Marianne Faithfull was the ultimate counter-culture icon
Marianne Faithfull’s work proved she was no mere muse, she was a creative force worshipped by cool musicians in every era
Marianne Faithful’s life was that of the ultimate counter-cultural icon, with all the highs and lows that may suggest.
Not cultural icon. She was not embraced by a mainstream still judging her as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend and junkie, and knew this, and always spoke up against the hypocrisy and sexism involved.
She once refused a role in Lynda La Plant’s Prime Suspect because the character was beaten-up and degraded. She told Mojo that she realised, “This is how they think of me! … I’m sure the English would like to see me in a role like that on television.”
And this is her on the difference between the way she was treated compared to The Rolling Stones et al: ‘Bad behaviour makes men more glamorous. Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.’
No doubt about it, there was a judgement of Faithfull throughout her life that was way different to other Sixties icons, one that gave lie to any kind of equality in the peace and love era.
Her pop career began when, still a schoolgirl, she was spotted at a party by The Rolling Stones’ young manager Andrew Loog Oldham; but he later described the meeting like so: “I saw an angel with big tits and signed her.” This greatly upset her - “he should be ashamed” - but didn’t surprise her, such was dismissal of her as a ‘dolly bird’ in the era.
Pre-Jagger, with her fiancé John Dunbar, 1965, with whom she had a son, Nicholas.
Getty Images
Or, worse in its own way, as just ‘muse’ for Mick Jagger. While Jagger wrote the Stones classics Wild Horses and You Can’t Always Get What You Want about her, she was not mere ethereal eye candy. She was the cool one, the intellectual one, the one with taste.
Jagger didn’t write her first single Tears Go By for her, it was already written with Keith Richards, and she actually dismissed Jagger when they were first introduced at Oldham’s session for that one: “I might not have known if I was pretty or beautiful, but I certainly knew I thought I was very special and I didn’t talk to people like that… [not because he was] working class, just because I was more special and London at that time was all so cool.”
Faithfull was the one who gave Jagger a copy of The Master and Margarita, which, after he discussed it with her, led him to then write Sympathy for the Devil. In those early years, she worked with Jean-Luc Godard and played Ophelia in Hamlet on screen and stage, but incidents like the Stones drug bust at Richards’ house, where she was found wrapped naked in a rug (much to the delight of the tabloids) and then the whole subsequent Mars Bar rumour (“a dirty old man’s fantasy. I’ve been through millions of versions of who made it up—and it was made up”), were signs of the world turning on her. The fact she wrote the lyrics to the Stones song Sister Morphine but was left off the writing credits on the record, says it all.
To be fair to Loog Oldham, he was a lifelong friend and supporter, though Faithfull once recalled to Mojo a pithy exchange: ‘I said to him, in a sort of jokey way, “If I had never met you, Andrew, you would never have had the chance to ruin my life.” To be so young and so beautiful—I was 17 years old, a convent schoolgirl—and to be thrown into that shark world was really too much. Sexualised in a very unpleasant way, and unable to say, “No, I won’t do that.”’
The trauma of her initial burst of fame resulted in a suicide attempt and heroin addiction. She split from Jagger in 1970, and had her son Nicholas taken away from her. She reached a low point when she ended up homeless and slept on a literal bombsite wall in Soho.
Just 24 she later said, “People were compassionate and kind, and it was the first time I realized that human beings are much kinder than I thought.” She met Francis Bacon there and became friends. Those around her eventually got her into rehab, and then the comeback begun.
In fact, you might say her subsequent life was one great triumph over hitting that low point.
REUTERS
Her album Broken English, made in 1979, was a widely acknowledged masterpiece will dealt unflinchingly with all her problems. Singing in what became her trademark raspy voice – the results of her drug abuse – it is perhaps the ultimate survivor record. And for all its chanteuse strengths, including a cover of Lennon’s Working Class Hero, it is very much a punk record, directly inspired by the unfettered attitude of that music.
“I knew Johnny Rotten. He liked me. He always like older women!” she later said, “The essence of the punk thing was anyone can go and do it if they want to, and you don’t have to be incredibly rich and grand, you can just do it. And I think that that helped me a lot. I gave myself permission to make a record that I’d wanted to make for a long time. I thought I was going to die, that this was going to be my last chance to make a record. That is the thing about Broken English, it’s this sense, this energy, that “Fucking hell, before I die I’m going to show you bastards who I am.”
She continued to record into the 80s, developing her counter-cultural status which combined jazz singer cool with Weimer-era decadence and an elusive rock n roll cool all her own.
She grew into herself, seemingly embodying her aristocratic-bohemian background; she grew up in a commune in Oxford, raised by her former British intelligencer officer father Robert Glynn Faithfull and her Austro-Hungarian nobility mother, Eva von Sacher Masoch (her great-uncle Leopold was the man who invented the term ‘masochism’, which later led Faithfull to reflect: ‘I think I’ve definitely got psychological masochism. Not like Leopold – it’s not boots and furs and whips. But I can do it to myself psychologically. Be very cruel to myself.’).
In 1987 she recorded a well-received album called Strange Weather on which she covered tracks by Bob Dylan - who famously tore up a poem he’d written for her when she told him she was pregnant with Nicholas - and Billie Holiday, as well as a haunting new take on As Tears Go By.
The Nineties saw her embraced by the Sixties-worshipping Britpop bands. Alex James from Blur recounts trying to seduce her in his autobiography.
Both James and another friend from that time Kate Moss, appeared in the video to Sex With Strangers, from her 2002 collaborations album Kissin’ Time. She later fell out with Moss, saying, "She's not really my friend. I thought she was, but she's very clever. She wanted to read me like a Braille book. And she did. It's a vampirical thing.”
Her legend grew even as she remained elusive or ignored by the wider public. The stars of every subsequent era of rock n’ roll would seek her out.
Dave Benett
She made a collaboration album with former lovers Nick Cave and PJ Harvey called Before the Poison (2005) which Faithfull recorded with both at separate times; she memorably said, “I was in the studio for about five days with Nick and The Bad Seeds…Polly came to me and we worked in Paris—only a woman would do that. All my life when I’ve worked with men I’ve had to do the traveling. They’ve got more ego.”
She was never too far from health problems. She had a breast cancer diagnosis in 2007, and during Covid, came very close to losing her life.
Her last album was 2021’s She Walks in Beauty, a collaboration with the Bad Seeds’ Warren Ellis in which she recites British Romantic poetry over the music. The recording was interrupted by Covid and her illness, but was highly acclaimed when it was released. The album turned out to be a fitting final statement by a woman who fully embraced the world of artistry over fame and fortune.
She told Mojo, “Of course I have regrets, but they’re not the ones that people really would expect. I wish I’d been nicer to my parents. I wish I’d been able to not have Nicholas taken away from me—I think that was a big mistake.
And I wish I’d really understood, earlier, or accepted my destiny, as a worker. As a person who works and creates and makes records and performs. I resisted it for so long. Living on the street, being a junkie, had a lot to do with that—it was me trying to retire myself, make myself unemployable. A very passive-aggressive way to do it.”
But another time she reflected on things in the manner that will continue to make her an inspiration for generations:
'I have lived my life as an adventurer. It's been rather wonderful. And I really wouldn't change much about it and I have to stand by it… I do stand by it.'
MORE ABOUT
Marianne Faithfull
The Rolling Stones
Mick Jagger
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