Melancholy, morphine and the Baader-Meinhof group: Marianne Faithfull's 10 best recordings

The Guardian

31-01-2025

Marianne Faithfull's 60s releases were wildly variable, perhaps because she seems to have been beholden to the whims of producers who didn't really know what to do with her: one minute she was recording rounded-edged folk – Cockleshells, What Have They Done to the Rain – the next retooling the Ronettes' Is This What I Get for Loving You? to no great effect. But, occasionally, she rose above it all, injecting her cut-glass delivery with an alarming degree of melancholy, as on Morning Sun. The B-side of her hit This Little Bird, it's a pretty but slender song, driven by what sounds like a echoing harp, that her voice transforms into something weirdly wrenching: 'I'm very sad, tears follow me,' she sings, and she genuinely sounds it.
Co-written with Keith Richards and Mick Jagger – the latter also acting as producer – Sister Morphine effectively curtailed Faithfull's recording career at a stroke: it was only the B-side of her comeback single, the Gerry Goffin/Barry Mann-penned Something Better, but in early 1969, the very thought of Faithfull singing about opiate addiction horrified her record company into pulling the plug on the whole enterprise. Presumably part of the problem was that it sounded so authentically damaged and decadent: a raddled country-rock track that appeared to be on the brink of falling apart, Faithfull's tremulous vocal alternately pleading and numbed. She subsequently re-recorded it in the late 70s, but the original version is the one to hear
The Broken English album wasn't just a deeply expected comeback, it was a complete reinvention. Its sound spoke of the new-wave present, not the era that had made her famous. Moreover, Faithfull seemed happy to dance on the grave of 60s nostalgia, reporting – with a certain relish – how the decade's excesses had resulted in addiction, her own included, and, on the title track, how its political idealism had curdled into terrorism: its obliquely handled subject is the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Stones's Street Fighting Man turned murderous. It's a fantastic track, Faithfull's ravaged voice rasping over a sparse, tense, cyclical backing made up of electronics and clanging guitar.
The Ballad of Lucy Jordan was a song that had been knocking around for years: the saga of a depressed, possibly suicidal housewife, it had been recorded by Lee Hazlewood, country star Johnny Darrell, and, most famously, Dr Hook, a band its author Shel Silverstein regularly worked with. Set to a beatless synth accompaniment courtesy of Steve Winwood, Faithfull's rendering immediately rendered them all null and void, perhaps because her vocal changed the tenor of the song completely. Dr Hook's version is full of pity for its protagonist; Faithfull's was full of an affecting empathy: if she didn't know much about being a housewife, she clearly knew about feeling like you were out of options and had blown your youthful promise.
Neither 1981's Dangerous Acquaintances nor 1983's A Child's Adventure were the match of Broken English, although there's scattered highlights on both: For Beauty's Sake, Sweetheart, The Blue Millionaire. But the pick is the closing track from A Child's Adventure. She's Got a Problem starts out lovelorn but calm, Faithfull singing over a backdrop of acoustic guitar, warm electric piano chords and modish fretless bass, but gradually reveals itself to be a song not about romance but alcoholism: 'Will I see whiskey as a mother in the end … will I smash my brains with drinking?' Unsurprisingly, there's no happy ending, just a blank acceptance of fate.
Stumped by the commercial failure of her previous albums, the Hal Willner-helmed Strange Weather chose to reinvent Faithfull again, this time as a battered chanteuse and interpreter of others' material – standards, old blues songs by Lead Belly, a track written for Faithfull by Tom Waits – throwing in a mordant torch song re-recording of As Tears Go By for good measure. It was risky, but it paid off. Boulevard of Broken Dreams had previously been recorded by Tony Bennett and Bing Crosby among others, but no one made it feel quite as grimy and raddled as it appears in Faithfull's version, which seems to be emanating from the stage of a particularly seedy nightclub.
In the second act of her solo career, Faithfull proved adept at attracting an incredibly high calibre of collaborator. Her first album of original songs in 12 years, A Secret Life was a collaboration with David Lynch's preferred soundtrack composer Angelo Badalamenti, and also featured lyrical contributions from playwright Frank McGuinness. In truth, the material on A Secret Life didn't always work, but when it did, the results were startling: on the chanson-like She, the contrast between Badalamenti's soft-focus and very filmic orchestral arrangement – epic enough to support a mandolin solo! – and Faithfull's rough edged and very human-sounding voice lends the song's lovely melody and lyrics about a protagonist whose tough exterior hides a desperate need for companionship a real emotional impact.
Not for the last time, a host of big names queued up to work with Faithfull on Kissin Time: Beck, Jarvis Cocker, Billy Corgan, Dave Stewart. The results were remarkably consistent – it sounds like an album, not a diverse bunch of collaborations – but the jewel is the title track, precisely because it sounds like nothing Faithfull had recorded before. 13-era Blur are the backing band, and the song shares some of that album's loose, experimental feel: bass informed in equal parts by dub and Krautrock, a hypnotic guitar part, ghostly backing vocals. It's both a fabulous song and alien territory, but Faithfull completely rises to the occasion: if you're always aware who's behind the music – you can spot Damon Albarn's voice a mile off – it's also clear that she's in charge.
Albarn turned up again on 2004's Before the Poison, but it's largely an album split between collaborations with PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, both of whom are on particularly good songwriting form. Cave co-wrote the exquisite Crazy Love with Faithfull, and it's just fantastic, Warren Ellis's violin wrapping around her vocal, which seems to have a strangely destabilising effect on the lyrics. Ostensibly a song about a dizzying romantic rush, it attracts a strange uncertainty in Faithfull's hands: the way she sings 'I know somehow you'll find me' makes the line sound less optimistic than desperate and doomed.
It wasn't her last album – that was She Walks in Beauty, on which Faithfull recited Romantic poetry to Warren Ellis's soundscapes, its recording disrupted by her near fatal brush with Covid – but nevertheless, Negative Capability had a sense of finality and leave-taking about it. It featured Faithfull revisiting songs from throughout her career, and musing on mortality (in part provoked by the death of her friend Anita Pallenberg) and ageing. Co-written by Ed Harcourt, No Moon in Paris is almost unbearably sad, a reflection on fading memories and lost loves, its poignancy heightened by Faithfull's voice, which had been audibly affected by her various health scares: 'Everything passes, everything changes … it's lonely.'