The last album by English songstress Kirsty MacColl, who died in a freak accident while swimming in the Gulf of Mexico in December, will be released Stateside on April 24.
Tropical Brainstorm, MacColl's first album since 1993's
Titanic Days, was released in the U.K. before her death. MacColl delves deeply into the Cuban music she had already explored on 1991's Electric Landlady, according to a representative of Instinct Records, which is releasing the album.
The daughter of English folk legend Ewan MacColl, Kirsty MacColl scored her first U.K. hit with 1981's "There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis" (RealAudio excerpt), followed by her 1985 cover of Billy Bragg's "A New England." Her 1979 debut single, "They Don't Know," hit #10 in the United States as recorded by Tracey Ullman. Perhaps best known to U.S. audiences as Shane MacGowan's duet partner on the Pogues' latter-day Christmas standard, "Fairytale of New York," MacColl also collaborated with the Rolling Stones and the Smiths during her 20-year career.
MacColl's own records are musically ambitious, fiercely literate affairs, such as 1988's Kite and Electric Landlady, and can be seen as a female analog to the work of Elvis Costello. She was often produced by her then-husband, Steve Lillywhite (U2, Dave Matthews Band), with whom she had two children.
The singer was struck and killed by a speedboat while she swam off the coast of Cozumel, Mexico, on December 18. She was 41.
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