Kirsty

I was delighted to see that Kirsty MacColl, my favourite artiste of all time (supplanting even the wonderful Grace), has made the news and is thumbing her nose from the grave at those who would bark at the moon.

'Fairytale of New York' is one of her less memorable efforts but it is being dragged out yet again as it is Xmas so that Shane MacGowan does not fall on even harder times. This song was first released for Xmas 1987 and has clogged the airwaves for a fortnight in mid December ever since. Yesterday the BBC decided that the drunken references to 'slut' and 'faggot' were offensive and had to be censored out. The absolutely correct public outcry to this forced them to reverse their decision within hours. As a bycatch this, of course, swells Mr McGowan's recreational pharmacology fund to a greater degree than is normal for this time of year.

What better time then to extoll the virtues of Ms MacColl. She is known for her quirky lyrics a lot of which revolve around men being liars. I find her very amusing and her words are set to very easy to listen to tunes. She has an album called Electric Landlady (Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland - get it?) and songs with titles like 'There's a guy works down the chip shop swears he's Elvis' and 'In these shoes?'. In the later stages of her career she got bitten by a latin bug and that flavoured a lot of her music. For a starter I would recommend 'England 2 Columbia 0' as a good introduction to certainly the latter part of her career.

If you have been living on Mars and are not familiar with the wonderful and sadly departed Kirsty then you are missing a treat. An opportunity to post my first video on this blog. This is Kirsty MacColl at the peak of her powers. The evocation of late fifties and early sixties suburban Britain in this video is just superb

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