The singer and songwriter Marianne Faithfull died on 30 January, aged 78, in London – with 21 albums and a solid-gold rock and roll reputation behind her. She’d been close to death before: after a suicide attempt on a plane in 1969, which left her in a coma; anorexic, homeless and high on heroin, when she lived “on a wall” in Soho in the 1970s; and in intensive care during the Covid pandemic, after spending the previous decade surviving breast cancer, hepatitis C, a broken back and hip, and chronic arthritis (her medical notes said “palliative care only”).
“Everything f**king hurts,” she told me in her Paris apartment in 2018, where I spoke with her about her beautiful, unsparing album about getting older, Negative Capability. “But you try and f**king stop me.”
Faithfull wasn’t a female Keith Richards – a rock and roll survivor ploughing the same furrows, though she remained, to her frustration, associated with the Rolling Stones decades after her relationship with Mick Jagger ended – but an uncompromising, headstrong artist to the end. In her last album, She Walks in Beauty (2021), she read Romantic poems over music beautifully composed by her friend Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis. Negative Capability, three years before it, tackled loneliness and grief without sentiment – she described it to me as “open-heart surgery, darling”. Songs such as “In My Particular Way” were delivered with a disarming directness: “Love me for who I really am/Not an image and not for money/I know I’m not young and I’m damaged/But I’m still pretty, kind and funny”.
Her collaborators over the years included PJ Harvey, Lou Reed, Angelo Badalamenti, Jarvis Cocker and Beck. She sang the work of Kurt Weill, Dolly Parton, Brian Eno and poet Frank McGuinness, and she wrote songs, most famously the Rolling Stones’ “Sister Morphine”, though she wasn’t credited on 1971’s Sticky Fingers (she went to court in 1994 to get her name reinstated, and won).
Then came her 1979 Grammy-nominated record Broken English, an album that arrived between punk and post-punk like a strike of white lightning. Co-written with her long-time collaborator Barry Reynolds and others, it was a world away from the sound of her early albums, shaped prettily by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham (who spotted her aged 17 at a party, later referring to her as “an angel with big tits” with “a face that could sell”). It also showcased her new voice, a rough-and-ready ruined rasp, albeit majestic and slightly plummy, that first appeared on Dreamin’ My Dreams (Faithfull’s 1975 country record that got to number one in Ireland, but did little elsewhere). Broken English came raging and roaring, with a palette of darkly twitching synthesizers and twisted blues.
It’s still the album that says the most about her. Its title track spotlights her intelligence and her family’s European past (“It’s just an old war/Not even a cold war”). “Witches Song” nods to her love of literature, its opening lyrics inspired by Macbeth. “Why D’Ya Do It?” is a sexually explicit, gothic stomp about being betrayed by a lover (“Why’d you let that trash/Get a hold of your cock, get stoned on my hash?”).
I first heard Faithfull’s voice ripping down a corridor as she called her carer for assistance – “MIRIAM!” – on our day together in Paris. She wouldn’t be drawn into giving quotable answers on topical debates (on #MeToo, she replied, “I couldn’t give a flying f**k”) and hated the idea of songwriting being cathartic (“What is this? F**king therapy? I wrote a song for Anita [Pallenberg, her best friend] because I loved Anita”).
But she was smiley and tender, happily giving me a tour of her flat – one side of her bed covered with books. She was wonderful when I interviewed her for my 2021 Radio 4 series A Life in Music, when she told me, like a proud grandma, that she had finally given up smoking. I even heard her the other week, surprisingly, in Dune: Part Two – she provided vocals for “The Voice”, a terrifying, bassy sound which Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and his mother use to gain power over others, which comes from their female ancestors. Faithfull gained a power in old age that suited her, that finally rewarded her.
Faithfull’s background was easy to mythologise in a dreamy, erotic fashion. She was born in 1946 and her great-great-uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who wrote Venus in Furs. Her mother, Eva, had been a ballerina in Weimar Republic Berlin and married a British spy (Faithfull’s father), but she had also faced horror. In the BBC ancestry series Who Do You Think You Are?, Faithfull found out Eva had been raped by a Russian soldier, who also tried to rape Faithfull’s grandmother – but Eva shot and killed him first.
Faithfull grew up with her mother in Reading. She went to a convent school and signed to Decca at 17. Her looks were striking; Gered Mankowitz’s picture of her, at 17 in 1964, lounging in a booth in the Salisbury pub on London’s St Martin’s Lane, arms stretched, socks to her knees, is a defining Swinging Sixties image. “You wanted to seduce her, to protect her… She was everything you could want in a woman that you couldn’t possibly have,” said her promoter and producer in the mid 1960s, Tony Calder. It’s a line that says nothing about Faithfull the person, but everything about Faithfull the beautiful cypher. It provides the subhead to the Telegraph obituary (the headline mentions her “self-destructive streak”, buying in to a legend she disproved in later decades).
Faithfull hadn’t wanted to be a pop star. She wanted to study literature or philosophy at university (instead, she famously introduced Jagger to Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which inspired the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” – she stayed distant friends with him in later life). She was married three times: to a gallery owner, John Dunbar, with whom she had a son, Nicholas; to Ben Brierley of punk band the Vibrators; and to actor Giorgio Della Terza. She had an abortion in early 1965, after getting pregnant by Gene Pitney on tour, and lost a baby she was having with Jagger seven months into her pregnancy. “Yes, of course,” she said when I asked if the miscarriage had a long-term effect, before refusing to say more. “It’s taken me years to separate myself from the Rolling Stones.”
Nicholas was taken away from his mother’s care in the early 1970s, but he and Faithfull became close again over the last 20 years. She adored being a grandmother. “We came through it – and I’m proud that we did that,” she told me. She also acted in films and plays, did quirky cameos on TV (such as her Absolutely Fabulous appearance as God, alongside Anita Pallenberg’s Devil), filling in the gaps of the “illusion” she was once presented as – a word she used, pointedly, in a spiky interview with Lynn Barber.
But the edge in Faithfull’s talent was there from the start. You hear it even in the deadpan, Nico-like delivery of her earliest songs, such as her 1964 debut “As Tears Go By”. She revisited it twice, most recently on Negative Capability. The 71-year-old Faithfull brought fresh meaning to its opening (“This is the evening of the day”), but it didn’t feel funereal. It felt curious and beautiful. She told me it was her favourite recording of the song.
I asked her why. “Because it’s not too bouncy and it’s not too sad. Getting older is not so awful. There are some good things about it. I feel more treasured, more precious now, than I ever did before.” The challenge now is that we ensure the older Marianne lives on – rather than the picture that other people created.
[See also: Vashti Bunyan’s second life]
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This article appears in the 05 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The New Gods of AI