It was eleven years ago today that Kirsty Maccoll was killed in a boating accident in Mexico.

Kirsty who?

Hush up and grab a seat.

MacColl was the daughter of Brit folk singer Ewan MacColl.  She was a wonderful singer, drop-dead gorgeous…

…and perpetually plagued by bad luck.

Recruited from a failed punk band, she had her first single, “They Don’t Know”, a girl-group homage, when she was 19…

…which garnered huge airplay in the UK – and was released just in time for a record-distributors strike to interrupt shipments to record stores, meaning the single never got on the sales charts.  (A cover by Tracey Ullman went into the American top forty in the early eighties).

Bad luck notwithstanding, MacColl mined the girl group tradition for a good long time, with a loving year and a wry sense of humor:

I recently discovered this one – “A Bench In Soho Square”, one of her most beautiful songs…:

…which is why there is a bench in London’s Soho Square in her honor, just in case you happen to be in the neighborhood.

MacColl dove into other styles as well; “Innocence” was an homage to British Invasion-era pop…:

…while “Queen of Belfast City” beat a bloke over the head with its “irish”-ness.

As much as she was covered, she covered other artists as well – in this case, with a cover that runs rings around The Smiths’ “You Just Haven’t Earned It Yet Baby”…:

(a statement that will, inevitably, bring out one or two outraged Smiths fans to insist that MacColl wasn’t fit to carry Morrissey’s therapy scheduler.  I like arguing with Smiths fans about as much as I do with Alex Jones fans).

Of course, this time of year her only real hit in the US is everywhere:

And for my money, I always loved this upbeat but wistful walk back through a bit of cheating gone terribly wrong:

At any rate, today’s the day I spin me up a whole lot of Kirsty MacColl.