So long, Marianne

Lady Marianne has passed away in her beloved London, one of the last queens of British rock. Behind her lies a life lived intensely, marked by both triumphs and pain. Today the mainstream media paint her superficially as "Mick Jagger's muse", recalling almost exclusively that tormented love affair that filled the tabloids of the Sixties. Back when sweet, carefree Marianne, guitar slung over her shoulder and that silken voice - enough to make Shirley Collins and Vashti Bunyan envious - had bewitched an entire nation. Her musical career began in 1964, thanks to the support of Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones. Her debut single, "As Tears Go By", written by Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Oldham himself, was an instant hit. In that era she became a central figure of Swinging London, co-writing Rolling Stones hits such as "Sister Morphine" and standing out as one of the most celebrated performers and songwriters in British music.

But Marianne Faithfull, who died yesterday at the age of 78, was so much more. She proved it as early as her album "Love In A Mist" (1967), which marked a moment of artistic transition, with folk and orchestral influences. Her early work - often shaped by the insights of Jon Mark (later of Mayall and Mark-Almond fame) - revealed a fragile yet fierce artist who always managed to pick herself back up, through refined, vibrant songs and a voice that carved every word and every pause with a depth and lived experience that, like an open wound, always left an indelible mark. Indeed, over a nearly sixty-year career, interrupted by long, turbulent periods of inactivity, the English singer-songwriter came to embody the figure of a phoenix, rising from the ashes, returning from hell. A name, a destiny of her own: a beguiling, decadent poetess, raised in the silk-lined comfort of an aristocratic family, who plunged - blonde and very young - first into the most rock-and-fashion-obsessed circles of Swingin' London (on the arm of Mick Jagger), then into the dark, squalid alleys of drug addiction, the remote, rusted corners of the British capital, squats, third-rate hotels.

She suffered, she endured; as a young woman she nearly died from the wrong kind of love, from loneliness, from melancholy: then inner strength managed to lift her back up, helping her find her way again. Some existential scars, unfortunately, stay tattooed on you more indelibly than any laughter line, and yet everything lies in knowing how to tend to them, drawing inspiration from them, making art out of the sublimation of so many lives condensed into one, each lived at the very height of intensity.

After staring into the abyss, Marianne found the creative path that suited her best: dark-hued songwriting, capable of riding the new wave with unyielding courage, even flirting with punk. Marianne herself would have plenty to say, in her celebrated memoirs, about how punk saved her, rescuing her from her own misery. She lived through that era with tremendous intensity and passion: having already tasted it alongside key figures of the time (Ben Brierley of the Vibrators at her side), she took it in like the most redemptive of medicines, and it was punk itself that would catapult her back into serious artistic conversation, lifting her bodily out of the nostalgic footnotes reserved for stars who once were. With that voice - cracked, harsh, biting - she brought a touch of feminine visceral force to her songs. A woman of rock, yes, but without the priestly aura of a Patti Smith or the timeless sacredness of a Nico to redeem her from the surrounding decay, or to make her attacks on society, her scandalous personal experiences, any more palatable. Yet it was precisely that sharpness that made her tirades against society and religion so singular, sublimating the yearning for escape of any ordinary Lucy Jordan, making it coincide with her own past, her aversion to a world that seems to offer no way out. Yes, Lucy Jordan, the anti-heroine of the 1979 masterpiece, "Broken English", whose review - a genuine milestone - we present below.

In the Eighties and Nineties, Marianne Faithfull continued to explore new musical territory with albums such as "Strange Weather" (1987) and "A Secret Life" (1995), collaborating with artists of the calibre of Angelo Badalamenti and Metallica. At the same time, she also established herself as an actress, appearing in films such as "Intimacy" (2001), "Marie Antoinette" (2006) and "Irina Palm" (2007), as well as in several stage adaptations.

Other intense records followed, crowded with reflections and contradictions. Albums often recorded with the precious collaboration of musician friends she'd known for a lifetime, or, conversely, who had grown up listening to her records and dreaming that one day they might meet her. It's no coincidence that just two years ago the tribute anthology "The Faithful: A Tribute To Marianne Faithfull" was released, gathering names from the world of rock and singer-songwriting such as Tanya Donelly (Breeders), Lydia Lunch, Joan As Policewoman and the duo Cat Power–Iggy Pop, taking on her "Working Class Hero".

After 2000, Faithfull consolidated her status as an artistic icon with albums like "Before The Poison" (2005), made in collaboration with Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, and "She Walks In Beauty" (2021), with Warren Ellis, recorded during the pandemic that put the English singer's very life at risk, to bring to life what had always been her dream: a series of pieces split between reading, poetry and music. But her true final legacy came three years earlier: "Negative Capability" (2018) grappled with reflections on themes like loss and resilience; today it sounds to us like Marianne Faithfull's spiritual testament, an album that holds the same weight as Leonard Cohen's "I Want It Darker", Johnny Cash's "American Recordings", or David Bowie's "Blackstar". Without the foreboding of a darker, harder future, but with a look back at the past free of useless regrets.

"It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull. "Marianne passed away peacefully in London, in the company of her beloved family. She will be greatly missed". This was the brief statement confirming the news everyone had feared, after the hospitalizations, the illness, the renewed suffering. She leaves us a formidable collection of songs and a life lesson, more valid today than ever.

So long, Marianne.

(OndaRock Staff)

***

Marianne Faithfull – Broken English (1979)

London, 1979: the days of Swinging London were long gone by then, punk had already swept away many certainties, and the long shadow of the Thatcherite decade was about to fall over the whole of the United Kingdom. Through the streets and suburbs of the capital wanders a solitary figure: few would dare admit they remembered her, yet that face had once known great fame. Sweet, impish Marianne, the trauma of a difficult childhood kept deep within her heart... With a guitar slung over her shoulder and that silken voice, one that would make Shirley Collins and Vashti Bunyan envious, she had bewitched an entire nation. How could you blame Mick Jagger for wanting her by his side as muse and companion? After all, it was from that magical bond that "As Tears Go By" emerged, one of the most indelible anthems of that extraordinary era.

Yes, that season now belongs to an almost mythical past, a fable swept away like the most unreal of lies. Other concerns had taken the place of that astonishing wave of optimism; new heroes had replaced, with little ceremony, the faded idols of an era already dissolved into dust. Oblivion, perhaps an even worse punishment than a deliberate damnatio memoriae, cast its oppressive shroud over most of the faces and voices that had symbolized a great period.

Sweet, cheeky Marianne... She herself became one of the most illustrious victims. A fading from the scene with the flavor of Greek tragedy: endless troubles, a son she had to give up early on, a heroin addiction spiraling out of all control, the alleys of Soho her only refuge. A curtain that fell far too suddenly, a step away from the most fateful of endpoints: a line constantly flirted with, revisited, perhaps even longed for, deep within an existence lacking meaning, lacking direction.

But deep down, that tenacity, that blessed tenacity, had never stopped burning. Beneath those embers, sweeping away the ash, still burned the pulsing fire of a soul hungry to make its voice heard, torn away too soon from its most natural context. If a fine, if inconclusive, covers collection from the mid-Seventies, "Dreamin' My Dreams" (which unexpectedly found success across the water in Ireland), offered the first glimmers of rebirth, life had an unhoped-for, extraordinary redemption in store for her. If we want to play with signs and symbols, it's not hard to believe that, given her surname, the whole thing takes on rather illuminating overtones.

And here comes the sudden jolt, the twist that overturns every expectation: new surroundings, new company (David Wilkie of Fleetwood Mac among others, but above all Barry Reynolds and Steve Winwood: the former's pen and guitar, and the latter's keyboards, would prove essential collaborators), and finally a revolution on the verge of exploding, shake a clouded consciousness out of its torpor, instilling passion where even the most misguided rehab programs had failed. Marianne herself would later say, in her celebrated memoirs, that punk saved her, pulled her out of her own misery. She lives through that season with tremendous intensity and abandon: already savored alongside some of the era's leading figures (Ben Brierley of the Vibrators at her side), taken like the most redemptive of medicines, it would be punk itself that catapulted her back into serious artistic conversation, lifting her bodily out of the nostalgic footnotes reserved for stars that once were.

A stage turned powder keg, then, a scandalous and fascinating pandemonium reinventing itself at unprecedented speed, throwing up new role models every week: the most stimulating backdrop imaginable for a comeback, with a brand-new contract with Island Records to shelve dusty, old-fashioned interpretations and throw herself into the fray with renewed enthusiasm. But above all, with a barely-mastered English, painfully spat out, courageously broken: it's as if her own bearing, her own suffering, is mirrored in the very title of the album that sealed Faithfull's definitive artistic rebirth. From then on, nothing would ever be the same.

Even that cover alone, that lit cigarette taking up all the available space, the gaze tucked behind an arm, that electric blue lighting up the profile of her face in a violent play of contrasts, rightfully belongs among the classics. Nothing more would be needed: compared to the baroque elegance of the late Sixties, Marianne presents herself in a tangibly different guise. After all, those slaps in the face, that tormented self-destructiveness, couldn't pass without leaving a mark. And what a shock, for anyone who rediscovered her years after her dazzling youthful appearances, to hear that voice.

Exactly, that voice: beginning and end of every torment, the arc of a life devoted to self-destruction, legacy of addictions and abuses that ruthlessly tore through that once-enchanting veil of silk. But what use is silk to someone used to the cold pavement? What use is it to someone who, against the religion of luxury, throws back a dry, fierce "What are you fighting for?" in an iconic, aggressive title track (hard to forget that guitar riff, courtesy of Barry Reynolds), lashing out at the wave of terrorism that haunted the whole of Europe for years? Nothing: she rejects it like so much waste paper. Her ruins, the wreckage of a past that once was, now speak an entirely different language. Drama is her constant companion, and the hysterical jabs of guitar, bass and synth are new arrows in her quiver. Let others build castles in the air.

Here she rides the new wave with unbroken courage, breathing in its thrill with full lungs. And no matter if that same wave keeps spasmodically chasing its next fix, turning all its attention to the eternal ritual of oblivion. It's no use reminding yourself that yes, there's no rush: "You want the power, you need the glory", you rasp to yourself, this is what you need. Pure, raw reality, backed by a stark and devastatingly effective punk arrangement: how many "Heroine"'s had already been written, passed indifferently under the bridges of memory. But here everything is different, with that cracked, raspy, biting voice lending a touch of feminine rawness to the theme of abuse.

A woman, yes: but there was no priestess-like aura of a Patti Smith, no timeless sacredness of a Nico, to redeem her from the surrounding squalor, to make her attacks on society, her scandalous personal experiences, more palatable. But it's precisely that sharpness that makes for, among other things, unrepeatable tirades against religion ("I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I ain't done nothing wrong I feel guilt", she declares with dispassionate simplicity in "Guilt", the partnership with Reynolds producing another gem of top-class wave songwriting), sublimating the longing for escape of any given Lucy Jordan, making it coincide with her own past, her aversion to a world from which there seems to be no escape.

And it's this very song, this moving and heartfelt "Ballad Of Lucy Jordan" (a reinterpretation of a track originally performed by Dr. Hook), that would pave the way for the cult status of "Broken English". Released alongside the album, introduced by a strikingly modern, alluring synth-folk arrangement (and a reminder to Kate Bush that the seeds of her "Heads We're Dancing" had already been planted ten years earlier), the song was soon destined for endless reworkings and covers. Curiously, it was itself a new interpretation of the Dr. Hook original, and would go on to feature in a cult film like "Thelma & Louise". But in the end, her stature as an interpreter had never stopped shining through.

With that voice, magnificently worn down, having lost an octave but gained new shades of nuance, the weight of the former "North Country Maid", the eternal dreamer, took on an unusual, different vigor, one that made her almost a foul-mouthed riot-grrrl ante litteram. Emotional details take on new meaning, the swells and silences gain heightened importance, underlining the very themes of the lyrics. The Lennon-penned standard "Working Class Hero" becomes, in Faithfull's hands, far more than a "simple" protest anthem about class divides. That guitar swelling second by second, Marianne's voice now vanishing into its weave and a moment later annihilating it with sudden bursts of intensity, a tension that keeps falling apart and reassembling itself: not just a tribute to those roaring Sixties lived on the front line, but an era brought back to life, speaking to the present as an equal, challenging its conventions and approaches. The best revenge on anyone who wanted to write off the old glories as dead and buried.

Glories that time has made, if anything, more insolent, more brazen than ever: having successfully persuaded the poet Heathcote Williams not to hand his lyrics over to a Tina Turner who would never have agreed to expose herself to verses of such weight, Faithfull saves the most scandalous, most libidinous confession for the icing on the cake. Yes, a "Why'd Ya Do It?" whose effect was, needless to say, immediate: the track's reggae break softening the hard-rock edges of the guitar, the keyboards embroidering a vague psychedelic backdrop, were nothing more than the vehicle, the conduit for an explicitness that instantly outraged every woman in charge of production at Island.

Try explaining to them how it's possible to talk about fellatio and male infidelity with such ease, suddenly overturning every commonly accepted perspective; try explaining that certain models no longer made any sense to someone who had never given the fake propriety of the good girl even a fighting chance. But that alone was enough to stir up an enormous fuss: never before had such verbal insolence, such explicit sexual declarations, been heard from the fairer sex, who in the minds of many were supposed to stick to rather different subjects: in Australia, the record was even banned in print. Well before the provocations of Veronica Ciccone, other women had already set about critically upending common sensibilities.

And this is where the artistic success of "Broken English" is rooted. Even before being an excellent collection of songs, even before being an example of a formidable conversion to the new gospel of wave, the record is a manifesto for a different model of artist and performer, of a proud, combative woman who sees in her problems, in her anguish, an opportunity rather than an obstacle. The opportunity to present herself without filters, to lay bare her own experience in the most direct and truthful way possible, to make plain a more passionate, more unsettling approach to femininity. No matter if the respectable classes turned away in disgust. There is life in this record, first and foremost. Everything else follows naturally from that.

(Vassilios Karagiannis)

P.S. Thanks to Alessandro Liccardo for his valuable suggestions.

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