Trivia / Kirsty MacColl

• Covered Up: She covered up Billy Bragg's "A New England"; Tracey Ullman covered up MacColl's "They Don't Know" (albeit Kirsty was heavily involved with that particular cover herself).
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Although the reissue of her debut album Desperate Character has dealt with one long-standing Keep Circulating The Tapes issue, there are still various B-sides from the first decade of her career that haven't re-appeared. Also in this category is the 1985 stopgap album Kirsty MacColl, an Updated Re-release of Desperate Character which included three new tracks, only two of which are now available.
• Misattributed Song: Kirsty never recorded the folk song known as "Tell Me Ma" or "Belle of Belfast City". The version commonly misattributed to her is by Sham Rock and the vocalist is Anne Barrett, who sounds nothing like her. Quite apart from the very diferent timbre and range of the two singers' voices, Kirsty did not have, nor ever sing with, an Irish accent.
• Missing Episode: Her synthpop album Real was this for a very long time - it was supposed to be the follow-up to Desperate Character but Polydor dropped her without ever releasing it. About half the tracks trickled out on compilations over the years, but the full set wasn't released until 2023, forty years after it was recorded.
• Similarly Named Works: Her song "Terry" is unrelated to the 1960s hit by Twinkle (to whom she was often compared), though it may have been a Shout-Out.
• What Could Have Been: MacColl was tapped to perform backing vocals on The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead, only for the band to throw out her parts due to Johnny Marr finding her harmonies "really weird." Frontman Morrissey would instead provide the feminine backing vocals himself via pitch-shifting. MacColl and Marr would later end up working together anyways as session players on Talking Heads' 1988 album Naked.

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