Sun on the Water

Kirsty MacColl led a dazzling life; tender, creative, heroic and full of love. This book, by her mother Jean MacColl, charts with moving insight Kirsty's early years, celebrates her brilliant career at the front rank of the music business in the 1980s and '90s, and mourns her tragic and untimely death, killed by a speedboat in Mexican waters in December 2000. It also tells, with heartfelt truth, the shocking story of the elaborate cover-up and gross miscarriage of justice that followed, and appeals for justice to be done in her name.

Jean MacColl studied with the great dance and movement innovator, Rudolf Laban, and began a long association as an accomplished choreographer with the director Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop. Her marriage to the folk-singer Ewan MacColl ended soon after Kirsty was born. She single-handedly brought up her two children, Hamish and Kirsty, as a working mother in the 1960s. The author of two widely praised books, Laban for Actors and Dancers and Laban for All, she lives in London, from where she continues to publicise the Justice for Kirsty campaign.