Marianne Faithfull – in concert from Circus Krone, Munich – November 15, 2014 – Radio Bayern 2
With the sad news today, hearing of the passing of Marianne Faithfull, the music world lost another legend and a connection to our past has been taken away, one more time. The Marianne Faithfull from this concert in Munich bears little resemblance to the Marianne Faithfull from those halcyon days when she was inexorably linked with The Rolling Stones and epitomized Swinging London of the 60s.
In 1965 Marianne Faithfull embodied the breezy nonchalance of the period – the wonderful enormity and excitement of all the new music coming out of Britain in the 1960s. She also had the look, the freshness and a beguiling innocence that made just about every teenage girl in America between 1964 and 1966 want to look just like her.
Having been a fan since “As Tears Go By” (but really a fan when she released Summer Nights), the career of Marianne Faithfull has been the stuff to fill several dense volumes. Needless to say, hers has been a life lived.
If you’re not familiar with her, or have come to the music of Marianne Faithfull recently, here’s a snippet of her bio via her website:
Marianne Faithfull’s long and distinguished career has seen her emerge as one of the most original female singer-songwriters this country has produced; Utterly unsentimental yet somehow affectionate, Marianne possesses that rare ability to transform any lyric into something compelling and utterly personal; and not just on her own songs, for she has become a master of the art of finding herself in the words and music of others.
Her story, has of course, been well documented, not least in her entertaining and insightful autobiography Faithfull (1994). Born in Hampstead in December 1946 Faithfull’s career as the crown princess of swinging London was launched with As Tears Go By; the first song ever written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, two folk albums two pop, and a singles collection followed whilst she also embarked on a parallel career as an actress, both on film in Girl On A Motorcycle (1968) and on stage in Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1967) and Hamlet (1969) By the end of the Sixties personal problems halted Marianne’s career and her drug addiction took over.
Faithfull emerged tentatively in the mid-Seventies with a country album called Dreamin’ My Dreams (1976)Though the album attracted little attention in the UK, it was a huge hit in Ireland, where the title track spent 7 weeks at number one and led to Marianne going back on the road for the first time in a decade, but it was her furious re-surfacing on Broken English in 1979 that definitively brought her back. The virginal pop persona created around her in the Sixties was defiantly smashed: Instead with songs like The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, Guilt and Why D’ya Do It?, Marianne became a kind of oracle, and the artist people turned to, to lead them through dark times.
It was a life well lived and a life that touched so many other lives and gave evidence the human spirit is unstoppable.
She will always be remembered – she has left an indelible mark. We’re grateful.
