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
n 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 teenageturned 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.
From the outset, MacColl’s career progressed in weird fits and starts. One theory is that she put the music industry’s collective back up by dint of being an opinionated female artist. “She never pandered to fashion about music. She knew what she liked, and she had very good taste,” says Pete Glenister, a frequent collaborator. “She was always deemed difficult, whereas if she’d been a bloke, they’d have just said: ‘Yeah, he knows what he wants.’ That was the real difference.
Then fate intervened. At a hairdresser’s, Robinson’s wife, Rosemary, found herself seated next to the actor and comedian. When Ullman expressed interest in making a record, Rosemary gave her a tape of MacColl’s songs. On the drive home, Ullman claimed she played They Don’t Know “about 50 times”: it was, she said, the kind of song “that makes you tingle and cry”. Ullman’s version went to No 2 in the UK and made the US Top 10, kickstarting what became a wildly successful career in the US.
The couple made two MacColl albums together, 1989’s Kite and 1991’s Electric Landlady, which minted her two songwriting partnerships with Glenister and Nevin . Neither album was huge commercially, although Kite spawned another hit cover, this time of the Kinks’ Days. And both were crammed with fantastic songs that showed MacColl’s ability to, as Glenister puts it, “break your heart with something wistful, then make you laugh with her wit”.
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