Marianne Faithfull’s Life Contained Rock Music’s Secret History

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When I tell people that I write about music—a concept I occasionally have to explain now, as the value put on criticism and art continue to dwindle on our rapidly dying planet—the follow-up questions I get tend to be predictable. “Who would be your dream interview, if you had to make a bucket list?” or some version of that is standard, and I struggle to give a straight answer every time. Yet, when pressed, until this past Thursday, my first answer was usually Marianne Faithfull. When friends genuinely curious enough were asking the questions, they would sometimes offer a polite admission that they hadn’t heard of her—and, as an American twenty-something who mostly hangs around other American twenty-somethings, I couldn’t really hold that against them. When given the chance to explain who she was, it also took me a while to settle on an answer that I felt did her unusual and miraculous career justice. It just struck me this past autumn, actually, as I pursed my lips and stammered with timid hesitation at my new friend I’d just met at a show: “Well, she’s maybe the most interesting person to ever live.”

For all the flowery adjectives and hyperbolic statements I’ve peddled through my writing over the past three years, I think that spur-of-the-moment assessment might be the most accurate statement about music I’ve ever verbalized. You could very well make the argument—as I suppose I am now—that the entire history of popular music (specifically in the U.K.) can be told through the life and career of Marianne Faithfull. There is a version of that history which I had been sold as a young person, just hungry to learn as much as I could. Yet, my reading and life experience over time have created a slow process of realizing I barely exist in that history—that the so-called “progressive” history of New Hollywood and the rock era mainly spelt freedom for those who already had it. I would never deny the importance or quality of so much of that work, but double-standards present themselves the second you start scratching away at the carefully-maintained patina of “rock history.”

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I was 13 when I read Faithfull: An Autobiography and it shook me to my teenage core in such a chilling manner that I’ve been hesitant to pick it up since. Over a decade on, part of me feels I was too young to have read it, but a more prominent part of me feels I picked it up at the perfect time to make me the person I am now—as both a commenter on pop culture and as a woman in a world that does not take women seriously. At the time, I had taken the book out of the library looking to learn more about the mammoth history of the Rolling Stones, to hear more swashbuckling tales of Mick and Keith’s escapades. At the very least, I knew that they were present when their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, discovered Faithfull (then a convent school pupil and the daughter of a military man and a baroness, soon to be wed to artist John Dunbar and become pregnant with her son, Nicholas) at a party, asking if she was interested in becoming a singer. Instead, I found where all the shame of the infamous 1967 Redlands drug bust had landed while the Stones had been lauded as outlaw heroes, learned about the public furor which arose around a suicide attempt, experienced secondhand the years of addiction while living on a wall in London’s Soho.

It’s a question of who gets to emerge from tabloid scandal without rumors swirling and being deemed unclean. It’s part of a “sexual revolution” that still required women to strip down in order to be bankable—it’s art now, don’t worry. It’s the notion of being remembered as a “muse” rather than an artist, as the pages men press you into are deemed more important than the pages you penned for yourself. Of course, it’s not shocking that Mick Jagger has been mentioned in the first paragraph of every obituary I’ve seen for Marianne Faithfull. That’s how the history we’ve been taught works. The same thing happened when Faithfull’s dear friend Anita Pallenberg—the person who arguably made the band both were associated with what they were, with no exaggeration—died several years ago.

But it’s that word “muse” in the headlines that’s made my skin crawl most in the wake of Faithfull’s death. It communicates that she is only important because a famous man fell in love with her for a short while decades ago. In our current cultural moment, where so much must be consumed in a soundbite or a thirty-second clip in order to be considered worthy our time, I am faced with the daunting task of fully explaining the harrowing and heroic life of Marianne Faithfull, cheater of a thousand deaths and music history’s true avenging angel. I’m terrified of compressing all her glory into something pithy that people will be more compelled to click on. She deserves better than that.

So I turn to what Marianne would have wanted to guide me in my mission, which is her incredible and eclectic career. “I’m sick of talking about it,” she said of her tattered, Stones-adjacent 1960s back in 2011. “It would be great if people could see me as I see myself, which is as a working musician with an incredible arc of work. I’ve got such a body of work behind me. It’s much more important than my mythical life. And my life is mythical. Most of it is a lie, the tabloid version of me.” In 2021, following a nasty bout with COVID that left her weakened for the rest of her life, she reaffirmed in an interview that she felt stifled in the band’s circle because she “couldn’t work at all.” While she felt that Pallenberg initially thrived on her life itself serving as her art (though she, too, later sunk deeper into the pits of addiction, feeling ensnared by acting out a supporting role in her own life), Faithfull knew early on “it wasn’t enough for me just to live life, I’m afraid.”

Of course, there is the wide-ranging oeuvre of both stage and screen—called on by Jean-Luc Godard, Sofia Coppola, William Burroughs and Kenneth Anger to help realize their vision, bringing iconic characters like Ophelia, Lewis Carroll’s Alice and Pirate Jenny to life. She also had the distinction of being the first person to say the word “fuck” in a mainstream studio film (the 1967 Oliver Reed and Orson Welles project I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname), fitting for Faithfull as a first of her kind in several mediums. Still, the weight of her legacy rests most on her career as a musician, finding critical success both by channeling the broader commercial moment through her own lens and, at times, by veering off into her own idiosyncratic obsessions.

The former approach produced the signature record of Faithfull’s recording career, arriving 15 years after the breakthrough release of her take on Jagger/Richards original “As Tears Go By.” Broken English still sounds like the New-Wave-saturated world into which it was born, but it stands as the high-water mark of her discography because you can so clearly hear her in it—seething, world-weary, delivered in a gorgeously raspy croon, like a choirgirl soprano whose smoking and drugging have finally caught up to her and sanded her voice down to a serrated edge. Though she would attempt rejigger the record’s formula in the years to come with diminishing returns, its successors lack Faithfull’s hunger to prove herself at its most potent, pushing her spiky personality straight to the fore.

For those listeners who have only seen images of an angel-faced Faithfull decked out in hippie garb and her son dutifully attached to her hip, I usually recommend the album’s closer—the filthy, venomous “Why D’ya Do It?”, originally co-written by poet Heathcote Williams with Tina Turner in mind—as the key to unlocking Marianne Faithfull. Though she tackles a bevy of expletives over the track’s heady reggae-inspired groove, my pick for most savory moment is the pin-sharp delivery of “‘Why’d ya do it,’ she said, ‘Why’d you spit on my snatch? / Are we out of love now, is this just a bad patch?’” injected with an almost vaudevillian sense of humor found in any project carrying her fingerprints. It’s the same deadpan twinkle in the eye which comes across in her 1974 live duet with David Bowie of Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” decked out in a full nun’s habit, just as much as it does in the gaudy kitsch of her 2011 record Horses and High Heels’ cover.

Though “Why D’ya Do It?” isn’t featured, Derek Jarman’s short film Broken English—built around three of the record’s tracks and featuring Faithfull—left behind the record’s most indelible images, creating an evocative extended video several years before the MTV boom (and made seven years before Jarman would take a similar approach for a more famous short film inspired by The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead). The record’s title track plays over images of contemporary right-wing National Front marches cut with footage of Nazi Germany, embedding a pop star usually referenced in the context of Swinging London firmly into the slate grey malaise of Thatcher’s Britain. Searing light stings, by comparison, when Faithfull appears on screen, cutting a striking, tough figure as she walks the London streets bundled in a leather jacket and sheer black tights, hair chopped and feathered. There’s an eternal, unmistakable cool to her that’s almost difficult to witness now. It can be startling to see someone finally looking so much like themselves, but still so of their given moment—as if the world had just taken 15 years to finally catch up to her.

The film also features Faithfull’s version of Dr. Hook’s “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”, still her biggest hit to date, which tells the story of a housewife’s descent into madness—a character Faithfull knew she had enough experience to depict realistically when she first heard original track on Radio 1: “I thought if it was sung by a woman—or, more specifically, if it was sung by me—it would take on a whole other meaning.” And so, a character study becomes a lived-in monologue, winking at an audience whose version of Marianne Faithfull had long ago circled the proverbial drain. Though she never shied from her past or the public’s perception of her post-Redlands bust, it’s interesting to track the way she pokes at it through song—as if to diminish the so-called madness’ power over her art, like it can’t catch her if she can swallow it whole first. It brings to mind the sessions that would later become Rich Kid Blues, recorded during the nadir of Faithfull’s dark years in 1971 and only released in 1985, post-Broken English’s success. On covers of Bob Dylan, Tom Hardin and Phil Ochs originals, her voice is fragile—not quite the sweet songbird of mid-60s gems like “The Sha La La Song” and “With You in Mind,” nor the hardened growl she’d ease into by the next decade’s end, but an uncertain, shaky wisp of a vocal that would threaten to crack under the intensity of anything but a folk song.

It’s the 1985 album’s final track, Sandy Denny’s “Crazy Lady Blues,” that meets Faithfull right where she’s at, providing a gentle, piano-laden bounce over the tentative sway of the vocal melody. It’s a cabaret closer fully in control of the story, as if to say, “yes, I’m her, and I’ll sing about her to prove it,” before the curtains close, the lights dim and our weakened heroine can stumble off to live what she wrote about in “Sister Morphine,” which she’d released as a single two years prior. She referred to the latter track (which she had to legally fight to receive writing credit on) as “my self-portrait in a dark mirror, my miniature gothic masterpiece, my celebration of death.” In 2021, she told Courtney Love that she “didn’t get anything out” of her addiction “except ‘Sister Morphine.’ It was a waste of my time.”

Yet, once the darkness was excised, there is so much haunted beauty in the more eclectic turns of her colorful discography—from the several albums’ worth of material from Germany’s Weimar Republic era, to the jazzy folk horror of 1987’s Strange Weather, to the jagged alt-rock of Before the Poison (made in collaboration with the likes of PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Damon Albarn and Jon Brion), to her final record, She Walks in Beauty, comprised of recitations of English Romantic poetry set to music by Bad Seeds member Warren Ellis. At the time of its release, following Faithfull’s near-death experience due to a serious bout of COVID, many pointed out the poignancy of selecting so many poems about the loss of life with the artist having come so close to losing hers. Of course, now, to hear Marianne Faithfull read Lord Byron’s assertion that we’ll go no more a roving is to hear her call out the classics from another place beyond, ordering us to quiet our hearts in her absence.

Still, there is a bitter laugh contained somewhere deep in the reading of “Owning her weakness / Her evil behavior / And leaving, with meekness / Her sins to her savior!” fitting of Faithfull’s life, itself a parade of endless “fuck yous” in the face of a history that held her at arms length. These lines—centuries old and conveying tragedy unfettered by time—almost sound triumphant when read by a woman whose sins physically wrestled to drown her and lost every time. Marianne Faithfull, in the words of one of her collaborators, pulled herself clear over and over again. I refuse to believe that “muse” and “rock chick” are the only words we can pin to the memory of this miracle, that a man mentioned in passing can serve as an artist’s final burial rites.

Though she’d chafe against the notion, Faithfull’s life was an important facet of her art, if only to acknowledge the way survival breeds art of experience, lends untold gravitas to a medium as trivial as popular music at its flimsiest. Now, with a right hand resting on a new-to-me copy of Faithfull, I still see a woman who belongs in every time and no time at all treading the London cobblestone in heels and a leather jacket. She screams in the street like a hallucinating housewife, hexes all who dwindle outside her witches’ coven, takes the dagger for all who follow her down, birthing an infinitely more interesting world than the one she was born into. Even though she’s left us, we’re lucky that her world is ours to keep.

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.

Marianne Faithfull’s Life Contained Rock Music’s Secret History

Writer Elise Soutar faces the daunting task of fully explaining the harrowing and heroic life of Marianne Faithfull, cheater of a thousand deaths and music history’s true avenging angel.