Karen O'Brien

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 20 years became symbolic rescue missions to retrieve British pop music from all that was saccharine and shallow, manufactured and mainstream. Overcoming agonizing 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."

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