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| Fashion Shoot for The Independent in the 1960's |
By her own admission, Marianne Faithfull "didn't do conventional". She was often known as the convent-educated teenager who abandoned school after meeting the Rolling Stones. But there was so much more. On one hand she was a picture of innocence, giddy with the highs of music chart success, before falling hard to alcohol and drug addiction.
It was her 'whisky-soaked' vocals, made cracked and dusky by years of painful life experiences and addiction, that became her most endearing brand in later years.
Her most famous song was 'As Tears Go By' and her 1979 No-wave classic 'Broken English', which spawned a string of hits including the title track and the 'Ballad Of Lucy Jordan'.
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born in Hampstead on 29 December 1946.
Her mother was Baroness Eva Sacher-Masoch. She was a Hungarian, half-Jewish former ballet dancer, who fled her native country to escape the Nazi invasion during WWII.
Her father, Mjr. Glyn Faithfull, was widely known as the eccentric British MI6 agent who became a professor of Italian literature in later years.
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| Young Marrianne - Belfast Telegraph |
Young Marianne was to spend her early years at Braziers Park, which was basically a posh hippy commune, founded by her father at an Oxfordshire country house. In her autobiography, 'Faithfull' (1994/2000) she described the place as a "mixture of high utopian thoughts and randy sex".
Lady Sacher-Masoch later divorced Mjr Faithfull and moved in with her then six-year-old daughter, Marianne, to a terraced house in Reading. She discouraged any further contact with her father. Bitterly, Marianne said she was raised like "one of her mother's cats".
Marianne was often sick with tuberculosis. She was sent to St Joseph's Roman Catholic boarding school. Her father objected, she says in her book, He complained that the nuns would "give her a problem with sex for the rest of her life".
While at the convent, Marianne began singing folk songs a cappella at coffee-houses in Reading. Before long, her unique and exquisite style, and obvious talent, opened a gateway to 'Swinging 60's London'.
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| With the Rolling Stones |
During a Rolling Stones launch party in 1964, as a guest of British artist John Dunbar, and was 'spotted' by flamboyant record producer Andrew Loog Oldham. He, famously, described her as an 'angel with impressive vital statistics'.
Oldham was also the Rolling Stones' manager at the time, and saw an opportunity to package her up as a new pop star, - a useful vehicle for songs that weren't quite right for the Stones, who at the time were predominantly a rhythm and blues band. Jagger and Richards wrote the gentle ballad, 'When Tears Go By', but they dismissed it as a "piece of tripe". Oldham gave it to Marianne Faithfull and it became a major hit for her.
It "fitted me so perfectly it might as well had been", she said. The melancholy classic, sung in her detached, husky,wintry voice, reached the UK Top 10. Not to be out done, the Stones, disappointed by missing a hit, they recorded their own version a year later.
Marianne, then did follow up singles, including 'Summer Nights', 'This Little Bird' and - her highest chart success - 'Come and Stay with Me'.
Inspired by her doe-eyed looks, Bob Dylan wrote her a poem - but tore it up when she turned him down.
Instead, in 1965, Faithfull married John Dunbar, and birthed their son. Yet, soon afterwards, she left the family home and moved in with Mick Jagger, who was not her first Rolling Stone. "I slept with three of them," she later said, "and then I decided the lead singer was the best bet."
Either way her influence on the Stones proved significant. The hits 'Let's Spend the Night Together', 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' and 'Wild Horses' were written about her, apparently.
'Sympathy for the Devil' was so-called inspired by 'The Master and Margarita', by Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov was introduced to Jagger by Marianne.
And due to her fame, as one of the faces of the 1960s, Marianne was also able to carve out a side-career as an actor, appearing at London's Royal Court in an adaptation of Chekhov's 'Three Sisters' with Glenda Jackson.
Infamously, she became the actor ever to utter the F-word in a mainstream movie, Michael Winner's comedy drama 'I'll Never Forget What'sisname', in 1967, which also starred Orson Welles.
One year later, she appeared opposite Alain Delon, playing a doomed, leather-clad glam girl in 'The Girl on a Motorcycle' - an erotic, romantic drama film directed by Jack Cardiff, also starring Alain Delon. Her character's psychedelic fantasies and erotic scenes made the the film gain the first ever X-rating in the USA.
Then there was the drugs. A lot of drugs.
During raid on the Sussex house of Keith Richards' Marianne was caught naked, draped in a fur rug (which she took 'indecent pleasure in occasionally letting slip'.) There were filthy allegations involving a Mars bar. Marianne insists this was complete fiction.
Yet the continuous drug busts and addiction took a great toll on her reputation. "It destroyed me," she has said, reflecting back on that time. "To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising", she explained. But, "a woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother."
In 1969, Marianne wrote one of the Stones most chilling songs, 'Sister Morphine' with Jagger and Richards'. Under contention, the lyrics -later the subject of a legal dispute with the band - provide a terrifying insight into the effects and impacts of heroin and cocaine addiction. Especially the lines "The scream of the ambulance is sounding in my ears. Tell me, Sister Morphine, how long have I been lying here?"
Finally, her relationship with Jagger, fell apart at the turn of the decade and consecutively, Mariannel lost custody of her son. Then her life really began to spiral out of control.
There was a suicide attempt, which left her in a coma. She became an alcoholic and an anorexic heroin addict. She took to living in a bomb-damaged building in London's Soho district.
Looking back on those years she told the BBC in 2002 that she considered her addiction as a 'kind of brutal therapy'... "I was in agony and I healed myself as best I could," she said. "One of the ways was with drugs, because they are painkillers...It was all too much for me... I really didn't like my gilded cage."
Vocally, her voice changed, impacted by drug abuse, laryngitis, continuous sickness, giving her a permanently rough, gravelly, lower pitch.
Then, almost a decade after splitting with Jagger, Marianne returned with a triumphant New Wave album, 'Broken English'. Shedding the 1960's innocence, replacing it with harsher post-punk world-weary experience. The final track, 'Why'd Ya Do It?', a rant from a woman reacting to her man's infidelity (Jagger, we think) is the most personal. The Rolling Stone party-girl becomes the sophisticated gravel-voiced muse.
The album was a milestone for many New Wave artists. The title track had the cold uncertainty of the early-80's Cold War, Reagan era. Critical success was varied, but now has recovered, doing well in Germany, France and Europe. But, oddly only #57 in the UK charts. But it did earn her a Grammy in 1981.
Marianne moved to the USA, where her record company, Island Records insisted she go to rehab. Still under the spell of addiction, she had a string of accidents, likely induced by drugs, including a jaw break, and her heart stopping. But she finally brought it all together and went on to release more than a dozen albums over the next thirty years.
Always worried about money, she's auctioned off many of her 1960's memorabilia, most lately last year, claiming she 'preferred gardening to looking back'.
In her late 70s, she'd inherited her mother's ancient title and became, technically at least, a baroness . She was of late living in Paris.
Illness continued to plague her, including breast cancer and hepatitis C scares leading her to cancel concert tours. Then there was complications from a broken back and hip, and complications from Corona Virus, that made her think she'd never sing again.
But she never gave up. One her last projects was a record that put the words of Keats and Wordsworth to music. And then her 21st album 'Negative Capability', which was described by the Guardian as "masterly mediation on ageing and death", notable for 'They Come at Night', a wild, furious response to the Bataclan shooting in Paris in 2015.
The album also dealt with Marianne's own increasing frailty and loneliness and the loss of close friends, such as fellow Rolling Stones muse Anita Pallenberg.
We'll remember Marianne Faithfull for her connection to the Stones, her drug addiction, but also her remarkable output, her charm and her wit. Her insistence to do things her way. - proof a rock star's muse can become a respected musician and actor artist in her own right.
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