty (collaborating with her brother) wrote following the death of her father. And I hear another of her more recent lyrics, too: "Don't be afraid of the rhythm, it's made to give life to the way you want to be."

Kirsty, it was a bumpy road to joy; thanks for living such a beautiful, inspiring life filled with honesty and integrity. See you when the clans rise again...

This is Freeworld , the premier Kirsty website.



This page was first published October 8, 2001, two days before what would have been Kirsty MacColl's 42nd birthday.