So Long, Marianne Faithfull: The Woman Who Refused to Go Quietly
Here’s a toast to Marianne Faithfull, a true rock & roll legend. Nobody was ever better at being an old rock star, except maybe Leonard Cohen. Yet the difference is that Cohen didn’t release his debut album until he was 33 — he was never young in public. Faithfull was a Sixties dolly bird who was on Top of the Pops in her teens, singing “As Tears Go By,” just another disposable pop ingenue. She played Ophelia in the 1970 film version of Hamlet, a hauntingly tragic performance, at a time when the real-life Faithfull was speeding to an early grave of her own. But she was the Ophelia who rose up and outlived her gravediggers. The ultimate rock & roll bad girl grew into a magnificently bad woman. “I’m not any era,” she said in 2013. “I just go on and on.”
That’s why the music world is in mourning at the news of her death on Tuesday at 78 — and also in shock, because she seemed so indestructible. She knew her way around the dark places, and she felt at home there. She started as the It girl of the Swinging London scene, Mick Jagger’s muse, a fashion icon. By the 1970s, she was a burnout, a homeless junkie on the streets of London. But her greatest work was ahead of her, starting with her 1979 post-punk hit Broken English. She got more playful and experimental as the decades went by. She knew pop history inside out, especially its taboos, and she took aim right at the most squeamish of pop taboos — the presence of an old woman with shit to talk.
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You can hear that in “Don’t Forget Me,” a totally obscure 1974 Harry Nilsson piano ballad that she single-handedly turned into a cult classic, with her 1997 cabaret-from-hell masterpiece 20th Century Blues. “When we’re older, and full of cancer,” she rasps, “it doesn’t matter now, come on, get happy.” In her raw voice, it’s an unsentimental but unflinching tribute from one old sinner to another, years after Harry died. (“We used to do drugs together,” Faithfull recalled at the time. “When I say drugs, I don’t mean those modern-day, airy-fairy drugs. I’m talking about narcotics.”) Nobody could have given this song so much haggard soul.
When the sad news of her death arrived, the first music I turned to was She Walks in Beauty, from 2021, her final album and one of the most powerful things she ever did. It’s a weird one — just Marianne reciting Romantic poetry, while Nick Cave wingman Warren Ellis plays behind her with pals like Brian Eno and Cave. Yet it’s an album you can play for years without wearing it out, especially her über-goth performance of John Keats’ “To Autumn.” It’s the poet dreaming of the adult life he died too young to see (tuberculosis, 25), though somehow she got there. But her voice never sounded more eerie, with her vampire-queen rasp over Ellis’ eerie electronics. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” she sneers. “Think not of them, thou hast thy music too.”
Keats died young and pretty; Faithfull lived to be old and weathered. It could have been the other way around, and you can hear how much she savors the irony. But nothing could stop her from making this album, not even a near-fatal Covid case that destroyed her lungs. She can’t even pretend to sing anymore. Yet she refuses to go quietly, making her art with the broken instrument she has left. Nobody else could have made such magnificent music — such punk rock — out of this Keats poem. She can’t hit the notes she used to hit, or any notes at all, really, but she has her music too.
People always wanted to duet with Marianne, because she made everyone sound cooler. She did an awesomely bizarre duet with David Bowie in 1973 for his TV special, The 1980 Floor Show. He’s dressed in drag as the Angel of Death, covered in black feathers; she’s wearing a full nun’s habit — or at least the front half. “Because of her convent background,” Bowie wrote in his book Moonage Daydream, “I felt Marianne would carry the moment superbly as a nun, albeit without a back panel to her habit, revealing her splendid arse. Not shown on the tele, natch.” They sang the Sonny and Cher oldie “I Got You Babe.”
She grew up as a nice Catholic schoolgirl, schooled in the convent. She had the archetypal fallen-aristocrat mystique — her great-great uncle was Leopold van Sacher-Masoch, the kink pioneer who wrote Venus in Furs. She made the Swinging London art-boho chic scene, marrying John Dunbar, who ran the Beatles hangout Indica Gallery (where John met Yoko). She also got discovered by the Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who recalled, “I saw an angel with big tits, and I signed her.” Mick and Keith wrote her the winsome ballad that made her famous, “As Tears Go By.”
“My first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend,” she famously said. “I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet.” She and Jagger were London’s prettiest couple from 1966 to 1970, turning heads everywhere they went. She also became best friends (for life) with Anita Pallenberg, the other bad girl in the Stones scene; Anita and Marianne taught these boys how the art of badness is really done. Nothing was the same for the Stones after these women arrived. Marianne had an instant impact on Mick, as a posh hedonist who was tough to impress — sophisticated, arty, well-read, not the least bit awed by him. She had her own charisma, her own style. He wrote the best songs of his life under her influence. He sang tributes like “She Smiled Sweetly” and “She’s a Rainbow,” yet you can hear more of Marianne in the sardonic wit of “Yesterday’s Papers,” “Jigsaw Puzzle,” or “No Expectations.”
She had a great run as a 1960s pop star, with hits like “Come and Stay With Me” and “Something Better,” which she sang brilliantly in the Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus show. She gave Mick the Mihail Bulgakov novel The Master and Margarita, which he turned into “Sympathy for the Devil.” She’s right there on the record, singing the hoo-hoo’s — in the Godard film of the session, she and Anita join the Stones as they gather around the microphone to hoo-hoo it up. (Everyone but Charlie, who folds his arms and rolls his eyes. God bless Charlie.) Marianne wears a big floppy hat and shades, which she never removes. She looks like a woman who’s already met too many devils to be impressed by this one.
Marianne became notorious in the 1967 drug bust at Keith’s mansion, where the cops caught her naked, wrapped in a fur rug. Her blasé lack of shame made her legend as a rebel icon — she posed proudly on Keith’s lawn holding the tabloid headline “Naked Girl at Stones Party.” In the Stones’ video mocking the case, “We Love You,” they parodied the Oscar Wilde sodomy trial — Mick played Wilde, while Marianne played his youthful lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. She also starred in the 1967 flick The Girl on a Motorcycle, riding her Harley across Europe in a leather catsuit (with frequent sex breaks). In the U.S., it was retitled Naked Under Leather.
But like so many people in the Stones orbit, she got shattered trying to keep up the pace, burning out fast. She co-wrote “Sister Morphine,” yet also lived it as a junkie. For years, she was living on the Soho streets. Nobody would have guessed her life’s work was just beginning. She moved into a punk squat and started working with guitarist Barry Reynolds. Broken English shocked everyone, with brutal tales like the title track, about the German female terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, or “Why’d Ya Do It,” where she snarls, “Why’d ya spit on my snatch?” The one-time ingenue made gallows humor out of her ruination, glorying in the cracks and croaks of her voice. As she said later, “I thought I was going to die, that this was my last chance to make a record. I’m going to show you bastards who I am.”
She struck a nerve with New Wave and post-punk kids, most of whom had no idea she had a previous life in the Sixties. This was a new adult voice, going somewhere unprecedented. On the 1985 Kurt Weill tribute album Lost in the Stars, she sang “The Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife” and made everybody else sound like kids. She brought sour wisdom to Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Visions of Johanna” on her lost gem Rich Kid Blues, cut in 1971 but unreleased until years later.
On her 1987 Strange Weather, she remade “As Tears Go By,” sounding like a world-weary roué who’s surprised to find any tears left in her heart. As she said at the time, “40 is the age to sing it, not 17.” She told Rolling Stone’s Kory Grow, “I suddenly really understood it myself when I was about 40, when I realized it was another version of [poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ballad] ‘The Lady of Shalott.’”
She had her biggest U.S. hit with Metallica on “The Memory Remains,” their 1997 smash from Reload. She has an superbly evil star turn in the video — an organ grinder in a carnival barker’s suit, with a face and heart of stone. “Say yes,” she whispers at the end, staring into the camera. “Or at least say hello.” It was the most airplay she ever got in America, an MTV mind freak establishing her uniquely formidable charisma — the only voice who could throw a scare into Metallica.
But she brought that presence wherever she traveled. She had a great moment on the U.K. cult-classic sitcom Absolutely Fabulous, in a 2001 episode where Edina saw visions of God and the Devil. Marianne played God, Anita Pallenberg the Devil. Sofia Coppola put her in Marie Antoinette, as Empress Maria Theresa. When Roger Waters staged The Wall in Berlin in 1990, he cast her as Mother. She also paid respects to Stevie Nicks on the Fleetwood Mac tribute album Just Tell Me That You Want Me, doing the Tusk deep cut “Angel.”
She had a major resurgence in the 2000s, teaming up with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave for her 2005 Before the Poison. On Kissing Time, she sang with Blur, Beck, Billy Corgan, and most smashingly, Pulp, for “Sliding Through Life on Charm.” “A beautiful jewel,” she called that song. “I thought, ‘When I see that Jarvis Cocker’ — so I grabbed him in this television studio one day and said, ‘Now, look, I want you to take this title and go and write a song from it.’ And off he went.” On 2008’s Easy Come Easy Go, she duets with Anohni on one of Smokey Robinson’s most delicate ballads, “Oooh Baby Baby,” for eight minutes of pained beauty. She also reunites with Keith Richards to sing Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” (“before I die”) and it’s not for the faint of heart — though nothing she did is.
For this fan, there’s nothing like her final album, She Walks in Beauty, the one she made as her lungs finally gave out. Like Leonard Cohen on You Want It Darker, or David Bowie in Blackstar, she faces the end as brash and unrepentant as ever. She recites the work of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, poems that she fell in love with as a schoolgirl. “It’s fairly obvious, isn’t it?” she said at the time. “I was a clever girl, a pretty girl, and I thought they were all about me.”
But her voice is all bleak gravitas as she delivers Lord Byron’s song of farewell, “So We’ll Go No More A-Roving.” It’s an unsentimental goodbye to a past she enjoyed, but doesn’t miss — she’s the sword that outwears her sheath. She’s way past weeping for lost autumns, much less lost springs. There’s not a regret in her voice when she declares, “Though the night was made for loving, and the day returns too soon, we will go no more a-roving by the light of the moon.” It’s a perfect song to remember her by. A fearsome presence to the end, and a unique artist who always remained defiantly herself. Rove on forever, Marianne Faithfull.
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