On Marianne Faithfull

For British music​ , 1978 was a year of hesitation. Pop began to admit that it didn’t know what to do with itself as punk evolved into New Wave, which was suddenly on Top of the Pops most weeks. Those who had been shocked by punk now just found it annoying. The bands that were still together had learned how to put on a show. They were slicker and more predictable, and we went to see them in town halls, theatres and cinemas rather than backstreet clubs. What next? We had been so busy jettisoning the past and claiming the future that we’d overlooked the present. Who were we going to listen to and argue about now?

This was also the year that Marianne Faithfull recorded what was to become her most celebrated album, Broken English. Her music career wasn’t one of solid output and solid progress. She didn’t gather substance, let alone increase the scale of her productions (other acts moved on to their concept album, their triple album, their triple-concept album). She continued to respond to ideas and encounters, and to work with collaborators. Born in 1946, she was only seventeen when she had a hit with ‘As Tears Go By’. It was written by the Rolling Stones, who later recorded their own version. She used to say that Mick and Keith didn’t write the song for her, but also that they did. Her voice on this debut is compelling, guarded and moves in straight lines – no trills or frills.

I want to use the same adjectives to describe her voice on Broken English. Yes, it had darkened and deepened and cracked (which the media relished, as though the damage done by substance abuse and itinerancy, getting lost and growing older, were an aesthetic enhancement), but her sense of measurement is the same, as is her ability to convey something complicated in what appears to be a straightforward melody. She doesn’t go in for embellishment or theatrics, and yet what we hear, the way it makes us feel, is complex in ways we recognise but can’t articulate. Isn’t that what songs are for?

If teenagers knew anything about Marianne Faithfull in the late 1970s, it was that she had been Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. Some of our parents used to play ‘As Tears Go By’: it was the kind of song you heard at weddings and funerals, and we were old enough now to be going to those. We knew that Faithfull had been arrested naked and wrapped in a fur rug in a mansion owned by one of the Rolling Stones – or was it in one of those vast townhouses owned by that generation of pop stars who used to drive Rolls-Royces into swimming pools and now spent a year at a time recording in the Caribbean? We were glad to know that pop stars met our expectations with their fur rugs and mansions and pools, but we were fed up of hearing about their lifestyle because it wasn’t ours. The Stones spent 1979 recording their fifteenth album, Emotional Rescue, in Nassau, Paris and New York. It was all a long way from Dartford, where Mick Jagger met Keith Richards at primary school. Faithfull grew up mostly in Reading, but her father had been in MI6 and then became a professor of Italian literature, while her mother, who was descended from Austrian aristocracy (her great-uncle Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was the author of Venus in Furs, published in 1870 and later the subject of a Velvet Underground song), had danced with the Max Reinhardt company. Perhaps Mick Jagger found her hard to impress.

In 1978, I went to see the Vibrators at the Marquee Club. My friend hated it and sat on the floor in a corridor reading Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. A punk staggered past and vomited on the book. We were outraged but also impressed. I thought this was a separate world from the hippy 1960s that I worked so hard to push away. I had no idea that Faithfull would soon marry someone who had been in the Vibrators. She was also cast as Sid Vicious’s mother in the never-made Sex Pistols film ‘Who Killed Bambi?’

Punk was far more about cover versions and name-checking and musical heritage than most of us understood. It removed the anxiety about originality and borrowed cheekily, carelessly, blatantly. New Wave brought back tunes and gave us something easier, albeit less exciting, to dance to. In 1979 disco still dominated the charts, though Donna Summer was handing over to the Sugarhill Gang and ‘Rapper’s Delight’. It became cool to listen to jazz, but not to rock. Not yet. I relished the depth and scale of Public Image Ltd (PiL) and the Pop Group, the way they simultaneously pursued and pushed away what was taking shape. One of the year’s big hits was Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. I wouldn’t have sought it out, but its lumbering tempo and corrosive repetitiveness suited the general mood. By the end of 1979, hesitation had given way to dread. We fully expected to be facing the end of the world. Margaret Thatcher had been elected; Russia invaded Afghanistan; Reagan announced he was running for president. We needed someone with a big presence, a big story, and there was Marianne Faithfull. Broken English was finally released in November 1979.

‘I had reluctantly come to the conclusion,’ she said later, ‘that if I was ever to obliterate my past I’d have to create my own Frankenstein, and then become that creature as well.’ This casually complex observation gives a sense of how open-minded she was during the making of Broken English. She had been touring with a band that included Ben Brierly (the member of the Vibrators she married) and Barry Reynolds. They worked together on a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ and a wild setting of the poet Heathcote Williams’s ‘Why D’Ya Do It’, which was so full of expletives that the pressing plant and distributors initially refused to handle it. It was that track, and the title song, that got her the record deal.

Faithfull seems to have been a natural collaborator, open to sharing influences and ideas. She was clearly relaxed about artistic control – or conditioned or compelled to share it. The best songs on Broken English are the ones she co-wrote. The original mix was less spacious, more of itself, less of the time and more of her times. It has greater force, more of a rock propulsion, and doesn’t direct you to pay her voice extra attention. She was said to prefer it, but it was set aside in favour of something more self-conscious.

The album opens with the title track, about the Baader-Meinhof Group. The first thing you hear is a squiggle of synth. Reynolds brought in Steve Winwood – whose musical career stretches from the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic in the 1960s to the hit ‘Higher Love’ in the 1980s – to garnish it with electronics, in a nod to New Wave. These additions are restrained but insistent. They stand apart like an extrovert accessory that would suit someone more fun.

Faithfull’s voice doesn’t hide the effort of singing. It is clear and precise, but never relaxed or spontaneous. It’s too easy to read into the sound her years of addiction and illness. Her phrasing is strong and there is no sign of the industry’s default American accent (listen to Mick). Her instinct seems to be to perform the material as cleanly as she can, using a staccato delivery on the line ‘What are you fighting for?’ without staging the question.

Both the punk and hippy worlds needed to feel opposed, and resistant rather than reactive. Broken English puts together Dr Hook’s ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ (hers is by far the better version) and the Beatles with arrangements and dynamics that had come out of punk and New Wave. This was the time of the uncomfortable tempo and its equally uncomfortable dance style: spasmodic, jerky, rigid and regimented – the mechanical inexorable. You can hear this on the record and hear how well it suits Faithfull’s direct approach to the sung line, a lack of give along with a refusal to emote or enact. ‘Witches’ Song’ holds our attention with a muted, narrow performance that doesn’t relax even when she gets to the la la las. It doesn’t drag or dwell, but marches to the beat. There is no breathing out or moving softly away, but no abruptness either.

Her record company advised her not to perform live and instead commissioned a short film by Derek Jarman as a promo. John Peel played tracks from the album alongside Joy Division, which made sense to me. Broken English doesn’t cohere, but neither did Marianne Faithfull. She once described herself as ‘somebody who not only can’t even sing but doesn’t really write or anything, just something you can make into something. I was just cheesecake really, terribly depressing.’ That may have been true in 1964, but by 1979 she was singing and writing to such powerful effect that she produced this album: indefinable, compelling, elusive and immediate, contradictory and straightforward, moving and puzzling, a vulnerable force.