Marianne Faithfull, la melancólica dama del rock and roll de los excesos

Marianne Faithfull was a British singer-songwriter and pop star of the 1960s who reinvented herself as a new wave artist with a smoky, deep voice, channeling her battles with drug addiction and personal loss into songs brimming with anguish, anger, sorrow, and resilience.

A teenage idol, film and stage actress, laconic singer, passionate performer, and cabaret queen, Marianne Faithfull was initially recognized as a symbol of rock and roll excess, often appearing in sensationalist press alongside Mick Jagger, the leader of the Rolling Stones, before struggling with anorexia and heroin addiction. In the early 1970s, she attempted suicide and spent several years living on the streets of London, suffering from a persistent laryngitis that left her voice hoarse and rough.

“My career had been a fluke… At best I was an anomalous curiosity in the machinery of pop. As a performer, I was merely average,” she wrote in Faithfull, her autobiography published in 1994.

Nevertheless, she made a triumphant comeback with the album Broken English (1979), adopting a darker and more intimate sound in songs like “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan” by Shel Silverstein, about a disillusioned suburban housewife. In recent years, she received renewed acclaim for albums like Negative Capability (2018), which blended new material with classic standards and led a Rolling Stone critic to call her the “Grande Dame of Melancholy, the High Priestess of Twilight Rock.”

The album reaffirmed her reputation as a masterful interpreter of popular music, breathing life into songs by Dolly Parton, Randy Newman, Duke Ellington, Michel Legrand, Morrissey, and Kurt Weill. She also collaborated with an array of musicians, working with artists such as Metallica, Angelo Badalamenti, Nick Cave, PJ Harvey, and David Bowie, with whom she performed “I Got You Babe” on an NBC show in 1973, dressed as a renegade nun in a backless habit.

Marianne Faithfull leaned towards music while studying at a convent school, performing in coffeehouses and envisioning a future as a folk singer, if not as an actress. However, she stated that she was treated as an attractive object when the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, spotted her in 1964, sitting at a record company meeting in London at age 17, with her blonde hair, bright eyes, and her boyfriend’s shirt tucked into her jeans.

“Who is she?” Oldham asked his companion, according to Faithfull’s autobiography.

As she wrote, “That was it.”

Invited to a studio, she recorded the melancholic single “As Tears Go By”, which she later described as “a commercial fantasy that pushes all the right buttons.” Written by Oldham, Jagger, and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, the song reached the top 10 in the UK and was recorded by the Stones in 1965.

The song brought Marianne Faithfull and her vibrant soprano to the center of London’s music scene, fueled by LSD, alcohol, and marijuana. She released pop singles like “Come and Stay With Me” and folk songs such as Bob Dylan‘s “Blowin’ in the Wind”, whose romantic advances she turned down, and in 1965 she simultaneously released her first two studio albums, the pop collection Marianne Faithfull and the more folk-inflected Come My Way.

She also maintained a close relationship with the Stones. “I had relationships with three of them and then figured the singer was the best choice,” she quoted from People magazine while explaining the origins of her four-year romance with Mick Jagger. She performed in the band’s televised special, Rock and Roll Circus in 1968; contributed the “whoo-whoo” background vocals on the song “Sympathy for the Devil” (according to some accounts inspired by the novel The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, which she had given to Jagger); and co-wrote “Sister Morphine,” a bluesy song about addiction that she released in 1969, two years before the Stones (included in the famous album Sticky Fingers, released in 1971).

However, her public image was transformed by a drug raid in 1967 at Richards’ home, which briefly sent the guitarist and Jagger to jail and resulted in increasing demonization from the British conservative press. Reports stated she was found by police wearing nothing but a bearskin rug. “They emerged with their reputations amplified as glamorous dangerous outlaws… I was destroyed by the same things that elevated them,” she later wrote, according to the British newspaper The Observer.

In 1969, shortly after Brian Jones was expelled from the band and found dead in his swimming pool, she overdosed on barbiturates and fell into a coma for six days. Waking up from her suicide attempt to see Jagger, he told her she looked like she was on the verge of death. She replied, “Not even wild horses could drag me away.”

When the Rolling Stones released “Wild Horses” in 1971, Faithfull and Jagger had already separated. She had suffered a miscarriage, lost custody of a child from an early marriage, and begun using heroin, romanticizing the addiction lifestyle after reading Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. “At that point,” she wrote in her autobiography, “I entered one of the outer levels of hell, and I stayed there for years.”

She rebounded with Broken English, supported by musicians like Steve Winwood and Barry Reynolds. The album featured an impulsive rendition of “Working Class Hero” by John Lennon; an upbeat title track about the German left-wing terrorist group Baader-Meinhof; and “Why D’ya Do It,” a sexually explicit punk-reggae number with lyrics from a poem by Heathcote Williams.

“It’s not something we have heard before, from anyone,” wrote respected critic Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone. “As for Faithfull, there is a bravery, a sense of artistry, and a disruptive intelligence that nothing in her old records remotely suggested. Broken English is something of a triumph: fifteen years after making her first single, Marianne Faithfull has made her first real album.”

“I allowed myself to make a record I had wanted to make for a long time,” she later told Mojo. “I thought I was going to die, that this was going to be my last chance to make a record. That’s what Broken English has, that feeling, that energy of ‘… before I die I’m going to show you… who I am’.”

Source: The Washington Post

[Photos: AP/Eddie Worth, archive; REUTERS/Denis Balibouse]