This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

It would have been the singer Kirsty MacColl’s sixty-fifth birthday last month. Instead, it’s now almost 24 years since her awful, untimely death. Whilst diving with her sons in Cozumel, Mexico, a speedboat ploughed into their party: MacColl was killed pushing her sons to safety.

This would have been devastating under any circumstances, but in MacColl’s case it seems particularly cruel, because it seemed as though, at 41, she still had so much more music to make. On the Latin-influenced album Tropical Brainstorm in 2000, she sounded happy, relaxed — joyful, even. After a stop-start career, finally she had found her groove.

She’d had to work harder than most to get there. Stage fright and label issues had taken a toll on her over the years — though she started recording at 17, her output was limited, because for long chunks of time she was either unable to perform (due to nerves) or unable to record (due to contractual disputes). Executives appeared confounded by what to do with her, despite her obvious talent.

Her voice was gorgeous: She could be droll, scathing, wry and melancholy in the space of a few lines, with perfect multitracked harmonies. (She supplied backing vocals for Talking Heads, the Smiths, the Happy Mondays — and of course, she duetted with the Pogues on “Fairytale of New York”.) Her melodies were punchy, her lyrics were sharp.

When she entered the music scene in the 1980s, though, it was a boys’ club, and MacColl occupied a singularly, insistently female perspective. Her first hit — “There’s a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis” — pierced the bubble of masculine braggadocio, teasing a lover for his “mohair suits and foreign shoes” before concluding that, like the man in the chip shop, the boyfriend is probably a liar.

Her harshest songs, though, were often about women, sketching scenarios rarely represented in pop music. “What Do Pretty Girls Do?” shrewdly dissects a former groupie, now left alone with all the “records and the posters of the people that she knew”. “But she got older just like everybody else/ She never thought she’d have to take care of herself.”

Characters who married and settled down fare no better. On “Tread Lightly”, she sighs: “What else is there for you to do/ But turn and wet the baby’s head/ And pray he will be happier than you or me?”

Dating is hopeless, too. “Don’t Come the Cowboy With Me, Sonny Jim!” bemoans “boys with warm beds and cold, cold hearts” who “make you feel nothing at all”.

Bathos, fatalism, heartbreak: these are the pillars of a MacColl song. The saddest song on Kite is probably “Mother’s Ruin”, in which a narrator tries to compensate for a lost father with casual sex. “But when you go/ Let me dream that I go with you,” she sings, broken but brave.

Mark Nevin, a guitarist who often worked with her, summed her songs up as: “Men — you’re all bastards; don’t leave me, I’m just a little girl.” He tied this feeling of rejection to her childhood. Her father, the folk singer Ewan MacColl, had left her mother not long after MacColl was born, and her relationship with him was difficult.

It was often assumed, because of the family connection, that she belonged to the folk tradition; she didn’t, precisely because she didn’t want to follow her father. It was another thing that made selling her harder than it might have been.

At least, during her doldrums, she had solid support from her husband, the producer Steve Lillywhite, who worked on most of her records. But in the early 1990s, their marriage started to come apart: it’s a period that shaped her darkest record, Titanic Days, released in 1993.

Even its happiest numbers hint at the abyss. “Bad” is a jaunty ballad about murdering your husband. “Angel” is a trip-hoppy song which MacColl told a journalist was about feeling “protected”, but it’s not a huge reach to hear the references to “falling”, “dreaming” and angels as someone flirting with the comfort of death.

On others, MacColl’s astuteness about relationships lurches into disconcerting territory. The title track celebrates an affair that sounds at the very least unhealthy: “A violent frenzy in a none-too-cheap hotel … His arms, his face/ The way my words got twisted out of place.” Is this a love song? Well, for some people it is.

She was always drawn back to the morally sticky parts of life: wanting what you shouldn’t want, or resenting the thing that’s supposed to make you happy. If MacColl had been an author, these piercing sketches of the human condition would be regarded as classics — on a par with Alan Bennett or Fay Weldon.

Instead, she was a popstar who didn’t match ideas of what a popstar ought to be. She sang frankly about sex, but she didn’t perform sexiness. She was scathing about men, but she knew them intimately. Her songs had the intensity and drive of the classic girl groups, but she recorded adult angsts like marital discontent or ageing out of hotness.

If she hadn’t been so brutally cut off, the changing mores from the noughties on would have given her plenty of material to work with. As it is, she left behind one of the great British songbooks, and a gap that no one since has quite been able to fill.