Marianne Faithfull was a towering artist, not just the muse she was painted as
Alexis Petridis
30 January 2025
It is difficult to think of a moment in pop history less receptive to a 1960s icon relaunching their career than in 1979. At that point, British rock and pop resolutely inhabited a world shaped by punk: it was the year of 2-Tone and Tubeway Army’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, of Ian Dury at No 1 and Blondie releasing the bestselling album of the year. And it was a central tenet of punk that the 1960s and their attendant “culture freaks” were, as Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren put it: “fucking disgusting … vampiric … the most narcissistic generation there has ever been,” and that the decade’s famous names should no longer be afforded the kind of awed reverence they had enjoyed for most of the 70s. “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones,” as the Clash had sung.
Marianne Faithfull at home in Paris: ‘It’s literally a pain to do anything.’ Photograph: Yann Orhan/The Observer
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o get to Marianne Faithfull’s apartment above a Montparnasse boulevard, you go up four floors in a tiny art deco lift, the kind in which two people have to get to know each other pretty well. The door is opened by Miriam, Faithfull’s twentysomething helper who comes every morning, staying until 6pm (she’s an aspiring film-maker, and killer coffee-maker). Books teeter everywhere in piles, on the floor next to shelves, and all over the dining table. An orchid also flowers opulently on it (stolen from a hotel room by Faithfull’s friend, Roger Waters), and a framed letter from Faithfull’s father stands next to it. It was sent just after the publication of her 1994 memoir. “It was a strange wartime marriage of two people that produced you, darling,” it goes. “I feel proud, not only of your achievement in making a successful career, but of your success in growing into such a nice and mature person. Lots of love, your Dad.”
A voice to raise terror, full of rattle and coal dust, suddenly roars down the hall. “MIRIAM!” A few minutes later, Marianne Faithfull appears – but she’s not terrifying at all. Her smile beams as she hobbles slowly; she smiles almost constantly today, despite being in obvious pain. She fell and broke her back in 2013, then fell and broke her hip the following summer. Its replacement was done badly, leading to an infection around the prosthesis. Her shoulder requires an operation this autumn, then there’s the arthritis in her left arm and hand – her writing hand.
“It’s literally a pain to fucking do anything,” she says, settling in her seat with Miriam’s help. She’s brought a fan, plus a plate of mango, cut into tiny pieces, which she lifts to her mouth to reach the final bits (“excuse me for being disgusting”). She then smokes a cigarette slowly: she started again a few years ago. “It’s the last thing I do. I don’t even drink coffee any more!” She sighs, theatrically. “Everything fucking hurts. But you try and fucking stop me.”
We’re here to talk about Faithfull’s 21st solo album, which has a fantastic title: Negative Capability, a Keatsian concept Faithfull learned about in her teens. “It’s about looking at something from all sides, from all points of view, knowing that everything is equally valuable, and that some mysteries can’t be pinned down to fact and reason. It’s fabulous.” Faithfull, at 71, looks equally fabulous on its cover – her short, shaggy blond hair styled just so, her walking stick held unapologetically in her right hand.
The band she’s assembled for it aren’t bad either: Nick Cave and Warren Ellis from the Bad Seeds, singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt, producer Rob Ellis, and guitarist Rob McVey. They’ve all collaborated with Faithfull over the years, but this was the first time it was just them together, holed up in a residential chateau studio by the Seine for a fortnight in January. “Being with them…” Her eyes crinkle with pleasure. “It’s not a family, but it feels like a group mind and a group effort. What a joy, hanging out with these wonderful men!” This is also a deeply personal record, she says, about “loneliness and love. It’s the most honest record I’ve ever made. There are no hidden corners.” A lyric from its opening track, Misunderstanding, announced by Ellis’s mournful viola, sets the scene: “Then you find yourself alone/ No explanation you can give… such a shame, no way to live.”
Faithfull’s music is rarely discussed in any detail. Yes, she was originally signed because Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham chanced upon her at a party, saying later he saw “an angel with big tits” with “a face that could sell”. No, she doesn’t have a voice to match that soft-focus face, and she never really did. Even the first song she sang, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards’s As Tears Go By, is stripped of any sentiment by her deadpan delivery. She was 17, sounding like Nico before Nico. (She sings it again on Negative Capability, forcefully, reclaiming it.)
“She was fully formed even back then,” says Warren on the phone from his Paris home; he first met Faithfull after writing with Nick Cave for her 2005 album, Before the Poison. She turned up to their garage studio on the outskirts of Paris, sat on a milk crate, sang in that broken, characterful baritone, blowing everyone away. “She sings in spite of herself. She’s like a punk rocker in a way – she’s always been at odds with the world that surrounded her.” She was never particularly rock’n’roll, he adds – she engaged with that world, but went into theatre after it, and preferred being in a world of words and ideas. She likes nothing better than to talk about books over dinner, or tea, which they do often. “I adore her,” he says, a sentiment he’ll return to in later texts. “I love Marianne.”
He first encountered her music on Broken English(1979), the synthesiser-driven explosion of post-punk fire and rage that underlined her individual talent. Many other rough diamonds sparkle through her back catalogue: great versions of Michel Legrand’s Ne Me Quitte Pas (Les Parapluies de Cherbourg) and Bert Jansch’s Courting Blues in her early days; fantastic excursions into reggae, country and trip hop through the 1980s and 90s; and great duets with the likes of PJ Harvey, Anohni and Nick Cave in recent years. Her first single from the new record, The Gypsy Faerie Queen, is another duet with Cave, her lyrics a gorgeous, mystical meditation on what it’s like to follow a vision of a girl, who “bears a blackthorn staff/To help her in her walking/I only listen to her sing/But I never hear her talking/ Any more.”
Marianne Faithfull plays the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, in 2005. Photograph: Jo Hale/
Negative Capability also reflects on other tough recent experiences. When the Paris terror attacks in November 2015 culminated at her beloved Bataclan, a few miles away from her flat, Faithfull wrote a song about it straight away, They Come At Night. Its lyrics are unflinching: “Those who survived that night are still completely traumatised/But the other souls unlucky/Shot like dogs between the eyes.” She played it at the venue exactly a year after the attacks, with Warren Ellis and Ed Harcourt in her band. She won’t be pressed further on politics, however. “I don’t think about it, or I try not to, because it’s just so terrible, so depressing. But I had to do this through song.”
Then came the deaths of best friends. Martin Stone, Faithfull’s regular guitarist and a well-regarded antiquarian bookseller, died in November 2016. “He was having a very hard death indeed. Cancer. He really didn’t want to die.” The following June, Faithfull’s best friend, Anita Pallenberg, died too. My first encounter with Faithfull was an interview about Pallenberg for the Observer’s 2017 end-of-year obituary special: they used to speak by phone every day, she said then, and still missed her profoundly. “But Anita had a very good death, actually,” she says today. “She just went away. I don’t talk about her with friends now. That’s done. She’s gone.”
Negative Capability includes songs for both of them: Don’t Go, for Martin, and Born to Live for Anita. “Blues stay away, stay away from me,” goes the latter. “I hate to lose old friends/Blues are my enemy.”
Does writing help her? “It doesn’t help me! What is this? Fucking therapy? I wrote a song for Anita because I loved Anita. I wrote a song for Martin because I loved Martin. I do not write things to help myself.”
Other questions on her personal motivations get defensive responses. I tell her how astounded I was by her blazingly honest 1994 autobiography, Faithfull; it’s as brutally honest as acclaimed recent memoirs by Viv Albertine and Lily Allen.
Of the police drugs raid of Keith Richards’s home, Redlands, in 1967, at which Faithfull emerged naked in a fur rug, she wrote: “They emerged with their reputations amplified as dangerous, glamorous outlaws… I was destroyed by the very things that enhanced them”; and of her first song, Sister Morphine: “I wasn’t going to be allowed to break out of my image… I would not be permitted to leave that tawdry doll behind.”
Marianne Faithfull at work in the studio with Ed Harcourt (centre) and Nick Cave. Photograph: Rob Ellis
What does she think of similar revelations after the #MeToo campaign? Her response is odd: “I couldn’t give a flying fuck.” Really? “No.” But when other women are honest, like you were, are you glad? “Yeah, I’m very glad. Proud. About fucking time! Women spend their lives just trying to please men.” Isn’t that you endorsing what they’re doing? She shrugs, still smiling. “Whatever!”
Instead, Faithfull tells me about her Austrian mother, Eva von Sacher-Masoch, and Jewish grandmother, Flora, who brought her up in an ordinary terraced house in Reading after her parents divorced. Her mother had been an actress and dancer before the second world war; she had lived with her mother in Vienna during it, being protected from the Nazis thanks to their aristocratic background. “But when the Russians entered Vienna, my mother and grandmother were raped, and after that my mother got pregnant and had an abortion. Then the next thing that happened – which always happens – is that she really wanted another baby. Then she met my father, and I think she thought that he would be a great father for a baby, and so she married him and they had me.”
They split up six years later. “It was probably all for the best,” Faithfull says, “and I would be a different person [if they’d stayed together]. I probably wouldn’t have hated men so much! But, you know, Mum needed me.” Faithfull adds that she did many similar things to her mum. She had an abortion early in 1965, after getting pregnant by Gene Pitney on a UK tour, then, in May, married her boyfriend of several years, Indica gallery owner John Dunbar, and had their son, Nicholas, in November. “It took me a long time to get away from that feeling I got from Mum, about men. Decades. But I don’t have it any more.”
She also got pregnant by Mick Jagger, for whom she left Dunbar in 1966, but lost the baby seven months into the pregnancy. Did that leave a lasting effect? “Yes, of course,” she says. “But please, it’s taken me years to separate myself from the Rolling Stones. I never talk about Mick any more, and I won’t talk about then.” There were two more marriages: to the Vibrators’ Ben Brierley in 1979, which lasted six years; and to writer Giorgio Della Terza in 1988, which lasted three. Then there was a 15-year relationship with French record producer Francois Ravard, who still manages her; they split in 2009, but remain good friends.
“My main priority in my head was always my work,” she continues, “but then, of course, the men came… and it wasn’t really what I wanted, but I was too pretty to be left alone.” She attempted suicide by drug overdose on a plane in 1969; she divorced and lost custody of her son a year later. By 1972, she was an anorexic heroin addict, living rough in London. “My answer to everything was to get as stoned as possible and live on the street, which made me sort of unattractive.” Making yourself unappealing liberated you? “Yeah!” Her smile broadens, as if this was the most wonderful revelation in the world.Faithfull leaves most statements about the past, and her present, to her lyrics. For Negative Capability she sent them off to Cave or Harcourt, whoever she felt fitted best, to set the words to music. “I had to be very delicate with Nick,” she says, “given what had just happened.” This was the first project Cave had worked on since Skeleton Tree, the Bad Seeds album completed after the death of his teenage son, Arthur. Warren Ellis found making the two albums so close together very moving. “To see people trying to create something in desperate circumstances was heartbreaking, but humbling. To be a witness to that was life-changing, to see that power and drive coming through.”
Marianne Faithfull in 1967. Photograph: Marc Sharratt/Rex/Shutterstock
Ed Harcourt was tasked with arranging some of Faithfull’s toughest, saddest songs (they’ve known each other since meeting at Patti Smith’s 2005 Meltdown, where Harcourt ending up accompanying Faithfull on the piano at an aftershow party). “She’s very funny, witty and strong, but she’s vulnerable as well. She needs company and people around her.” He spent time getting his music to fit her lyrics properly – what she writes is influenced by the beat generation and jazz, he says, stream-of-consciousness at times, more like poetry. “And I had to get her pitch right. She’d be: ‘I can’t sing that, you fucking idiot!’” He laughs. “She’s got no filter – it took me a while to get used to that. But it’s almost always affection rather than malevolence.”
Their fortnight in the old chateau on the River Seine was very special, he says. Warren Ellis and Faithfull stayed in the chateau, while Harcourt, Rob Ellis and Rob McVey stayed on a houseboat nearby with a piano and pool table. Every day they’d eat together (one recipe for steamed cod has gone back with Marianne; Miriam makes it for her often), then the band would get everything ready in the studio, before Marianne was helped down to the control room to sing.
She decided to start their first session by singing No Moon in Paris, to Ellis’s mind the saddest song on the record. Its lyrics run: “It’s very lonely here tonight… what can I do but pretend to be brave?/And pretend to be strong when I’m not?”
“Everyone in that room was hanging on to anything we could as she sang, and by the end we were all in tears,” Ellis says. He sat in his room for 30 minutes after it to recover, and Marianne came up to see him. “I was all red-faced, and she said: ‘Well, was that all right?’ Was that all right, Marianne? Look at the state of me! Fuck!”
That fortnight was magical, Faithfull says. She hopes there will be more like it.Before I leave, she gets up slowly, another cigarette in her hand, and gives me a little tour of the flat, pointing out a beautiful nude and some landscapes by Anita Pallenberg (“people forget what brilliant talent she had”). A snap of Faithfull and Mick Jagger in the studio hangs in the loo (“best place for it!”). Half of her double bed is covered with books as is the rest of the house: she points out one she’s reading about John Lennon, and one about Shelley – her next project, also with Warren Ellis, is based on Prometheus Unbound. “I can’t say anything else!” she smiles, wickedly.
In the living room, she also points out a drawing of a young girl, who looks remarkably like her. This is her six-year-old granddaughter, Eliza, her third grandchild from her son, Nicholas, with whom Faithfull has finally reunited in the last decade. He’s a financial analyst, she says. “Very sensible.” Her two grandsons are Oscar, who plays in a rock band called Khartoum, and Noah, who’s still in college. “He’s coming over soon to look after me and cook for me and be my love.” This is plainly blissful to her.
So even the cloudy last decade has had a glorious, silver lining? “We went through a lot. But we came through it – and I’m proud that we did that. Because I love having a family.” Another smile. “I never expected to.” Making music with friends who have supported her both physically and emotionally has sustained her through her lonely moments, she says. “But I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me,” she says, fixing me straight in the eye. “No fucking way. I’m so grateful that I lived long enough to get there.” She looks around, still beaming. “To get here.”
Marianne Faithfull: the muse who made it on her own terms
As the singer prepares to release her 21st album, we look back at a singular career marked by creative restlessness, personal troubles and triumphant reinventions Alexis Petridis Tue 23 de October 2018
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f you’re looking for a study in contrasts, you could do worse than compare the two albums released this autumn with Marianne Faithfull’s name on the cover. The first is Come and Stay With Me, a collection of her 1960s singles that opens and closes with two Rolling Stones-related tracks: the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards composition As Tears Go By, and Sister Morphine, co-written by Faithfull and Jagger while their relationship was in its death throes. The second is Negative Capability, a meditation on loss, grief and loneliness recorded in Paris last winter with the Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis and PJ Harvey collaborator Rob Ellis. It also contains a version of As Tears Go By, but there the similarities end. Thematically and sonically, it could be the work of a completely different artist to Come and Stay With Me. Given how often Faithfull’s personal life has overshadowed her music, it is worth noting the artistic distance she has travelled in her career – further than a lot of her more regularly lauded peers.
There was a time when the notion of either of these albums existing would have seemed like a joke. Faithfull’s musical career was not expected to last more than 50 years, nor was it supposed to have the kind of weight that might still interest people decades on. It wasn’t supposed to have any weight to it all. Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ manager who spotted her at a party and launched her career as a vocalist, dismissively described her as “an angel with big tits”. As she later recalled, she was “treated as somebody who not only can’t even sing, but doesn’t really write or anything, just something you can make into something … I was just cheesecake really, terribly depressing”.
Marianne Faithfull in 1967. Photograph: Marc Sharratt/Rex/Shutterstock
Loog Oldham seemed to view her as a repository for the cast-offs that Jagger and Richards would produce as they attempted to establish themselves as songwriters, and as an opportunity to live out his fantasy of being the British Phil Spector and prove that his powers as a svengali extended further than positioning the Stones as the stuff of middle England’s nightmares. He saw Faithfull as a posh adjunct to the ongoing folk revival, her cut-glass voice capable of primly essaying its staple songs for an MOR audience more used to finding music via Saturday variety specials on BBC One than in the spit-and-sawdust environment of a folk club or coffeehouse.
You might charitably describe the results as mixed. As Tears Go By, the Jagger/Richards offcut that became her first hit in 1964, was great, and her version of House of the Rising Sun has a certain unexpected bluesy power. But her cover of Blowin’ in the Wind was almost as catastrophic as the events the song describes, and a Spectorised take on Greensleeves sounds like light entertainment from the pre-rock’n’roll era.
She saw herself as a folk singer. In her mid-teens she had performed a cappella in Reading’s coffee bars. But what Faithfull turned out to be good at – really good at – was a certain kind of wintry-sounding orchestral pop, on which harpsichords, harps and 12-string guitars twinkled, and you could somehow imagine Faithfull’s breath forming clouds in front of her face as she sang. Examples: This Little Bird, Go Away from My World, Morning Sun, Tomorrow’s Calling. More recently, Faithfull has understandably traded on the more painful aspects of her personal history; here is a woman who understands the darkness of which she sings. But the truth is that there was something eerie about the records she made long before the heroin, homelessness and suicide attempts. On the best of her 60s records, her voice injected slightly too much yearning and melancholy into ostensibly lightweight songs.
She was also much smarter and rather less biddable than you suspect Loog Oldham anticipated. She quickly ditched him as a producer and successfully lobbied her label to simultaneously release two albums – one pop (Marianne Faithfull) and one folk (Come My Way).
By her own admission, she lost interest in her music when she became Jagger’s partner, but in 1969 – coincidentally the year that Dusty Springfield and Sandie Shaw also began exerting more noticeable control over their careers, the former releasing Dusty in Memphis, the latter the self-produced Reviewing the Situation, replete with covers of Dr John and Led Zeppelin – Faithfull put out her first new single in two years, showcasing a very different sound and worldview. Something Better was gritty, country-inflected and featured Ry Cooder on slide guitar; the B-side, co-written with Jagger, was Sister Morphine, a song so bleak in its depiction of addiction that her UK record company withdrew the release. The Rolling Stones claimed it as their own, only giving her a writing credit on the song in the 1990s. Faithfull wouldn’t release another record for seven years.
In fact, her years of heroin-soaked seclusion weren’t quite as secluded as they’re often painted. She gave a remarkable interview to the NME, equal parts coy and frank, in which she said of the Rolling Stones: “I slept with three and then I decided the lead singer was the best bet.” (She declined to name the other two.) She appeared on David Bowie’s 1973 US TV special The 1980 Floor Show, performing Noël Coward’s 20th Century Blues and duetting with Bowie on I Got You Babe, sounding more like Nico than the singer of As Tears Go By.
The decadent Faithfull would have been good in the glam era, but that show with Bowie was as far as it went. A 1976 album, Dreaming My Dreams, was both very much of its era – slick country-rock was having a pre-punk moment – and apparently constructed with one eye on the past: there is occasionally something of Andrew Loog Oldham’s Spector infatuation about the production.
‘I decided the singer was the best bet’ … Faithfull and Mick Jagger in 1969. Photograph: Five/Rex Features
Broken English, however, from 1979, was something else entirely. The punk era was not kind to most 60s icons, especially those such as the Stones, who had continued into the 70s, getting more successful, remote and aristocratic in their bearing. But Faithful turned out to be a very punk kind of 60s icon: a living embodiment not of some unsurpassable golden era, as smug baby boomers had it, but of its darker side. She was a figure wronged by the era’s casual sexism and ruined by its unthinking excesses; not a pampered rock’n’roll sun god, but someone who had wound up homeless and survived on the street. She was the snarling wronged woman on Why Did Ya Do It?, a ghost at the feast of nostalgia on What’s the Hurry? “Do you hear me? Do you fear me?” she sang, with the relish of someone who knew where the bodies were buried. She picked through the wreckage of the decade with a certain venomous glee on the title track, which concerned hippy-idealists-turned-killers the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and also on Brain Drain, about how turn-on-tune-in-drop-out idealism could curdle into a desperate scrabble of “trying to get high without having to pay”.
Broken English also demonstrated Faithfull’s ability as an interpreter. As sung by Dr Hook’s Dennis Locorriere, a man who frequently sounded as if he was on the verge of tears, the original version of The Ballad of Lucy Jordan was filled with sympathy for its titular heroine, a housewife bored to the point of suicide. Rasped by Faithfull, it was full of empathy.
Although it was critically acclaimed, Broken English didn’t quite re-establish Faithfull commercially in the way she may have hoped. In a 1984 interview, she complained that she was less popular than her manager’s other client, Toyah. Nevertheless, the album laid the foundations of her later career. Her music from then on was invariably tinged with darkness of varying degrees, the original material frequently dealt with bleak themes – bitterness and romantic perfidy, loss, dissolution of various kinds – and it increasingly leaned on her interpretative skills. She also displayed a genuine musical restlessness. Her 1987 album Strange Weather found her inhabiting the role of a ravaged torch singer performing The Boulevard of Dreams; the ensuing 20th Century Blues (1997) and The Seven Deadly Sins (1998) evinced her interest in Kurt Weill.
Her 2002 album Kissin’ Time demonstrated the regard in which Faithfull was held by a younger generation of musicians. A noticeably hipper record than anything the Stones had recorded in years, its supporting cast of players and writers included Beck, Blur, Billy Corgan and Jarvis Cocker. At its best, as on the dubby Blur collaboration of the title track, it took Faithfull’s voice into entirely fresh musical territory. It also found her burnishing her own myth on Sliding Through Life on Charm, which was perhaps understandable. As Faithfull was the first person to point out, younger artists were attracted to her as much by that as by her talent (“I’ve got all the stories,” she noted).
The follow-up to Kissin’ Time, Before the Poison, added Nick Cave and PJ Harvey to her list of contemporary collaborators, while its successor Easy Come Easy Go found her covering the Decemberists and Espers alongside Randy Newman and Smokey Robinson.
This isn’t the standard behaviour of a 60s rock legend, content merely to mine past glories in order to give them an album to tour the old hits around. But then, as Marianne Faithfull established some time ago, she wasn’t the artist people thought she was. “She walked through the whole thing on her own terms,” Warren Ellis noted recently, reflecting on her career. He has a point.
