Galore - The Best Of Kirsty Maccoll - Kirsty MacColl

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas for me without hearing the raucous ‘Christmas in New York’ played in all the department stores during the ritual shopping trips. It’s a lovely romantic booze-soaked song, one of the best ever, a Christmas classic since December 1987, with Kirsty MacColl’s sweetly ironic voice balanced against the gruff romanticism of Shane McGowan. As I write this now I can visualize the video and hear the poignancy in her voice when she sings “So could anyone” to Shane’s taunt that he “could have been someone”. A simple lyric, but one which encapsulated the whole story of this great ...

It made me genuinely sad last year when I heard that Kirsty MacColl had died in a tragic water incident in Mexico. I loved and still love all of Kirsty’s work and to say that she was a magical entertainer would be a ridiculous and unimportant understatement about life. Galore really is the ‘best’ of MacColl’s back catalogue and is an album that I like to play more than regularly. When I heard of her death I didn’t want to play it anymore because the joviality and pure glee that you instantly get in ‘galore-like’ quantities from all these tunes would not have seemed right somehow. After a couple of months ...

The cheeky picture of Kirsty on the inside cover with the Cuban cigar and hat showed her growing interest with South American music and politics. I first got into her work when I was working in a factory environment, with the radio blaring out all day. The track 'Caroline' was the single, which struck a chord with me at the time. This coincided with the release of the album Galore, which I had to go and purchase. I then discovered the diversity of her work, which resulted in the purchase of all her previous albums. The lyrics of the songs are an absolute joy - the ability to identify with the listener that a lot of the pop bands seem to miss. ...