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.”
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