Kirsty MacColl

AMG Review of Kirsty MacColl

Dave Thompson
All Music Guide

Polydor never knew what to do with Kirsty MacColl, even after 1981's "There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop" brought her the massive hit single she'd been threatening since her emergence two years earlier. A swift follow-through album, Desperate Character, perished through lack of promotion; subsequent singles went nowhere; and a second album was abandoned when the label dropped her. But MacColl simply took her magic elsewhere and, no sooner had she returned to the charts in 1984, than her ex-label was reconsidering its share of her archive. Kirsty MacColl was basically a reissue of Desperate Character, but with its weaker numbers replaced with material from those aborted second LP sessions -- farewell, then, "Mexican Sofa," "Just One Look," and the country version of "Chipshop"; greetings to "Annie," "Roman Gardens," and "Berlin" (an earlier version of the single released independently during 1983). The substitutions really don't affect the overall shape of the record, although it's certainly worth noting that both "Roman Gardens" and "Berlin" were deemed worthy of inclusion on MacColl's From Croydon to Cuba anthology, while Desperate Character itself squeezes a mere three songs onto that set. Overall, however, Kirsty MacColl is more notable for its status as a rarity than for any quality of its own -- upon release, it sold even less than the album it supplanted.