He was one of the emblematic faces of the movement Swinging London in the 60s and ended up living on the street for his heroin addiction. Singer and actress Marianne Faithfull turns 76 on December 29. Mick Jagger’s ex-girlfriend has just been released I sing of innocence and experience (1965-1995), a collection of critical 30-year recordings of his long career, including some previously unreleased.
Marianne Faithfull is a true survivorthat he needed a long recovery from his addictions to direct his career, albeit within an almost therapeutic low profile.
A life in which there have been suicide attempts, homelessness, breast cancer (2005), hepatitis C, hip fracture (2015) and was diagnosed with Covid-19 on April 2, 2020. “With my pulmonary emphysema, I was a candidate for death. I wish I had never smoked in my life,” said the artist.
“Covid has left me with sequelae, such as memory problems, tiredness and my lungs not looking good. I have to use oxygen and everything. Consequences are a very strange thing; some people come back, but can’t walk or talk. Terrible,” Faithfull said during an interview in January last year.
Debut at 17
His first recording. As the tears passcame out on August 13, 1964 and was one of first compositions written by Jagger and Keith Richards at the behest of his manager and scout Andrew Loog Oldham, who also represented Faithfull, who was just 17.
The ballad was overly amorous for a rhythm and blues group like the Stones and so he passed it on to Marianne. the simple it reached number 4 in UK sales.
Faithfull told it Oldham locked Mick and Keith in a kitchen and gave them two hours to compose a song.. they went out together As the tears passwhich was initially called As times go bythe same title as the central theme of the film White Housewhich they changed for what ultimately remained.
At that time, Marianne opened for performances in England for Roy Orbison and Gene Pitney, with whom she would have a fleeting romance.
Jagger and Faithfull had met at a party hosted by Oldham in March 1964, where they introduced the Swinging Londonan artistic collective that included musicians, painters, sculptors and models.
In attendance at the former Servicemen’s Club, Windsor, Berkshire, Jagger, his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton, Paul McCartneyJane Asher, Peter Asher and the young London artist John Dunbar, who arrived accompanied by his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, who was none other than Marianne.
“Oldham thought he could make a star out of me. It was a terrible idea. It took me a long time to heal the resentment I felt for Oldham and his partner Tony Calder, and even for Mick and Keith. I really loved Mick, Keith and Charlie,” Faithfull said in a recent interview.
A 58-year musical career spanning 32 albums and having moments of impasse due to Faithfull’s heavy addiction to heroin, especially between 1967, when she released her album love in a fog and his return, even if not definitive, with the elegant album Broken Englishin 1979.
These 13 years without album had fleeting sparks like the launch, in 1969, of the simple something better with Sister Morphineon the B-side which the record company quickly withdrew from circulation. Sister Morphinewritten by Jagger and Richards, it later appeared on the album Sticky Fingers, the first Stones album with guitarist mick taylorEx Bluesbreaker, by John Mayall.
During her relationship with Jagger, Marianne Faithfull was arrested during a raid on the home of Keith Richards, in Redlands, Sussex, in February 1967. The police found her naked and badly covered in skin, in a pitiful state. Her rumor at the time was that the heroin seized at her scene belonged to her, but one of the guests tried to bail her out of the law.
This was the first sign of his drug problems dating back sometime and worsening during his time in the life of the biggest rock and roll band in the world.
We agree that Marianne was coming quickly. At 17, rising pop star; married at 18, John Dunbar, a drug addict who ran the Attica art gallery, where John Lennon and Yoko Oko they met for the first time; she was the mother of Nicholas Dunbar at 18 and at 20 she began her relationship with Mick Jagger.
elegance and intellectuality
Faithfull gave Jagger a veneer of elegance and intellectuality that the singer lacked in those years. He was the muse of songs What Dear doctor, You can’t always get what you want Y Wild Horse.
the letter of Sympathy for the devil was born because Faithfull suggested that Jagger read The teacher and Margherita, by Mikhail Bulgakov; there is part of the story that the song is about.
For example, all that approach to the devil came, apparently, from Marianne’s readings.
At that time, he devoured the works of Aestair Crowley, the father of the occult, bisexuality and drugs; intellectual father as well as the creepy director Kenneth Anger, who used the music of Sympathy for the devil for your movie Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969) and also Faithfull e Anita Pallenbergpartner of Richards, starred in his short film Lucifer on the rise (1972).
That is to say, many of Mick Jagger’s leanings and texts at that time went hand in hand with Marianne’s suggestions, readings and stories who, for her part, he was undergoing a process of physical and mental decay because of heroin.
One of the worst moments was experienced in 1969, during the filming of the film kelly (1970), in Sydney, Australia when tried to take his own life taking a significant, though not fatal, amount of barbiturates.
Mick Jagger unfortunately played the lead, a local hero (a sort of Australian Robin Hood) and Marianne was part of the cast, but the bond had entered a steep decline that would lead Faithfull to make that decision, which had something theatrical and ended up dissolving the relationship.
In any case, Jagger accompanied her during this tragedy, hence the text of Sister Morphinealmost dictated by Marianne to Jagger.
even more difficult years
Difficult years have come for Faithfull due to her addiction, which led her to do it live for two years on the street and which ended up with her imprisoned in a Norwegian prison for transporting a kilo of marijuana.
He managed to rehabilitate and one of his first activities was to sing again. your disk Broken English it is one of his best works. In the mid-1980s she had a strong heroin relapse which led to her being admitted to Belmont Hospital in London. She disappears from the scene to return in 1987 with Weird weather.
registered Vagabond ways (1999), Before the poison with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave (2004); Give my love to London (2014), one of his best works with music by Roger Waters and Cave; Negative capacity (1018). While always maintaining his musical eclecticism, its lyrics have an undeniable darkness. They talk about addictions, losses, terrorism, infidelity.
In 2021, to celebrate its 75th birthday, it launched She walks in beauty, an album of poems by Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats, set to music by Warren Ellis. This poetry record read is on the one hand an old wish and at the same time a necessity, as she cannot sing due to respiratory problems. It could be his last album.
Its origins
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born on December 29, 1946 in the London district of Hampstead. She was the daughter of Elder Robert Glynn Faithfull and Eva von Sacher-Masoch; from the mother’s side has the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch as its progenitorauthor of the classic Venus in furinspirer of Masoch’s term “masochism”.
Marianne is the heir to the noble title of the Sacher-Masoch family as baroness.
Speaking of those 1960s, Faithfull pointed out: “We were young, rich, beautiful and the current – we believed – was in our favour. Of course, we would have changed everything, but above all we would have changed the rules. Unlike our parents, we shouldn’t give up youthful hedonism in favor of the crazy world of adults.”
Perhaps the phrase that best defines Marianne Faithfull today is that of “a sadness tempered with optimism and despair saved by humour”.
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Source: Clarin
