Polydor never knew what to do with
Kirsty MacColl, even after 1981's "There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop" brought her the massive hit single she'd been threatening since her emergence two years earlier. A swift follow-through album,
Desperate Character, perished through lack of promotion; subsequent singles went nowhere; and a second album was abandoned when the label dropped her. But
MacColl simply took her magic elsewhere and, no sooner had she returned to the charts in 1984, than her ex-label was reconsidering its share of her archive. Kirsty MacColl was basically a reissue of
Desperate Character, but with its weaker numbers replaced with material from those aborted second LP sessions -- farewell, then, "Mexican Sofa," "Just One Look," and the country version of "Chipshop"; greetings to "Annie," "Roman Gardens," and "Berlin" (an earlier version of the single released independently during 1983). The substitutions really don't affect the overall shape of the record, although it's certainly worth noting that both "Roman Gardens" and "Berlin" were deemed worthy of inclusion on
MacColl's From Croydon to Cuba anthology, while
Desperate Character itself squeezes a mere three songs onto that set. Overall, however, Kirsty MacColl is more notable for its status as a rarity than for any quality of its own -- upon release, it sold even less than the album it supplanted. ~ Dave Thompson