You could tell the story of Marianne Faithfull, who died Jan. 30 at the age of 78, in three recordings — specifically three versions of “As Tears Go By.” The British singer initially recorded the song, one of the first that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote together, in 1964 as a 17-year-old ingénue. Produced by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who discovered her at a party, the recording is a brisk, breezy slice of chamber-pop and Faithfull’s vocals are all breathy sweep. Faithfull wrote in her 1994 autobiography that Oldham immediately knew it would be a hit, and it reached No. 9 on the UK Singles Chart and No. 22 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Faithfull returned to the song twice more in the studio: First on Strange Weather, the 1987 album she recorded after struggling with drug addiction for much of the ’70s and ’80s, and then again on the 2018 Negative Capability. Especially in this last version, recorded when she was 71, you can hear both how far she travelled and the toll that hard road took on her. Faithfull was, above all, a survivor — of tabloid coverage of a drug bust where she was found wearing only a fur rug, of a heroin addiction that cost her custody of her son, of years living on the street — but she was never made it look easy. Indeed, her genius was to make it sound as hard as it must have been.
Faithfull, who dated Jagger for years in the late 1960s, began her career as a living symbol of Swinging London, an especially beautiful woman in a scene of beautiful people. She had a glamorous background to match: Her father was a British intelligence officer and her mother was the daughter of an Austrian aristocrat. (She was related to the Austrian nobleman and writer Leopold van Sacher-Masoch, for whom masochism is named, which would have been a great opening line if Faithfull ever needed one.) She was better educated than Jagger, and she introduced him to Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which inspired the song “Sympathy for the Devil.”
It’s hard to hear that kind of depth on Faithfull’s first recording, “As Tears Go By,” which came out more than a year before the Stones version. Even by 1964 standards, the song sounds remarkably innocent — it’s pop, without a rock sensibility. In her 1994 autobiography, Faithfull describes it a bit disparagingly as “the Europop you might hear on a French jukebox.” The lyrics are downcast — it’s the evening of the day, she’s watching the children play — but her voice sounds too high and pure to give them much feeling.
The following April, in 1965, Faithfull released two albums the same day — a self-titled pop album and the folk-oriented Come My Way. (The latter album didn’t come out in the U.S.) Within a year, she separated from her husband, John Dunbar, and started dating Jagger. (“I slept with three” Rolling Stones, she said later, “and then I decided the lead singer was the best bet.”) The year after that, she was busted at Richards’ estate with Jagger, Richards and others, wearing only a rug and, she writes in her biography, coming down from an acid trip.
After Faithfull broke up with Jagger, in 1970, her life unraveled — she lost custody of her son, attempted suicide, became addicted to heroin and ended up living on the street in London. She tried to return to singing, with a couple of false starts, including recordings from 1971 that eventually came out as Rich Kid Blues and the 1975 and 1976 country tracks released as Dreamin’ My Dreams and then as Faithless. Finally, in 1979, she recorded her masterpiece, Broken English, a mix of off-kilter dance music and rough New Wave with a punk edge. By then, her voice had worn ragged — lower in pitch, rougher in tone, better suited for more sophisticated songs.
Faithfull recorded two more albums before getting clean in the mid-’80s and, on the 1987 album Strange Weather, finding a deep, world-weary voice that stayed with her for the rest of her career. A dark cabaret sensibility ties together the album, which is all covers, from “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” to “Hello Stranger.” She also revisited “As Tears Go By,” which was released as a single but didn’t chart, in a slower, sadder version. On this version, her voice is deeper, the orchestration darker and sparser. Faithfull now sounds like she’s watching the children play from the distance the lyrics imply, looking at their innocence with hers behind her. She could be looking back on herself singing in 1964 (“Doing things I used to do/ They think are new”). It’s an astonishing reinvention of her earlier hit.
Faithfull spent the rest of her career bringing her deep, weathered voice to various kinds of music — standards by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, compositions by writers of her generation, and songs written for her by younger musicians who admired her (including Beck and Jarvis Cocker on Kissin Time and Nick Cave and PJ Harvey on Before the Poison). Finally, on Negative Capability, she revisits a few songs she had already recorded — “A Tears Go By,” as well as Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (which she had recorded on Rich Kid Blues) and “Witches’ Song” (on Broken English). All three sound slower, almost strained at times, as though they are harder to for Faithfull to sing than they once were. She turns “Witches’ Song,” powerful and incantatory on Broken English, into a dirge, as though she recognized she was no longer the witch she once was. But the most striking difference is in “As Tears Go By.”
Faithfull’s 2018 take on “As Tears Go By” is a lifetime away from her 1964 hit — literally. Her voice, long since worn, now sounds downright weary — as though she’s singing only with great effort. The production, lush in 1964 and sparse in 1987, is minimal but warm, transparent enough to reveal every tremor in her voice. The song, originally light and airy, now sounds almost funereal, as Faithfull’s voice comes close to cracking. It sounds as though she’s revealing more than she intends to — “It is the evening of the day” has a very different meaning at 71 than it does at 17. The children in the song, once so close, are now only visible from a distance. The 17-year-old ingénue is obscured by a lifetime of hard-won accomplishment and regret. This last version of the song is a harder listen, especially for anyone who has heard the other two, and it wasn’t a single, much less a hit. On it, though, Faithfull took ownership of the song, and her history with it, and with it her remarkable legacy.
