Kirsty MacColl
Photo: Rocky Scheneck

Folk singer Billy Bragg and Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood honored Kirsty MacColl at a memorial service Saturday by singing her songs.

The British singer was killed on December 18 when a speedboat struck her while she was swimming with her two sons off the coast of Mexico. She was 41.

According to a MacColl family spokesperson, who described the ceremony as reflective, Bragg opened the service by singing "A New England," a song he wrote that MacColl made a hit in 1985.

"While others just sing about issues, Kirsty got involved," Bragg said at the memorial, according to London newspaper The Independent. "I considered her not just a friend but a comrade." Johnson ended the ceremony by joining MacColl's band on the bittersweet "Don't Come the Cowboy With Me Sonny Jim," according to The Independent. More than 900 people packed into London's Saint Martin-in-the-Fields Church near Trafalgar Square, including friends and family such as U2's Bono, television host and ex-Squeeze keyboardist Jools Holland and comedian Phill Jupitus.

A collection was held after the service for the Cuba Music Fund, which has been set up in memory of MacColl. She was working on a BBC show about Cuban music at the time of her death, and she had become involved in the campaign to lift U.S. sanctions against Cuba.

MacColl released her debut single, "They Don't Know," on Stiff Records in 1979, and although it failed to chart in the U.S. or England, Tracey Ullman's cover version was a hit in both countries in 1984. MacColl scored her own hit with "There's a Guy Works Down the Chip Shop (Swears He's Elvis)" in 1981 and released her latest album, Tropical Brainstorm, last year.

• Kirsty MacColl
• Billy Bragg
• Holly Johnson

Billy Bragg and Wilco are putting the final touches on their second album of Woody Guthrie tunes, the follow-up to 1998's critically acclaimed and Grammy-nominated record, "Mermaid Avenue."

• Severance Hall Cast - "Hard Travelin' Hootenanny"
• Peter Glazer - "Payback"
• Ramblin' Jack Elliott - "1913 Massacre"
• Arlo Guthrie - "Regular Fires"
• Billy Bragg - "Against The Law"
• Bruce Springsteen - "Riding In My Car"
• David Pirner - "Pretty Boy Floyd"
• Arlo Guthrie - "Free In Every Moment"
• Ani DiFranco - "Do Re Mi"
• Fred Hellerman - "What A Song Is"
• Arlo Guthrie - "Dust Storm Disaster"
• Craig Werner - "It Ain't About Bein' Perfect"
• Bruce Springsteen - "Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (Deportee)"
• Country Joe McDonald - "Does Music Change The World?"
• Indigo Girls w/ Ani DiFranco - "Ramblin' 'Round"
• Arlo Guthrie - "Change The Moment"
• Tim Robbins - "Born Naked"
• Ramblin' Jack Elliott - "Talking Dust Bowls"
• Severance Hall Cast - "'Til We Outnumber 'Em (This Land Is Your Land)"

• Billy Bragg
• Ani DiFranco
• Woody Guthrie
• Wilco

Organizers for Bumbershoot, Seattle's annual arts and music festival, have unveiled this year's lineup of musical performers, which will once again feature an eclectic mix of folk, hip-hop, world, and modern rock artists playing in and around the Seattle Center throughout Labor Day weekend, from September 3-6.

• Black Eyed Peas
• Billy Bragg
• Cake
• Everlast
• House of Pain

Already one of the most critically-lauded albums of the year, Billy Bragg and Wilco have confirmed plans for a follow-up to "Mermaid Avenue," the album of previously unreleased Woody Guthrie songs to which Bragg and Wilco wrote new music for.

The second Bragg/Wilco album will feature material originally recorded during the "Avenue" sessions held in Chicago and Dublin, Ireland. As Bragg told MTV News, the possibility for a subsequent Guthrie album factored into how songs were selected and recorded for the initial album.

"Wilco and myself had such a great time working on the project that we actually recorded 40 tracks," Bragg said, "and eventually we had to be pulled off the material, or else we'd still be working on the 'Mermaid Avenue.'"

"I suppose we thought in our minds that if this material is as good and strong as we think it is," he continued, Bragg said, "but that wasn't because it wasn't good enough. It was just because we wanted some good tracks to be on the second album as well. The second album will have by no means second-rate songs. There's stuff just as powerful as what's on the first album." [28.8 RealVideo]

Both Bragg and Wilco plan to issue their own new albums prior to the release of their collaborative sequel to "Mermaid Avenue," which a spokesperson for Elektra said was tentatively planned for spring 1999.

• Billy Bragg
• Woody Guthrie
• Wilco

Left wing folk hero Woody Guthrie, who died in 1967 and was best known for his anthemic "This Land Is Your Land," has been re-born -- in a way -- with the "Mermaid Avenue" collaboration between Billy Bragg and Wilco.

The songs on "Mermaid Avenue" were taken from a stash of 3,000 lyrics Guthrie never set to music, and that his daughter Nora compiled for a Guthrie archive in Manhattan, New York.

After hearing Bragg sing at a Guthrie memorial six years ago, Nora asked the British singer, who's also championed political causes in the U.K., to set some of the lyrics to music, and the alt. country outfit Wilco joined the project in '96.

In an interview with MTV News, Bragg admitted he wasn't exactly a Guthrie groupie, but was drawn to the project by Guthrie's personal and political pathos, which he believes would fit very comfortably alongside some of Bragg's punk rock idols.

"My biggest influence was the Clash," Bragg said, "who wrote anti-fascists slogans on their clothing and their guitars. But it is Woody who wrote an anti-fascist slogan on his acoustic guitar before electric guitars had even been invented. So you have to ask yourself, who was the first punk? Was it Joe Strummer or Woody?" [1MB QuickTime]

"Mermaid Avenue" is named after a street in Coney Island, Brooklyn, where the Guthrie family lived in the late '40s and '50s. Bragg is now working on a Guthrie documentary of the same name, and next Tuesday he will play the Crystal Theater in Guthrie's hometown of Okema, Oklahoma.

• Billy Bragg
• Woody Guthrie

October 9 [10:00 EDT] -- British folksinger Billy Bragg has been given a unique honor: the daughter of the late Woody Guthrie, a giant of American folksinging, has given Bragg a batch of his lyrics for songs that were never written.

Bragg is now setting them to music, and will record the results with Wilco¹s Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett in February.

Woody's daughter Nora contacted Bragg two years ago after hearing Billy's song "You Woke Up The Neighborhood," which happens to be the same title Woody Guthrie gave to a piece of his own artwork.

Bragg is also working on a documentary film on the life and work of Woody Guthrie.

• Billy Bragg
• Wilco