Last March, Kirsty MacColl released Tropical Brainstorm, a witty, wise and acerbic work widely hailed as the best album of her career. At the time, she said that "whenever I go into a studio, I operate on the principle that I might get hit by a bus tomorrow. And I'd hate the obituaries to have to read: `And her last album was her not-very-good album.' "
She avoided that fate, but her death on December 18th aged 41, must prompt speculation about the albums she might have made. Tropical Brainstorm bore all the hallmarks of her recent infatuation with South America - even though it was recorded in drizzly old Britain with non-Latin musicians - but throughout her career she proved herself adept at writing or performing in diverse idioms.
Kirsty MacColl's first Top 20 hit from 1981, There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis, was a novelty effort, which suggested she might be a kind of female Chas and Dave. But her collaboration with the Pogues, on the whisky-sodden 1987 Christmas hit, Fairytale Of New York, revealed new musical and dramatic gifts, while later releases found her tripping nonchalantly through country and western, rock and electronic dance music.
Even though she never entirely overcame the stage fright which probably kept her from achieving the success that should have been her due, Kirsty MacColl was steeped in music and the performing arts. Her father was the folk musician Ewan MacColl, and her mother was the dancer and choreographer Jean Newlove, although, by the time Kirsty was born, her father had married Peggy Seeger.
She grew up in Croydon, south London, with her mother, her older brother Hamish and three younger half-siblings. Her first adventures in the music business found her tiptoeing round the edges of punk rock. In 1978, she sang with a band called the Drug Addix; she dubbed herself Mandy Doubt. The group made an EP called The Drug Addix Make A Record, which came to the attention of Stiff Records. However, Stiff were only interested in Kirsty MacColl, and invited her to record a debut solo single, They Don't Know; it was released in June 1979, after she had dropped out of art college. The disc flopped, but the song became a substantial hit for Tracey Ullman four years later.
Despite the success of A Guy Works, Kirsty MacColl still could not establish herself, not least because of her fear of live performance. Once, on a tour of Ireland, she rushed through her material at such a pace that she ran out of songs and had to sing them all again. Nonetheless, she was back at Stiff Records in 1985, and returned to the UK charts with a version of Billy Bragg's song, A New England. By now Kirsty MacColl was married to the record producer Steve Lillywhite, who was quick to make full use of her talents, which included perfect pitch and a knack for recording harmony vocals on the first take.
She appeared regularly as a backing singer on production efforts by Lillywhite and others, and featured on discs by Simple Minds, Happy Mondays, The Smiths, Talking Heads and Robert Plant.
It was her solo album, Kite (1989), that finally saw Kirsty MacColl realising some of her potential. The songs were, by turns, funny, tender and furiously political, one of her recurring themes being the treatment of women in the music business.
"The music industry packages women," she said. "You're either a dolly-bird bimbo or a soapbox sociologist."
Subsequent releases included Electric Landlady, Titanic Days and the compilation Galore, but despite the manifest quality of her songwriting - and showers of critical plaudits - sales were disappointing, and Kirsty MacColl grew accustomed to the chore of shopping for new record labels.
She remained visible via regular television appearances in French and Saunders, while her music has been used in several movies and in the TV comedy, Moving Story.
She was never able to reconcile herself fully to working in a music industry she often despised: "It gets slightly less to do with music every year," she complained. This, perhaps, contributed to the breakup of her marriage in the mid-90s. "She's brilliant," a colleague once said, "and sometimes she's not very happy."
Kirsty MacColl's recent discovery of the delights of South America and the Caribbean had even prompted her to consider giving up music for travelling.
"It was like a sudden liberation of my brain," she recalled. "I had spent so long being unhappy in a very British way, and suddenly there was all this new stuff."
She is survived by her two sons, Jamie and Louis.
Kirsty MacColl: born 1959; died, December 2000