Deemed ‘difficult’ in the 80s music industry, the Pogues’ vocal foil never quite found the audience she deserved. As a box set is released, collaborators gather to recall her wistful, witty songwriting
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 by the ghosts of 60s girl groups. “Very pop, very Brill Building,” recalls Dave Robinson, co-founder of the esteemed indie label Stiff, who signed her off the back of her demos. “An English person writing teen pop was very unusual, plus she was definitely writing from a female point of view.”
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