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Kirsty MacColl: The One and Only
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. Her tragic death in a senseless boating accident came shortly after the release of her long-awaited album Tropical Brainstorm, an Anglo-Latin pop hybrid that embraced her passion for Cuba. The One and Only is the definitive Kirsty MacColl biography and a tribute to a highly original talent.
- GenresMusicBiographyNonfiction
264 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 8, 2025
interesting and detail look at the career and life of kirsty MacColl her song writing and musical life and her sudden and tragic death. charts her career with interviews with people who worked with her. enjoyed the book overall.
April 6, 2020
See that girl: “Perhaps it’s time for the definitive biography,” commented a fellow devotee when I mentioned on the KM Facebook page that I was finally getting round to reading this. Perhaps so, because The One And Only isn’t quite it....
Rock star reads tend to fall into one of two moulds: the cash-in and the fan-wank. Karen O’Brien’s life of the much-missed and misunderstood MacColl treads a thin line between the two, and whilst it’s clear she’s a fan, it avoids maudlin sentimentality for which I’m sure her famously acerbic subject would have had no patience. It doesn’t totally avoid the traps of the genre, with some over-engineered writing that emulates NME in its pomp.
O’Brien is too respectful to genuinely analyse and deconstruct MacColl’s talent - she falls back on the ‘one of us’ and ‘witty, observational’ tags too often. When she does lurch into criticism it’s with disastrous results - I seriously doubt anyone sees Do They Know It’s Christmas? (great cause, lousy song) as equal to Happy Christmas (War Is Over) or even Fairytale of New York. I won’t mention Stop The Fucking Cavalry.
Nevertheless, workmanlike, sometimes sloppily-edited (mistaking one album with its punning title for the Jimi Hendrix LP it was satirising is a bit of a faux pas) as this is, it’s a thorough canter through our Kirsty’s life, and good enough to make me dig out my CD box set of From Croydon To Cuba, the retrospective that appeared a few years after her horrific and tragic death. Because so much of what she recorded isn’t on Spotify.
If a lot of O’Brien’s research seems derived from a BBC documentary produced after she was killed, including extensive verbatim quotes from the likes of Bono, Johnny Marr and a host of other collaborators, The One And Only becomes more original - and genuinely touching - towards its end as it describes with some poignancy the musical and personal renaissance in the last year of her life, and the shocking loss.
Not definitive, maybe, and perhaps this most eloquent and literate of musicians deserves something more graceful and analytical, but a decent tribute nonetheless these 20 years from her death. On the other hand, you could just dig out Kite (which is on Spotify) and hear the woman in her own sharp and unapologetic words and music. As she said, “You can’t get even but you can get mad.”
Rock star reads tend to fall into one of two moulds: the cash-in and the fan-wank. Karen O’Brien’s life of the much-missed and misunderstood MacColl treads a thin line between the two, and whilst it’s clear she’s a fan, it avoids maudlin sentimentality for which I’m sure her famously acerbic subject would have had no patience. It doesn’t totally avoid the traps of the genre, with some over-engineered writing that emulates NME in its pomp.
O’Brien is too respectful to genuinely analyse and deconstruct MacColl’s talent - she falls back on the ‘one of us’ and ‘witty, observational’ tags too often. When she does lurch into criticism it’s with disastrous results - I seriously doubt anyone sees Do They Know It’s Christmas? (great cause, lousy song) as equal to Happy Christmas (War Is Over) or even Fairytale of New York. I won’t mention Stop The Fucking Cavalry.
Nevertheless, workmanlike, sometimes sloppily-edited (mistaking one album with its punning title for the Jimi Hendrix LP it was satirising is a bit of a faux pas) as this is, it’s a thorough canter through our Kirsty’s life, and good enough to make me dig out my CD box set of From Croydon To Cuba, the retrospective that appeared a few years after her horrific and tragic death. Because so much of what she recorded isn’t on Spotify.
If a lot of O’Brien’s research seems derived from a BBC documentary produced after she was killed, including extensive verbatim quotes from the likes of Bono, Johnny Marr and a host of other collaborators, The One And Only becomes more original - and genuinely touching - towards its end as it describes with some poignancy the musical and personal renaissance in the last year of her life, and the shocking loss.
Not definitive, maybe, and perhaps this most eloquent and literate of musicians deserves something more graceful and analytical, but a decent tribute nonetheless these 20 years from her death. On the other hand, you could just dig out Kite (which is on Spotify) and hear the woman in her own sharp and unapologetic words and music. As she said, “You can’t get even but you can get mad.”
May 29, 2025
Great biography of the wonderful Kirsty MacColl and not too long
March 18, 2023
Probably best known for two almost-novelty songs, Kirsty MacColl had five albums over a 20 year period. Combining pop melodies with wit, acerbic commentaries and often deeply personal lyrics about her own life, she played with, wrote for and was rated by The Smiths, the Pogues, U2, Simple Minds and the Rolling Stones.
Not so convinced by this biography though. It doesnt really scratch below the surface, and anyone interested in the lyrics / stories behind all but the most famous few songs will be disappointed.
Not so convinced by this biography though. It doesnt really scratch below the surface, and anyone interested in the lyrics / stories behind all but the most famous few songs will be disappointed.
November 10, 2020
I love Kirsty Maccoll. She was a great poet who then created catchy pop songs out of her complex lyrics. Some of that comes across in this average biography. Overall it is a little scattershot, jumping unnecessarily backwards and forwards at times and I think is better at conveying Kirsty as a human than analysing her music. Then again perhaps that’s what I needed to discover.
May 11, 2025
My very favourite singer and songwriter ever. We did the first dance at our wedding to "Don't come the Cowboy". So this was interesting, but it could have done with a GOOD EDIT. Sometimes it felt like one of those "Rock Family Trees" which used to be a TV staple.
July 8, 2019
An excellent tribute to a much missed artist.
February 22, 2014
Thoughtful, well-researched and sympathetic biography of one of the great and underrecognized talents of recent pop music. I always admired Kirsty MacColl's music, and was deeply saddened after her untimely and undeniably unfair death in 2001, but I never knew much of her history or of her personality or politics.
This bio does a good job explaining her roots in the politically-motivated and legendary MacColl family of folk music, her troubled family life with uber-producer Steve Lillywhite (U2, Simple Minds, Rolling Stones), as well as her talents as a songwriter and singer. What emerges here is that Kirsty never had quite the opportunity, or quite the right mix of ambition and guile, to become a superstar. She wrote hit records and then would disappear from the music scene, and spent much of her 20s and 30s as a wife and mom who would - intermittently - sing on legendary tracks like "Fairytale of New York" with the Pogues. And her entire career had only five proper studio albums, even though she sang professionally from her teens until her last record - the remarkable Cuban- and Brazilian-influenced TROPICAL BRAINSTORM - at age 40. So the talent was there, the connections were there, but in America at least Kirsty was a minor figure - even if U2, the Smiths, Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg, among others in the British isles, sung her praises.
The book gets a bit lost in the horror of Kirsty's death in Mexico - struck by a speedboat while diving in a protected area - and the ensuing legal battles. And some of the political bits are under informed and perhaps not critical enough. Karen O'Brien is a pop music writer and maybe doesn't have the chops to cover these with the rigor they need. But still a thoroughly researched and very readable exploration of a sadly underappreciated talent.
This bio does a good job explaining her roots in the politically-motivated and legendary MacColl family of folk music, her troubled family life with uber-producer Steve Lillywhite (U2, Simple Minds, Rolling Stones), as well as her talents as a songwriter and singer. What emerges here is that Kirsty never had quite the opportunity, or quite the right mix of ambition and guile, to become a superstar. She wrote hit records and then would disappear from the music scene, and spent much of her 20s and 30s as a wife and mom who would - intermittently - sing on legendary tracks like "Fairytale of New York" with the Pogues. And her entire career had only five proper studio albums, even though she sang professionally from her teens until her last record - the remarkable Cuban- and Brazilian-influenced TROPICAL BRAINSTORM - at age 40. So the talent was there, the connections were there, but in America at least Kirsty was a minor figure - even if U2, the Smiths, Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg, among others in the British isles, sung her praises.
The book gets a bit lost in the horror of Kirsty's death in Mexico - struck by a speedboat while diving in a protected area - and the ensuing legal battles. And some of the political bits are under informed and perhaps not critical enough. Karen O'Brien is a pop music writer and maybe doesn't have the chops to cover these with the rigor they need. But still a thoroughly researched and very readable exploration of a sadly underappreciated talent.
November 21, 2016
A very good book - but a reminder of one of the most tragic losses not only of the music industry but to the many who loved her. I knew bits of Kirsty's story. How could I not? Her lyrics tell all. I didn't know details of the 'accident'
May 21, 2025
Feia temps que volia aprofundir en la vida i obra de la gran i enyorada Kirsty MacColl --"one of the great english songwriters" (Bono)--. 'The one and only', de Karen O'Brien, permet endinsar-se en la biografia d'una artista lliure i original; a reivindicar sempre.
February 9, 2013
Very sad :-(
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews