"My Tribute to Kirsty MacColl" by Karen J White (Covid iso show) [68mins]

"My Tribute to Kirsty MacColl"

• Covid iso show - 68mins duration

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Hi there!  Thanks for tuning into my video.   This is a recording of “My Tribute to Kirsty MacColl” which is a mix of a range of Kirsty’s songs interspersed with a brief storyline of her life.  I have cobbled together snippets taken from a wide variety of sources - online, from biographies, and from chats with a several friends, fans and family members of Kirsty’s; to the best of my knowledge all the information I offer is correct.

The reason we’ve made this video of my show is because I wasn’t able to take the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year, 2020, as planned – due to Covid 19 restrictions of course: Australians were barred from leaving the country and then the Fringe was cancelled anyway.  I had been scheduled to perform the show 12 times – 7 in the first week of the Fringe and 5 in the last week.  Friends from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland has said they’d come and see my show … this isn’t the same as attending a live show, but it’s the nearest we can get in the circumstances!

It’s really strange, performing to cameras rather than an audience; I know many folks do a superb job of it, but I really miss the audience rapport and reaction.  Still, making a video provided me with one massive advantage over the live show – frock changes!!  Oh, the joy!  A different outfit for each song – I liked that!

Whilst this is a video, made in sections rather than one non-stop performance, it’s still basically the show you would have seen if I’d been able to perform in Edinburgh – basically the same as I had already performed at the Perth FringeWorld Festival in January and the Adelaide Fringe Festival in March.  If I completely mangled my words or a song then yes, I called ‘cut’ and we did a re-take, but little fluffs, the odd naff chord, they’ve been left in.  

John (my husband, in case you don’t know) of course operated the lighting, the cameras, the sound equipment, he put together the little mock stage – let’s face it, he did everything other than sing the songs and play the guitars … oh, and change frocks!  With 5 different camera angles John also gave himself quite a job to go through the footage of each song and pick the most appropriate angle for each shot.  I think he’s done an amazing job, as always.

We don’t have a space big enough to use our big, full on stage lights so we had to rely on being able to enhance a good level of natural light into the room.  That gave us a limited amount of time to do the filming.  We set ourselves the goal of filming 3 songs a day in that little time-slot; that meant we’d get the filming completed in a week.  You know what they say about the best plans of mice and men??

3 songs on Monday – check.  3 songs on Tuesday – check.  Day off filming on Wednesday as I had a dental appointment in town (speaking was a challenge for some hours!).  3 songs on Thursday?  Nope.  Just before lunch the doorbell rang; it was the local livestock agent who arranges the purchase and sale of small numbers of cattle for us to put on our paddocks, to help keep the grass low (long grass and such can be a significant fire hazard).  “Ah, good, you’re in!” he said.  “I’ve just bought you 8 little heifers – they’ll be here within the hour!”  

That meant preparing the pen, getting feed ready, cleaning out bowls and such that hadn’t been used since the last batch of automatic lawnmowers left us in May … and then we were dealing with a bunch of VERY young heifers, scared out of their wits, who needed to be calmed down and fed.  They are absolute sweethearts and gradually getting more relaxed around us but of course they took up a lot of time for the first few weeks.

Getting back to the filming was not helped by the fact that dealing with the cattle caused me to reignite an old wrist injury which made it impossible to play guitar for several weeks!  In fact, I was getting to the stage of deciding to record the remaining 2 songs that required me to play guitar using backing tracks instead of my live playing.  However, with the aid of a good hand and wrist support, I managed to muddle through and we got back into the filming in November.

By this time the lighting had changed and we decided just to go for 2 songs a day, so that the natural light wasn’t too different for each song. And finally we got all 12 songs (with their spoken introductions and general chat) ‘in the can’ as they say.  All John had to do then was put it together into a continuous hour of entertainment.  Note the use of the word ‘all’.

Now it’s done – over to you to watch, listen and, hopefully, enjoy. Remember, it’s not a ‘polished’ performance, it’s my way of getting my ‘Tribute to Kirsty MacColl’ show to you as ‘live’ as I can make it.  Let me know what you think of it – write a comment, send an email, message me on Facebook, whatever method you want, with praise or with criticism.  Thanks again for your support, it really is appreciated.  By the way, we originally intended for me to perform the show as a live stream, but with people in the UK and Europe, people in the USA and Canada, people in Asia and in Australia all saying they’d like to see the show … well, what time would we do the live stream??  There is also the fact that we have to rely on satellite for our internet connection – it gives us a decent download speed and a rubbish upload speed and dreadful latency, so live streaming probably isn’t a sensible option for us full stop! Having ruled that out we decided to make a video and offer it on a Pay to View website, but the ones we originally thought we might use are in the States and I’d have to fill in US tax forms, get a US tax number, etc., etc., - all in all it seemed like a lot of hassle for a relatively small reward – John finding Sellfy has hopefully solved that problem.  

I really ought to let you know how the theme for my show came about. Having released my first studio album ‘By Request’ in 2014 (which included 2 Kirsty songs, out of interest – 2 of the most requested songs I was singing at the time!), by 2015 I was wanting to get out and about with my music.  Discussing this with my crazy Irish friend Maud Hamill, Maud said “Well why don’t you do a Kirsty MacColl show?  You do so many of her songs you could put together a great show, and her music is still hugely popular.”  And the rest, as they say, is history. 

Perhaps, though, I should explain the discrepancy between 2015 and 2020!  First off, John and I decided that I should have a ‘Kirsty’ album to support a show, and so ‘In These Shoes?’ was born.  We began recording at the very end of 2015 at Pegasus Studios in Cairns with the amazing Nigel Pegrum (of Steeleye Span, The Barron Knights, and Kamarunga fame, to name a few) as the recording engineer, co-producer, drummer, provider of special effects, and, to particularly beautiful effect, flautist together with an extraordinary bevy of musicians ; we put the final vocals on in July 2016 … when to my intense pleasure Michael Simic (aka Mikelangelo of Mikelangelo and the Black Sea Gentleman) provided the male voice for my cover of The Pogues’ perennial Christmas cracker ‘Fairytale of New York’.  

Around the time of finishing the recording something that had started as an occasional niggly problem with my voice was gradually worsening and my voice became unreliable.  I was seeing a specialist for the problem and, whilst he couldn’t find anything obviously causing it he tried me on a variety of medications in an attempt to cure me (something was causing me to have a persistent cough which, in turn, was inflaming my vocal cords, which were therefore not working properly!).  The official launch for ‘In These Shoes?’ had to be postponed because my voice just wasn’t up to public performances, other than doing a few songs at open mic events!  

I did not despair though … I was determined that one day I would bring this show to the unsuspecting World!  As the format for the show started to take shape I realised there were some songs I would want to include that I wouldn’t be able to perform without a backing band (I recognise my musical limitations!) and, of course, touring with a band is financially simply way beyond the means of most musicians, certainly beyond mine. That meant I would need recorded backing tracks for those songs, not all of which were on ‘In these Shoes?’ … and so ‘Soho Square’ was born!   Recording the vocals was a slow process, due to my inability to sing for long at any one time, but I was determined to complete the album before a scheduled visit to an ENT specialist in Melbourne for surgery on my vocal cords – I was scared I would be unable to sing AT ALL after such surgery).

The really, really good news is that the specialist decided against the surgery, the previous specialist discovered a potential cause of my problem cough (through a medical paper from the UK), and the suggested ‘cure’ – a pill 3 times a day for a few months – seemed to do the trick.   ‘Soho Square’ was released in 2019 and I started re-strengthening my voice ready for performing again.  Time to get serious about what to include in the show.  It was originally put together as 2 sets of 45 minutes each; to produce the show for a Fringe Festival performance I needed to compress it to 1 set of 60 minutes, and that is what is presented in this video.  It has meant truncating the amount of information I can talk through and reducing the number of songs, but I think it hangs together very well in this form too.

I had applied to slots at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival but had been unsuccessful, with “subtle” hints from organisers suggesting that I should first perform at either the Perth or Adelaide Fringe Festivals, so much of the middle part of 2019 was taken up with applying to both – successfully, as it turned out!  From there, my application to the 2020 Edinburgh Fringe was successful, 12 shows, as previously mentioned … all, alas, cancelled along with the entire Festival when Covid 19 smacked the World between the eyes.  The next move, of course, was to produce this video and here we are!

Before I go, there are a few specific folks I’d like to say thank you to. Fellow fans of our beloved Kirsty, some of whom I have met at the six Kirstyfests I’ve attended, some of whom I only ‘know’ through the Facebook group ‘The Kirsty MacColl Fan Gang’ have been incredibly encouraging, egging me on to put a show of Kirsty’s music together and some of them offered thoughts and suggestions (when requested) to help decide which songs to record and to include in the shows; I can’t remember everyone to name them individually but I have had specific and enormous support from Sue Lovell, Tim Milton, Rich Parker and Jess Cully amongst all the others and the amazing Ruby Pepper (“Kirsty’s Little Fan”) has been a huge help with fact-checking and proof-reading. Kirsty’s younger son Louis (Louis Lillywhite as opposed to Louis White … my son!) is highly complimentary at each Kirstyfest, and that’s a HUGE boost to my ego, as you can imagine!  A CD exchange with the lovely Philip Rambow (fabulous singer-songwriter, including being co-writer with Kirsty of her fabulous song “There’s A Guy Works Down the Chip Shop”) meant that Philip has listened to all my recordings of ‘Kirsty’ songs and kindly sent me a ‘critique’ of each CD, as he received them.  Of ‘In These Shoes?’ he wrote: “Hi Karen. Just received your CD yesterday. I listened to it all and want to congratulate you in a really really excellent and in depth work. The playing is excellent throughout, all the arrangements are spot on. But the vocals and especially the harmonies are right on the money. Trying to get the layering and effect of Kirsty's great vocal sound is so so difficult and you've achieved that better than anyone I've heard. The only comment I'd make is that the arrangements could have been even more your own than they are here. My personal favourite is actually The Butcher Boy, and maybe that's because there's less to try to get in from Kirsty's original, so being sparer, there's more room for raw emotion which is here in a profound and touching way. The violin playing is also really really soulful. So all and all a hugely accomplished and lovingly put together project. You and your whole team should be very very proud of yourselves. Thanks so much for sending. If there's any thing I can do to help with promotion let me know. All the best.”  Then of ‘Soho Square’ he wrote: “Hi Karen. Been as busy as a bee with ADHD. The new album is great. Sounds more comfortable and confident than the last one. Congratulations to the whole team. I would suggest that next time take a more obscure song and do a completely unique version. Unleash the collective creativity. You all deserve to have that freedom. It’s a helluva good team. Well done.”  I feel highly honoured to receive such enthusiasm from a musician I have such respect for … and was a cohort of Kirsty herself!

I mustn’t forget to say a big, big Thank You to that crazy Irish friend Maud, without whom I don’t think I would ever have come up with the brilliant idea of putting together a show to honour the music and memory of the amazing and much lamented Kirsty MacColl – nice one, Maud! 

Thanks again for watching the video.  Don’t forget to let me know what you think of it  and feel free to check out my website … and maybe even buy some of my music!  I look forward to hopefully catching up at a live show somewhere, somewhen; meanwhile keep safe and keep smiling!

Oh, and if I’ve learnt nothing else from making this video, I’ve learnt not to wear dangly earrings when using a headset microphone!

Karen xx
my email: karen@karenjwhite.com.au

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Video file ref: kjw-kirsty.tribute.show-2020.v02.1.3-VP18.1080p20M.mp4
Words ref: My-Tribute-to-Kirsty-MacColl-sellfy-210205.docx
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