A New New England: The Transformative Adventures of Kirsty MacColl and Billy Bragg by Mark Butler
Looking For A New England: Transformation By Cover
Covers can transform a song. An effective cover version shines light on undiscovered corners of a song, awakens nostalgia for the original, maybe even unlocks a new audience. But what happens when a cover transforms a songwriter? In 1983, singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl found herself with a massive hit single when Tracey Ullman’s cover of Kirsty’s debut single launched the British comedienne into global stardom. This is not that story. (Although, don’t worry, we’ll get there too.) This is the story of “A New England” and how Kirsty MacColl’s sunsoaked cover of Billy Bragg’s scruffy original transformed the paths of two great British songwriters.
See Kirsty become a household presence (and an evergreen holiday institution) without becoming a household name!
Watch Billy, a self-avowed cuddly communist, begin to mix pop with politics and take a great leap forward from DIY indie-land to #1 on the pop charts (plus a dancefloor detour with Fatboy Slim!)
Learn how Kirsty’s take on “A New England” is so definitive that Billy only plays “her” version in live performance, specially commissioned extra verse and all!
Special guest appearances by Bette Midler, Johnny Marr, the Simpsons, and more
Are You Looking For Another Girl?: Self-Discovery Through Someone Else’s Song
You know you know who Kirsty MacColl is, right? She’s soundtracked all of your Christmases since 1987 with the Pogues’ “Fairytale Of New York.” She’s also planted one significant earworm in the collective pop consciousness as the writer of Tracey Ullman’s “They Don’t Know.” She’s been an auxiliary Talking Head and an honorary Smith. She’s also had a solo career full of sadly underheard gems. But before she became the sassy, brassy Kirsty MacColl beloved by many, she was a singer and songwriter looking for herself, until she found her distinctive voice by transforming a scruffy little shouter by Billy Bragg into a UK chart smash. But before we try to change the world, before we wish on space hardware, and before we can fully appreciate “A New England,” the brilliant song about the challenges of finding and losing love in gloomy times, we need to know who Kirsty MacColl was before she recorded the cover that changed her life. (Feel free to start listening now, though. Here’s Billy’s original and Kirsty’s cover.)
It’s ironic and somehow on point for Kirsty MacColl that her greatest success by the measures of the music industry was a song that ended up with someone else. “They Don’t Know” is a perfect candidate for a hit single, landing somewhere between awkwardly out of date for 1983 and timeless. It was almost a hit in the UK for a 19-year-old Kirsty in 1979 when her label fumbled the distribution of the record, after breakthrough radio play. When the song was given to a then-fairly obscure British comedienne named Tracey Ullman by Kirsty’s once-and-future label boss, magic happened. The song became a global smash and it was the catalyst that saw Tracey meteorically rise from BBC sketch comedy to a guest VJ slot on MTV to headlining her own American TV show. (The Tracey Ullman Show was the birthplace of The Simpsons, so it’s not unreasonable to speculate that without Kirsty MacColl, there might have never been a Springfield.)
During Tracey’s short-lived pop career, she specialized in covers and tackled a handful of Kirsty MacColl songs, most of which were previously unheard. By all accounts, Kirsty was a hands-on participant in Tracey’s recording sessions, adding backing vocals and arrangements. In fact, the first time most of the world heard Kirsty MacColl was when she stepped in for a vocally limited Tracey Ullman to nail that climactic “Bay-bee” in “They Don’t Know.” Once you hear her on Tracey’s version, you can’t unhear it.
Dueling “They Don’t Know’s”: Ullman vs. MacColl. Kirsty can be heard at 1:50 on both!
Kirsty’s original, which was out of circulation for almost 15 years until it surfaced on a couple of compilations, will sound very familiar to Tracey’s hit version, especially since both benefit from a multi-tracked choir of Kirstys. “They Don’t Know” is an evergreen, but it falls on the basic side of pop music: sweet, catchy, nice. It lacks the fire, the smarts, the sass that epitomize the best of Kirsty MacColl.
Between the two “They Don’t Know’s,” Kirsty MacColl was trying to find a foothold in the business and trying to find herself in the process. She tried on a number of styles and sounds: a melodic pop craftswoman, a thrumming new waver, a west coast Beach Girl, and even a hard-nosed country punk from honky-tonkin’ Croydon.
In the latter guise, she found a chart breakthrough in 1981 with the impossibly titled “There’s A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis,” an exercise in kitsch-a-billy that channels the UK’s then-current appetite for the Stray Cats and Shakin’ Stevens. “Chip Shop” is a hoot, but it’s a little on the lightweight side, having expended a lot of energy on the set-up only to reveal a standard country payoff where the “guy” is a liar, and she’s “not sure about you” either.
If you want to venture down an improbable fork in the covers road, take a listen to the unfaithfully translated German language versions of “Chip Shop” that popped up in the early 80’s: Bert & Steff’s “Heut Trinken Wir Auf Alles Was Wir Lieben” (“Today We Drink To All We Love”) and Maggie Mae’s “Und Der Weihnachtsmann Behauptet, Er Ist Elvis” (“And Santa Claims He’s Elvis.”) Feel free to skip the fleeting rendition by proto-Kidz Bop-pers, Mini-Pops, though.
With her next single, the brassy cowgirl of “Chip Shop” who done been wronged was replaced with fragility and lush harmonies on a cover of Pet Sounds’ “You Still Believe In Me.” You’d be forgiven if you thought this single was from a different artist, as she channels Brian Wilson’s insecurities as convincingly as she zings the chip shop bloke.
In these early days before “A New England,” Kirsty dabbles in a wide array of styles and sounds. You can hear the core elements of her classic songs starting to rise: melodic smarts, sardonic wit, and a wall-of-Kirstys… but it’s hasn’t all come together yet.
I Put You On A Pedestal: The Songwriter’s Record Collection
As music lovers, we carry on a time-old tradition of sharing that perfect song: sitting in front of a stack of records with friends, holding up a sleeve while crate digging with a pal, making a mix tape, sweating over a playlist. When we do this, we are putting our hearts out there, sharing our delight (and maybe our guilty pleasures.) We are putting the music that lights us up or messes with our heads or gets our asses in motion out there. It’s an incomplete form of communication but it’s a proven way to share feeling and thought.
For a performer, a cover can have the same effect. Ideally, the artist holds an affection for the song or has a desire to reinterpret something meaningful to them rather than create something brand new. Unfortunately, covers are often a calculated play for listeners, or something easy and fast to pad out a record, or to cash in on a proven success.
When a songwriter covers a song, those reasons get a little more complex. It could as a simple as a writer saying “Listen to this… this is a song that floors me while I’m trying to write a song that floors you. I’m listening, I’m learning. Join me.” Maybe there’s a deeper resonance with the art and the craft of the creator of the original. Maybe it’s a shorthand to connect the dots between listeners and the writer. Maybe it’s a temporary cure for writer’s block. In all likelihood, it’s all of those things.
Even though she could have focused on her own songwriting gifts, Kirsty MacColl wasn’t afraid to have you back to hers to play you everything that she loved. Listening to the many covers she tackled as well as the many, many influences that she’s folded into her music, you can imagine a pile of 45s with well-worn sleeves, stacked next to her Dansette.
Kirsty was just a teenager when she entered the music business, so it’s not hard to imagine an array of records scavenged from charity shops and nicked from friends and family… each one offering new horizons. Like most young people, she went through a lot of new styles, new attitudes, and new sounds… trying on what worked, keeping the best, discarding the rest.
This is the journey of most young music obsessives. Finding your sound is part of finding your identity. The act of listening is an act of discovery and also a launchpad to invention and continual re-invention. All of Kirsty’s recordings, full of homages and influences, offer a flip through her record collection, but her broad array of covers provide the readiest insights: Beach Boys, country, doo-wop, salsa, calypso, and punk all get a spin. In hindsight, the clues are all there. But if you track forward from the original “They Don’t Know,” it’s clear that it took her a while for her to figure out who she is. Over her first few singles and debut album, she plays it straight… her assimilation of influences hasn’t kicked in. That’s one of the reasons that “A New England” stopped time for many of us. You heard a singer and songwriter put all of the pieces together for the first time.
Kirsty must have heard a lot of herself in the cutting wit and anthemic chorus of Billy Bragg’s bare bones original. The Kirsty MacColl you hear on her version of “A New England” is the Kirsty you will hear through the rest of her work. She’s fiery and forceful and sweet and tender all at once—and her distinctive voice can be heard clearly. Singing Kirsty’s song helped Tracey Ullman unlock her career, but transforming Billy’s song helped Kirsty MacColl unlock her true self.
I Don’t Want To Change The World: All About “A New England”
Billy Bragg sounded like he was in a hurry. He’d crammed seven songs into less than 16 minutes on 1983’s Life’s A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy, where “A New England” flew by in two indelible verses, biting the opening lines from Simon and Garfunkel’s “Leaves That Are Green” and adding a wealth of his own lyrical insights. Much like a street corner newspaper vendor at a London tube stop, he sounded like he had to blurt out the headlines fast to get the punters’ attention. “What’s this, you say? He doesn’t want to change the world? But he’s looking for a new England? OK, fella, tell me more.”
Kirsty MacColl obviously responded to the headline and began an in-depth exploration of Billy’s message. Karen O’Brien’s Kirsty MacColl: The One and Only recounts how, in a matter of hours, Kirsty went from seeing Billy live to informing her manager that she was going to record “A New England.” Although there were plenty of Bragg diehards that might’ve contended that a short, sharp burst of vocals plus an electric guitar was enough, Kirsty saw that the song wasn’t finished and invited him to her flat to discuss it. While she cooked him breakfast, she asked Billy to apply a gender flip that re-centers the song and to write a third verse to finish(!) the already-released song.
Kirsty’s version keeps Billy’s verses largely intact with a couple of significant changes in the first verse. The girls at school that are now “pushing prams” were loves of Billy but simply peers of Kirsty. Billy tells his soon-to-be ex “I put you on a pedestal/They put you on the pill” with “they” presumably being the ex’s parents, NHS doctors, or some authority figure. Kirsty tells her ex “I put you on a pedestal/You put me on the pill” which suggests a much more controlling relationship. Both versions reflect a patriarchal mid-80s Britain, but the ex in Kirsty’s version is the more heavy-handed representation of that.
That cooked-up-at-breakfast final verse adds some finality to the relationship. Kirsty sings about sitting by the phone, “waiting for someone to pull me through/when at last it didn’t ring, I knew it wasn’t you.” Billy’s briefer version dials back his dismissiveness with a plaintive “I wish, I wish, I wish you’d care” but with Kirsty’s third verse, it’s game over, that guy’s toast.
The biggest shift between the original and the cover is subtle but powerful. In his chorus, Billy declares “I don’t want to change the world/I’m not looking for a new England/I’m just looking for another girl.” It’s a breakup song, or maybe even a pre-breakup song, as Billy reviews the list of what’s not working. Even as forceful as his delivery is, there’s the possibility that he’s rehearsing the breakup. With the gender flip in Kirsty’s version, she’s not stating that “I’m just looking for another girl,” she’s asking “Are you looking for another girl?” Her question says that the breakup is done, some time has passed, and if she hasn’t completely moved on, she’s ready to do a post-mortem on the relationship.
It’s a heck of a flex for one young songwriter to ask another to go back to work, but Kirsty MacColl, with a few extra years of songwriting chops and a young lifetime of pop fandom, clearly heard a keeper was going to go far. By the time breakfast had been polished off, so had Billy’s amendments yielding a perfect fit for the singe. Bragg considers the longer edition as “Kirsty’s version,” the one that he still plays today. The two clearly became kindred spirits in the process as they’d cross paths repeatedly over the ensuing years.
Billy Bragg added a verse but Kirsty MacColl added much, much more to her rendition. Sonically, the original was a brash, speedy blurt over a spare, chugging electric guitar. Billy’s original seems like it’s in black-and-white compared to the Technicolor glow of her cover. With an opening peal of Pete Glenister’s Smiths-esque 12-string guitar chimes and crystalline production from Steve Lillywhite, Kirsty’s husband and “it” producer of the moment (Peter Gabriel, U2, Big Country, Simple Minds,) Kirsty’s single was a big pop thing, drenched in sunlight, echoing the same vocal lushness of her earlier Beach Boys cover. When she reaches the end of the original two verses and expands her lead vocal into a wall of widescreen harmonies, it’s a glorious moment.
For a deeper dive into those harmonies, check out the 12” mix of “A New England.” Unlike many tracks from this “Special Dance Mix” era, the extended version doesn’t just prolong the beats, it rethinks the voices by frequently dropping out the lead vocal track and swapping in one of her many harmony vocals. It shouldn’t work but it’s a revelation. It’s disorienting and lovely and true to the still-superior hit single version. Kirsty’s voice is a dynamic and expressive instrument throughout.
As she works through the words of Billy Bragg (and a snippet of Paul Simon), this is the first time we hear her fully settle into the Kirsty voice. Until “A New England,” Kirsty flitted from style to style. On the original “They Don’t Know,” she sounds a little too sweet and polished, a bit too pop-by-numbers. “You Caught Me Out” thrums with a disaffected drone of new wave unison vocals. “Chip Shop,” where most folks had heard her before she started looking for a new England, is a slightly camp, Twanglo-Saxon country tone.
But at last, with “A New England,” you hear that distinctive voice in full bloom. It’s like honey in hot tea with a splash of whiskey to add grit and fire. It’s rich but just a bit nasal. It’s classic Mid-Atlantic pop inflected with more than just a little splash of London brass. It’s… indelible. Listen to anything she recorded post-1985 and you’ll immediately know it’s Kirsty MacColl.
Without getting deeply into the realities of Thatcher’s Britain, both Bragg and MacColl were looking for a new England or at least a better one. That underlying desire makes “A New England” connect in both versions. The modern world of space hardware and downward social mobility is weighing down the protagonist, but the politics of the day are being eclipsed by personal problems where love has soured or straight up fallen apart. Bragg and MacColl certainly weren’t alone in analyzing the realms of politics and relationships, but Kirsty’s use of a spoonful of sonic sugar made that messaging more appealing. The UK charts in the mid-80s saw agitated punk polemics being polished up with a kind of lush lefty pop. Scritti Politti was folding Situationalist concepts into floor filling electropop, smooth chanteuses like Tracey Thorn and Sade were delving into politics, and Paul Weller abandoned The Jam to dole out soulful socialism in The Style Council. As Kirsty’s single flew into the UK Top 10, she saw she had created an opportunity to dig deeper into social commentary and Billy Bragg found that he could safely juggle the political and personal while adding a bit of pop pizzazz to carry his message further. But that’s when covers are most magic… they can be a gateway drug to new voices and new sounds.
On paper, “A New England” was certainly not a slam dunk for chart success… a belated follow-up to a not-exactly-similar hit by a still-obscure singer, written by an indie-punk with strident political leanings but that’s what makes pop life fun. It helps that it’s one hell of an anthem. Go ahead, close your eyes. Think of a hundred fans packed in a small club—or a stadium terrace full of liquored-up football fans. They’re going to sing along at the drop of a hat and some of them are going to get hooked into the tender-hearted verses and the socio-political undercurrents. Kirsty’s single peaked at #7 on the UK singles chart. MacColl was only given one opportunity to appear on Top of the Pops, since she was carrying her first child and the BBC could apparently handle a political song but not a pregnant pop star.
But… a hit is a hit. Unless you’re on Stiff Records. Stiff had already fumbled Kirsty’s original “They Don’t Know” with poor distribution, but made good with Tracey’s version (abetted greatly with a licensing deal with MCA.) For “A New England,” Kirsty re-signed for another go but Stiff was on the verge of collapse, so between impending motherhood and the death of her label, the crowning achievement of her hit cover was followed up with… absolutely nothing.
But Other Things Got In The Way: Everywhere And Nowhere In The 80’s
OK, there was quite a bit more than absolutely nothing. Kirsty MacColl was actually everywhere in the five years between her hit single and her next album which did not, in fact, feature that hit single. There just weren’t any new Kirsty MacColl records. And thanks to the collapse of Stiff, if you were looking for “A New England” in the mid-80’s, you were coming up empty-handed, making the record a bit of a holy grail.
While she raised her two children, her musical presence during the 5-year gap between “A New England” and Kite was limited to someone else’s records. She could be heard sweetening the chorus on the Smiths’ “Ask” and providing backing vocals on a crazy array of big deal records (usually produced by Steve Lillywhite) from the Rolling Stones to Robert Plant to Happy Mondays. One fleeting but key player in the Bragg/MacColl orbit was a soon-to-be Smiths-less Johnny Marr, joining Kirsty on Billy’s “Greetings To The New Brunette.” MacColl, a major Smiths fan, snuck out one record under her own name in this hiatus, a spectacular cover of “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby.” Marr and MacColl even found themselves as auxiliary members of Talking Heads on the Naked album. Oh, beyond that, there was a Christmas record of some notoriety, The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York.”
If you know Kirsty MacColl, “Fairytale of New York” is likely the main reason. And if you know the modern-day standard but didn’t know who the female voice belonged to, congratulations… you’ve got so much to discover. As she considered her next steps for her solo career, here was yet another new voice to try on.... a bitter, weary, angry lover having it out with her inebriated, incarcerated boyfriend. As a counter to Shane MacGowan’s sodden loser character, Kirsty brings the song to new heights by adding full measures of ferocity and defeat. It’s an unforgettable pairing of his gravelly croak and her sweet-but-soured tones, and a triumph of obsessive songcraft. By the band’s own admission, they sweated out every detail of the writing, arranging, and performance, and so did Kirsty. Band members recall turning a tape of the song over to Lillywhite and receiving a fully-realized performance from Kirsty shortly after. The chemistry was powerful, no doubt enhanced by Kirsty’s past history with “you done me wrong” songs. The honest, unflinching nature of the song had an immediate impact, blocked from hitting #1 in England in 1987 only by the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of “Always On My Mind.” “Fairytale” continues to re-chart year after year, an anthem for millions who feel the bitter more than the sweet at Christmas.
Two Shooting Stars: MacColl and Bragg In Technicolor
If Kirsty MacColl was trying on many styles in the years before “A New England,” Billy Bragg might have been the bloke that never saw the point of a makeover until he stumbled into one. In fact, if you attend his concerts today, you’d swear nothing’s changed. One guy, one guitar, strident politics, disarming humor—same engaging charm, different year. However, after finding one of his songs hit the UK Top 10 with a bright, shiny makeover, Billy’s horizons expanded in unexpected directions.
It was baby steps, at first, for a songwriter who usually opted for spare voice and electric guitar. Bringing in Kirsty and Johnny Marr and a few other comrades added more color to Talking With The Taxman About Poetry, but if finding “A New England” in the Top 10 was surprising, Billy’s late ‘80s tangents qualify for the weird charts hall of fame.
Maybe he was ready for a cover of his own and he certainly had a soft spot for helping others, but he found himself at #1 in the UK with a plaintive take on The Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home,” part of a charity double A-side with 1988’s it boys Wet Wet Wet (a most un-Bragg like pairing that helped guarantee its success.) A year later, he returned to the charts with his biggest left-turn, a bit of big beat electronica as the co-writer and falsetto crooner of “Won’t Talk About It” masterminded by Norman Cook, in his post-Housemartins, pre-Fatboy Slim period. (Cook re-cooked the song slightly for Beats International, relegating Billy to backing vocals, but it still landed him near the top of the US Dance Charts!) Bragg wasn’t exactly engineering a radical career shift here, as he quickly returned to his trademark razor-sharp wit and rootsy rock. His motivations were obviously a good cause with the former and a bit of a laugh with the latter. But “A New England” gave him the opportunity to try something new and unexpected—and he found playing the pop game could lead to a great leap forward.
Waiting For Someone To Pull Me Through: A Cavalcade of Covers
Despite the many challenges she faced in her personal and professional life after “A New England,” Kirsty MacColl created a wealth of great work in her too-short career, too much to tackle in a short-form essay. (Check out the well-curated www.kirstymaccoll.com to learn more about all things Kirsty.) But even as she created engaging and diverse new music, she never let go of her love of other people’s songs and put out a string of revealing covers. Although “A New England” is the high watermark of her covers portfolio, this batch is too good to ignore.
This lovely version of The Kinks’ “Days” helped launch Kite in 1989 and returned Kirsty to the Top 20.
Tackling Marty Robbins’ “El Paso” indulged those cowgirl leanings that first emerged with “Chip Shop”
Another curveball… in French(!) Kate and Anna McGarrigle’s “Complainte Pour Ste. Catherine”
A silly yet tender romp with Billy Bragg through “Darling, Let’s Have Another Baby” originally by old school punkers Johnny Moped
And a double-self cover from the same radio session: Kirsty and Billy tackle “A New England” together.
A thrash through “I Wanna Be Sedated” serves as a reminder of Kirsty’s punk roots and her ability to surprise and delight.
I Loved The Words You Wrote To Me: Kirsty MacColl’s Transformations
Kirsty MacColl saw her own songwriting go through an ultra-vivid metamorphosis in the wake of “A New England.” There’s a wider variety of styles, colored with nuance and subtlety, but still hewing to the pop song classicism that she grew up listening to. More importantly, whether she dug into club beats or pared down to spare folk, all of her songs were unified by Kirsty’s singular voice which now moved front and center in the mix.
It’s too simple to say that one hit cover was the cause of this blossoming as a songwriter. In an very candid interview from 1990, Kirsty talks about emerging from a three-year maternity leave, where by her own reckoning, she was unable to write much of anything, but suddenly found herself ready to tackle everything that had been on her mind from rocky relationships to social inequity. A new label and constant encouragement from Johnny Marr (who would become a songwriting partner and recurring guest guitarist) were also motivating forces. But, the work she did to create her version of “A New England” created a blueprint for her subsequent creations.
Kirsty’s new songs, beginning with Kite, strike a beautiful balance. Relationships are now portrayed with more complexities in songs like “Tread Lightly” or “You Know It’s You” than the sweet simplicity of “They Don’t Know.” The woes of the world and the working class are directly tackled, whether they are embellished with snarling guitars (“Free World”) or with a gentler bounce (“Children Of The Revolution.”) Compared to her earliest songs, there’s much more immediacy and grounding in the realities of the day.
The sonic palette is richer than ever too. Influences are deployed with more savvy—and in unique juxtapositions just like “A New England’s” combination of Beach Boys vocals vs. Smiths guitars. Just as her choice of covers illuminated a wide range of influences, you can hear a fearless exploration of styles and sounds on all of her subsequent records. Kite sprawls out from more straightforward indie guitar gems like “The End Of A Perfect Day” to unexpected flourishes like the Dixieland breakdown on “Fifteen Minutes.” Electric Landlady plays with salsa on “My Affair” and detours into “Walking Down Madison’s” Soul II Soul beats, while Titanic Days adds symphonic dynamics. Kirsty’s final album, Tropical Brainstorm, revels in Latin sounds and rhythms throughout, reflecting a growing love for Cuban music and beyond. It’s too much to dream that we could have access to Kirsty MacColl’s complete record collection but based on her songbook and covers list, it’s a big, diverse stack of music. (There is a snapshot of her Top 10 Albums circa 1994. Steely Dan! Frank Black! Kid Creole! Yeah, that checks out.)
Kirsty MacColl had always been funny. If anything, “Chip Shop” might have pigeonholed her as “too funny” but humor was an enduring part of her musical identity. She took cues from Billy Bragg’s deft balancing of clever wordplay and earnestness, allowing wit to serve as a hook that serves the song, instead of dominating it. “In These Shoes?” is sassy and sultry without being hokey-jokey like her early B-Side “I’m Going Out With An 80-Year Old Millionaire.” (The former was a perfect pairing for Bette Midler, echoing Tracey Ullman’s early success with a Kirsty cover.) There’s dark wit afoot in the spooky and yearning “Autumngirlsoup,” which gets deliciously messy with food/sex metaphors. “Treachery” and “England 2 Colombia 0” weave comic narratives on the typically dark subjects of stalkers and infidelity. There’s still room for straight-up silly with nyah-nyah goofing on Primal Scream’s “Rocks” at the end of the proto-sexting farce of “Here Comes That Man Again.”
But more than anything else in her own technicolor transformation, Kirsty is finally ready to showcase her own voice. She’d learned to creatively deploy her vocal talents to serve the songs, rather than overwhelm them. Kirsty admitted that early in her career, she’d hidden behind harmonies because she lacked confidence in herself as a singer. Indeed, it’s sometimes a struggle to find her in very early tracks like “You Caught Me Out” or “They Don’t Know.” Waiting to deploy that sunny wall-of-Kirstys until the bridge in “A New England” helps define the song as much as her direct vocal approach to the verses. And when she opts for subdued harmonies on “Dancing In Limbo,” it makes even a quiet song more dynamic. As her songwriting becomes more direct and specific, her vocal creativity makes the performance of those songs that much more powerful.
But That Was Bloody Yesterday: The Legacy Of “A New England”
By 1989, Kirsty MacColl had four bonafide hit singles, one as a songwriter, two as a solo artist, and one as a duet partner. That’s usually enough for smooth sailing in the pop world, but Kirsty was only then truly finding traction for her solo career. After her rethinking of “A New England” and her own songcraft, she never achieved the same commercial heights, but she created a rich body of work that still resonates decades later.
It’s hard to acknowledge that Kirsty’s life was tragically cut short in December 2000, when she has now achieved that kind of immortality that great artists do. When she was killed near Cozumel by a powerboat careening through restricted waters, her brilliant work was also ended and her songs are now colored by the loss of a talent that we never fully got to know. It’s bittersweet that she returns to us every December as part of the classic holiday soundtrack for both the romantic and the world weary, but her presence on “Fairytale Of New York” reminds us each year that her own discography is right there to dig into—full of sass, fire, sincerity, tough love and sweetness.
“A New England” lives on too, if not on the scale that “Fairytale Of New York” does. And Billy Bragg, the big softie, makes sure it does. At his shows, he loudly and proudly proclaims Kirsty’s version is now the version. It’s a powerful moment to hear that but not as powerful as hearing a roomful of people roaring along to the chorus. In 1984, Kirsty grabbed ahold Billy’s song and asked him to build it out, making it hers. Billy, rather than reclaiming it, keeps the transformed version alive, and gives the song back to us with a cover of a cover.
Despite her claims to the contrary, Kirsty MacColl did change the world and the lives of the people around her. But more importantly, through all this transformation, she’d found herself. After “A New England,” she created a body of work that was full of melody and passion, creativity and whimsy, and irresistible pop hooks—all delivered by a very relatable lyricist with a warm, engaging, distinctive voice. No more tentative steps, even in the face of record company concessions and the usual industry rigamarole. Billy Bragg might have given her the final set of keys to unlock her voice and her music, but there was never a doubt afterwards of who she was. There’s no need to go looking for a new England—or another girl—when you have found the one and only: Kirsty MacColl.
Mark Butler is an editor, writer, and content creator in Seattle. A true believer in all things Kirsty since he found the original 45 of “A New England” at Wax Trax in Denver in 1985, his immersive research for this extracurricular essay included personally covering all of the Kirsty MacColl songs available at Baby Ketten karaoke.