Kirsty MacColl

Everything about Kirsty MacColl defied the conventional 'pop' category, yet she embraced and defended the genre, redeeming it with literate writing that had seldom been seen in British pop since the glory days of Ray Davies and the Kinks. Her music was funny, irreverent and endearingly catchy and her five albums in almost twenty years became symbolic rescue missions to retrieve British pop music from all that was saccharine and shallow, manufactured and mainstream. Overcoming agonising stage fright, long periods of writer's block and depression, she created a hugely successful solo career and collaborated with a legion of people from the Rolling Stones to the Happy Mondays, and, most famously, The Pogues, with Fairytale of New York. With a foreword by Billy Bragg, and based on interviews with Kirsty before her tragic death, plus interviews with Bono, Billy Bragg, Johnny Marr and a host of others, this is the first fully authorized biography of the unique singer songwriting talent that was Kirsty MacColl.