Fun_People Archive
23 Dec
RIP Kirsty MacColl

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Sat, 23 Dec 100 18:02:35 -0800
To: Fun_People
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Subject: RIP Kirsty MacColl

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From: A M Carley <silentpc@silentpc.com>
From: WittenWist@aol.com
From: Robert Corwin <photorc@mindspring.com>

Songwriter Kirsty MacColl, 41, dies in boating accident
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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Dec. 19, 2000 | LONDON -- British singer and songwriter Kirsty MacColl has
died after being struck by a speedboat while swimming in Mexico, her
management said Tuesday. She was 41.

MacColl was swimming with her two children at Cozumel, Mexico, when she
was hit Monday by a boat that entered an area reserved for swimmers, said
the Outside Organization, a public relations company working for MacColl's
manager, Kevin Nixon.

Her two sons were not injured, the company said.

Police in Cozumel confirmed only that a woman tourist had been killed in
a boating accident Monday.

MacColl released her first record when she was 19. It was two more years
before she finally got a song in the Top 40 with "There's a Guy Works Down
the Chipshop Swears He's Elvis."

She may be best remembered for accompanying Shane MacGowan on The Pogues'
1987 hit, "A Fairytale of New York."

Bono of U2 described her as "the Noel Coward of her generation" and MacGowan
once wondered aloud, "Why is she not massively successful?"

"I remember Kirsty as just a really brainy, funny girl whose songwriting
came from all different traditions," Bono said Tuesday in an interview with
Britain's Sky News. "I just remember her humor really. She was really
funny."

MacColl, the daughter of folk singer Ewan MacColl, was born Oct. 10, 1959,
and grew up in Croydon, England, with her mother Jean Newlove, a dancer
and choreographer.

For the last few years MacColl had traveled extensively in Cuba and Brazil,
drawing inspiration from Latin music.

"It was like a sudden liberation of my brain. I'd spent so long being
unhappy in a very British way, and suddenly there was all this ... this
new stuff," she said in a recent interview.

She added: "Whenever I go into the studio I always operate on the principle
that I might get hit by a bus tomorrow and I would hate the obituaries to
have to read 'her last album was her not-very-good-album."'

She married producer Steve Lillywhite in 1984, and they were divorced in
1997. She is survived by her two sons.

Funeral arrangements were not immediately announced.

© 2000 Peter Langston