Kirsty Maccoll's Titanic Days, by Mark E Nevin
Kirsty and I met at the start of the Eighties. She was signed to Stiff Records and had recently had a hit with ‘There’s a Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis’ and asked me to play guitar on some new songs she was recording at the tiny and slightly strange-smelling Pathway Studios, in Islington. After a handful of drunken nights at Dingwalls and various other bars and clubs which were popular at that time, Kirsty and I went our separate ways.
It wasn’t until 1989 that our paths crossed again. When she asked keyboard player Gavin Povey what had become of me, he told her that I was now “the bloke with the hat in Fairground Attraction”. I was amazed at how Kirsty’s writing had developed since we last met. Back then she had specialised in teen ballads and pub country rock with jokey lyrics, but when I listened to Kite, the album that she had just released, it was another matter altogether. Co-written with Pete Glenister and Johnny Marr, the lyrics and melodies were those of a really great songwriter.
She had maintained her brilliant sense of humour but the songs were rich with intelligent insight and worked on so many different levels: great pop tunes were combined with biting political comment and touching personal confessions — all this with Kirsty’s fantastic multi-layered vocal arrangements, painstakingly woven together to create a sound that was her’s alone. She suggested we wrote some songs together and the first we came up with were ‘Halloween’, ‘My Affair’ and ‘The One And Only’.
While I had always preferred to write the words and music on my own, it was a real luxury to collaborate with someone whom I could trust to come up with truly inspired lyrics. The three songs we wrote formed part of Kirsty’s next album, Electric Landlady, and after its release we went on tour and much of 1991/92 was spent having a mad time doing shows around England, Ireland, Europe and America. Kite and Electric Landlady came out on Virgin and while neither album had been a huge commercial success, both featured songs that were hits — ‘Days’ and ‘Walking Down Madison’, respectively. So, when Virgin was bought out by EMI it was a bitter surprise for Kirsty that she was one of the artists to be dropped during the culling that so often occurs when one record company is absorbed by another.
My record deal with BMG had come to an end, too, and the feeling between us was that perhaps the best period of our careers was over. It was scary – “Did you ever get that sinking feeling?” Well, yes, we had it then, and to make matters worse, our personal lives were heading towards disaster. Kirsty later described the album as her ‘sad divorce album’. It was, for both of us. From the start of the album the desperation is evident:
Kirsty signed to ZTT on a one-album deal and Titanic Days (a title she chose to express “that dual fear and excitement of a huge tide where everything is constantly changing”), was preceded by the single ‘Angel’, which came out in February 1994. Neither single nor album was a hit and the record seemed to disappear immediately. It was a huge disappointment to us. Now we really were up shit creek without a paddle, and somewhere up there Kirsty and I lost each other and we went our separate ways again.
I needed to clean up my life, to try and make sense of it. When we got together we always seemed to end up the same way: out of our heads. I tried to explain that I needed some space to sort myself out, but Kirsty took it as a personal rejection and became very angry towards me. The last time I saw her was at a club in Kentish Town called The Verge. It was at an after-show party for one of her final gigs, at The Forum. The invitation described the party venue as being “a short walk from The Forum (what, in these shoes?)”. She was surprised to see me, but pleased too, and we danced and talked and she told me that she was happier than she had ever been. I was so glad we had the opportunity to put things straight between us before she died.
In the US this album was described as ‘a multi-hued piece of art waiting to be put on display for countless admirers, old and new, to savour’. I am so happy about this re-issue, that Titanic Days is back out there to be savoured again. I am told that before this re-release it had been selling on eBay for silly prices. I suppose that the fact that there can be no more new Kirsty records makes the old ones even more precious. But to me, this one especially, always was.
Mark E Nevin, London, 2005