This story was originally published in the April 17, 1980, issue of Rolling Stone.
“God, I was beautiful.”
Blonde hair in her face, Marianne Faithfull is hanging halfway off the bed in her New York hotel room so she can reach a blazer thrown over a chair. She fingers a huge pink button pinned to the lapel; on it, the words Marianne Faithfull Fan Club frame the photo of a young girl, demure and luminously lovely, with a half-smile on her lips. Faithful stares at her younger image with a hint of wistful pride.
It’s been sixteen years since Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham zeroed in on her at a London party and soon after offered her a recording contract, which led to her Top Ten hit, “As Tears Go By,” and, eventually, a prolonged and highly publicized affair with Mick Jagger. Along with Keith Richards’ common-law wife, Anita Pallenberg, Faithfull was a sexual icon that helped define Swinging London. But for American audiences she’s been virtually invisible since she and Jagger split up in 1969.
Now, at thirty-three, Faithfull is in New York to promote Broken English, an unexpectedly substantial comeback album that’s both powerful and eccentric. Faithfull’s voice is entirely new; her schoolgirl croon has changed to an aged whiskey rasp, full of kinks and cracks. This afternoon, it’s just about gone altogether. Faithfull lost her voice three days ago from rehearsing too strenuously for her spot on Saturday Night Live. Not only did she go through with the appearance, she played a scheduled gig the next night at the New Wave Mudd Club. “There’s no good going on about old troupers and all that,” Faithfull says with a tired gesture. “That’s all very well, but it’s a load of shit. The point is that if you’ve given your word, you’ve got to do it, even if you can’t sing a fucking note. And lo and behold, I couldn’t.”
Before a Mudd Club audience packed tightly enough to induce asthma; Faithfull talked, strained and wrestled her way through her songs, making “Sister Morphine” (a Stones song on 1971’s Sticky Fingers for which she wrote the lyrics) sound bare and scary, like nails scraping across a floor. It was a stunning demonstration of Faithfull’s art — and her character.
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“I’m so, so strong,” she whispers, hand to her heart. “People have no clue.” It hardly jibes, I say, with her old vulnerable-waif image. “Oh I know, they all think I’m a victim — or a survivor. I hate that, I hate the word. A survivor of what? The Titanic? It’s not just that I’m not a survivor,” she says breathily, “I’m so much more than that.”
The publication last year of Up and Down with the Rolling Stones has helped accent the Sixties-survivor element of Faithfull’s comeback. A lurid, tell-all memoir by Tony Sanchez, a former flunky for Keith Richards, the book details the sex-and-drugs misadventures of the Rolling Stones circle, Faithfull included. She is restrainedly bemused about the book. “It was riveting, of course — all those books are riveting,” she drawls, one hand over her eyes. “And it’s nice to have those stories told by the pusher… ” Her voice trails off into a cough. If she hadn’t left that milieu, she admits, “I might have become just a hopeless junkie.”
Instead, Faithfull acted in British repertory theater — quitting when her reputation helped deny her good parts — and kicked a well-publicized heroin habit. She supported herself mainly with royalties from “Sister Morphine” — a wages-of-sin irony she’s quick to point out. “Once or twice,” she adds, “I met a nice boyfriend who happened to have some money.” She’s been married for nearly a year to ex-Vibrators bassist Ben Briereley (“A musician, of all things,” she laughs dryly, “after all those years of nice, rich, young Etonians”), who contributed “Brain Drain” to Broken English.
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Faithless, released on NEMS records in 1976, marked Faithfull’s rapprochement with the music business; it was her first LP since the Sixties. Recorded a few tracks at a time over two years, the LP yielded a minor European hit (“Dreamin’ My Dreams”) but seemed halfhearted and lackluster. It wasn’t until 1978 that, inspired by the music and energy of the punk movement, she put together a permanent band and hit the British club circuit. A few songs the band recorded with young producer Mark Miller Mundy (“My dear” chuckles Faithfull, “he was the only one who would go near me”) won Faithfull a contract with Island Records.
The material on Broken English — much of it worked out by Faithfull and her band in the course of touring— is a jagged fusion of New Wave, disco and reggae accents, as gritty as her voice. Faithfull covers John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” and Shel Silverstein’s “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”— both unjustly neglected songs, she feels, that are oddly enriched by her treatment. “Lucy Jordan” (the tale of a housewife’s crackup) becomes more pointed when sung by a woman, while Lennon’s song becomes a more general statement of solidarity “instead of a bitter cry by a working-class boy against society.” The album is “something very special,” says Faithfull quietly. “I’ve never worked very hard at anything before; it’s the first time musical demands have been made on me.”
British audiences, expecting the old Marianne, were shell-shocked by her new voice and hard-edged material — particularly “Why D’Ya Do It,” a scathing poem by Heathcote Williams about sexual jealousy set to a jagged dance tune by Faithfull and her band. She delivers its brutally obscene lyrics (“Why d’ya do it,’ she said/ Why d’ya let her suck your cock”) in a voice corrosive with contempt. “Before the record came out, no one had ever heard it. So the people who would come, all five of them,” she adds sardonically, “were old fans of mine. They were absolutely staggered; I’d see people’s jaws dropping.”
She sits up abruptly and peers across the room into the mirror, running her hands through her shaggy, pink-streaked hair. Despite all her toughness, she admits she’s still not a model of confidence: “Yesterday, having lost my voice before the concert, I was so frightened I even got an old friend to get hold of Mick and have him call me to say, ‘Calm down.’ Which he did.” Did it help? She shoots me a sidelong grin. “Yes it did, actually.” She pauses a moment and laughs. “He said to me, ‘Of course, we won’t be able to speak to each other,’ and I said, ‘Oh, all right then.’”
“We mustn’t, you see,” she adds quickly. “I can see what he means. It’s what everyone’s waiting for. And, fuck, I’m married and he’s with Jerry Hall — but in America people still only see me as Jagger’s ex-girlfriend.” She grimaces, then leans back against her pillow and smiles; it’s the same tantalizing smile she wore long ago. “It might not even be possible for anyone to have realized,” she murmurs, “that I’m really rather happy.”
