Song of the Day: Sharon Shannon/Kirsty MacColl ... Libertango
August 02, 2011
The Salut! Live Song of the Day series just won't shut up up ...
Lovely singer, inspired musician and innovator. Some combination, and it was to be found with the Grace Jones song Libertango, as sung by Kirsty MacColl to gorgeous accompaniment led by Sharon Shannon.
The thought of Kirsty dying such a tragic and unnecessary death, when a powerboat ploughed into her during a diving expedition with her sons off Cozumel, Mexico, brings a shudder 11 years on,
Seeing danger, she pushed clear the son who was in the boat's path before being hit. The boat had no right to be in the restricted waters where divers were meant to be able to pursue their hoby free of such perils.
I was very fond of Kirsty MacColl's voice, whether on the very superior pop songs she recorded, They Don't Know and A New England, in duet with Shane MacGowan on the Pogues' Fairytale of New York or with her father, the revered folk singer and writer Ewan MacColl, on the The Manchester Rambler.
Each of those was very different, and the same may be said of Libertango. Dreamy and sultry, it is one of the most gripping of the many magnificent collaborations in which Sharon Shannon has become involved.
* Galway Girl, on which Libertango appears, is a fabulous album, with bags of exciting collaborations plus plenty of Sharon Shannonls tunes to pelase her core following, Buy it here.
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