Marianne Faithfull

This one, she says, was written for me by Tom Waits. And then she starts singing again, a crooked thread of smoke rising from the cigarette clutched in her right hand. With her onstage, only the trusty guitar of Doug Pettibone, in front of five hundred-odd people who know they're very close to the end of an evening they won't easily forget. She sings, Marianne Faithfull, of rain and skies, of tears and loves, she sings "Strange Weather" and meanwhile traces thin shapes in the air, the night, out there, is cold, is mad, it should have been July but instead it's an October night, with a wind that lashes and stings, and carries off the warmth and the clouds.

Perugia in summer can be freezing too, but this is too much, this is a joke, this is a night engineered on purpose to be exactly like this, so that everything remains vividly etched in memory, the music and the words and the uncertain gait of this woman for whom it's impossible to give her need for legend a moment's rest. She was destined for legend when she was seventeen and sang the songs Mick Jagger gave her, and she's still anchored to legend today at sixty-five, giving the impression of having lived at least a hundred years. This one was written for her by Tom Waits, and she pours into it all the intensity she's still, after and despite everything, capable of. It will obviously be the only encore. There couldn't have been a better way to close the show.

It had begun a couple of hours earlier, the final night of this 2011 edition of Rockin' Umbria, which besides Faithfull also brought in acts of the calibre of Joan As Police Woman, Verdena, Giovanni Lindo Ferretti and Kultur Shock. All of them played in Umbertide, the festival's historic home. For her, though, the old high priestess of rock, they managed to wrest the splendid San Francesco auditorium in Perugia away from the never-ending building works that have occupied it since it was damaged by the 1997 earthquake. It used to be the favourite venue of Umbria Jazz, and they're working very hard, and very slowly, to get it back into shape.

But Lady Marianne deserved a prestigious stage, and it was well worth putting a brief hold on works that will still need a few more years before they're finished. A place like this is a marvel in itself, and in the end it hardly matters if the acoustics are, for now, still what they are. Something to factor in.

The crowd who'd come for Faithfull had first found themselves clapping their hands raw for a surprisingly good support act. This Harmony, from Perugia, none of them much over thirty. Their performance was fantastic: post-rock stripped of frills, with a violin playing the diva and illuminating choreographic and staging touches. Good, very good indeed. The band had started while the chiaroscuro of clouds could still be glimpsed at dusk through the glass that caps the ancient apse, one extra touch of magic instantly swallowed up by the far greater magic of the voice of this elegant old lady who'd sauntered up to the microphone to hang some of the most significant tracks of her career on it.

A bit of material from the latest album, the recent "Horses And High Heels", to begin with, immediately setting the tone for what the whole show would be: don't expect anything academic here, the guts are in charge. And so out came the title track of the album, out came "Why Did We Have To Part?" and out came the corrosive "Stations" by Gutter Twins, Mr. Dulli and Mr. Lanegan. And then "There Is A Ghost", co-written with Nick Cave, and "Crane Wife" by the Decemberists, and all the rest right up to the wonderful "Sing Me Back Home", dedicated to the doomed soul of Amy Winehouse. And here, shivers down the spine.

Then the blistering run of "Broken English", with the band's full firepower - a superb Pettibone and multi-instrumentalist Kate St. John, a slightly dazed-looking bassist Ray McFarlane, a solid drummer in Martyn Baker - at its peak, and right after that the song which, more than any other, still is Marianne Faithfull today, an almost rushed "As Tears Go By", ghost of a time now belonging to rock mythology, the way Jagger wrote, yes, his own personal version of Marcel Proust's petite madeleine. Finally, before going off to have a cigarette lit backstage, "Working Class Hero" ("a great song, written by a great man"), closed with her left fist raised to the sky, and "Incarceration Of A Flower Child", which Roger Waters wrote in 1968 but "never gave it to Pink Floyd".

Marianne is special, because it only takes hearing her intone a couple of words to forget much of what you'd legitimately expect from a rock concert: a singer who always remembers every word, a band that never loses the thread, acoustics that don't clash with the stone walls and ceilings. And, make no mistake, this isn't simply indulgence. It's just that Marianne Faithfull, in a place like this - magnificent and ancient and imperfect, just like her - fits perfectly. She carries with her the joys and the weight of legend, and her voice can still remember everything she's been and that, in a way, she will never stop being.

(Photo by Chiara Borgarelli)

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