A fascinating life and some truly great songs. Sadly many will mainly remember her for salacious but probably untrue headlines in the 60s involving The Stones.
So Long Marianne
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Musings on the byways of popular culture
R.I.P.
Shit.
Don’t know why, but this has hit me far harder than I would’ve thought.
Lucky enough to see her in HK in – IIRC – 2012
RIP Marianne and thanks for being such a huge part of my youth
I know what you mean – I’m a bit startled at how I’ve reacted to this.
One of my heroes. RIP.
Damnation. Love Marianne. Broken English is a fantastic album, I love both her versions of Sister Morphine, and this, Truth Bitter Truth.
“Where did it go to, my youth?”
Such a great, albeit underrated, album. I was going to post that song, but here’s my second favourite from it Running For Our Lives:
The Ballard of Lucy Jordan is on repeat right now . So sad to here of her passing.
I was listening to this just over the weekend – so sorry to hear this bad news.
Was originally cast to play Sid Vicious’s mum in the original Russ Meyer draft of Great Rock n Roll Swindle
I highly rate her version of Working Class Hero
One of my all time favourite concerts was seeing her perform in front of Saisbury Cathedral as the sun went down. Unforgettable. Probably about 20 years ago now.
Very sad but what a life.
How beautiful she was this is very sad
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2025/jan/30/marianne-faithfull-a-life-in-pictures
As Andrew Loog Oldham wrote in Stoned
“She had the sort of beauty that had she’s been around in the 16th Century,
you’d have set sail for her.”
I love this live album of hers
Absolutely, one of my favourites…
I love this live album of hers
I’ll say it again – superb album, I really enjoyed what she was doing here – also the Brecht-Weill songs.
I saw her at the Dominion Theatre on the tour that Blazing Away was recorded on (IIRC). She was utterly compelling.
Broken English and Strange Weather are albums I return to again and again.
She was so much more than her ’60s notoriety.
Sad news. You already beat me above with “Sunny Goodge Street”, but I like her take of Gerry Goffin’s (but not Carol King, as I had assumed) “Something Better”
I dislike the sexist way they filmed her for Rock N Roll Circus, as it shows the problems she faced as a serious 60s artist, but this is the best clip
Absolutely love her as a person and her music and had just started reading her autobiography. Either Mojo or Uncut mentioned an anthology due out sometime this year which now can’t come soon enough for me l.
Rest in peace Marianne you were truly special.
I heard her last album thanks to El Hombre Malo putting this track in his collection for the last CD swap (in 2023).
I reviewed it, not knowing who it was, as:
“This is, without a doubt, the best thing in the whole collection – possibly among all 36 tracks. Wonderful eerie instrumentation, just poking through in the right places and the vocals — croaky, elegant female quoting poetry – I think it’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci, though not a verse I know. But it is magnificent. Such words, such confidence and calm in their utterance of words not now commonly used, but such syllabic joy in their sound. Wow. Really impressive”.
She was really impressive. I like this tribute by Alexis Petridis, which shows by those wanting to collaborate with her what an artist she was, far from the sexist misuse she experienced in the sixties.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jan/30/marianne-faithfull-towering-artist-not-just-a-muse
I looked up my take on the same track in the CD swap…
(5) An oddity – spoken word over an ambient background. I recognise the poem from my school days and I think I can identify the voice – 60’s starlet plus 40 fags a day. She has made some interesting choices in her theatrical career. This fits and who better to fill this Keats with world weariness. I like it. A bold choice.
A fitting elegy for the day that’s in it.
I was absolutely blown away when I read her autobiography 30 years ago. I was in my early 20s and she seemed ancient and from another age – but she wasn’t even 50 when she wrote it! But she’d already lived enough to fill a multitude of ordinary lives. Very glad she enjoyed another 30 years, which wouldn’t have seemed likely at various points of her life. What a character and what a voice (or rather two, before and after, voices).
I’ve been filling in the gaps of what I’ve not heard before and there’s so much to enjoy. This is lovely:
As is this which I was meaning to post to the 80s soundtrack thread last week but never got round to. My absolute favourite moment of hers.
Jake Shillingford shared this tribute on the My Life Story Facebook page
There are many brilliant eulogies by proper journalists out there this weekend but I thought I’d just write my own personal story from the heart. If you don’t know much about her, please take 10 mins to learn about her life before you read on.
I first met Marianne Faithfull through my A&R man Tris Penna. MLS were the first artist to sign to his new label It Records, set up and funded by Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1998. *Much more about this bizarre and beautiful story in my forthcoming NostalgiaBlog™ posts about Joined Up Talking. I remember he was looking to build the roster with a few contemporary acts, so I never suspected Marianne Faithfull to suddenly pop into the offices in Tower Street, West One.
Wow.
I had a fascination with her ever since I got a calculator out one day and worked out that she was the same age as Debbie Harry. Just 5 months apart. I mean that totally blows your mind doesn’t it! Marianne a star at 19 and Debbie much older when she found fame. Both cut from the same fragile sexy rock goddess cloth, continually under the gaze of a salacious media.
Marianne once said: “When you are 18, 19, 20, you’re used to being photographed all the time, in a certain way. So, the narcissism becomes almost out of control. And the way that young women are photographed, they become addicted to this feedback of the image. I’m still dealing with it.”
Well she didn’t, as we all know, and ended up living on the streets of Soho during the punk era, deadening herself with heroin before emerging with the new wave classic Broken English. Btw – Why D’ya Do It? is a fantastic track as well as the better known Ballad of Lucy Jordan, which I always felt it sounded like it was written in the 60s and a bit out of place on an album released in 1979.
Another thing I feel I need to mention at this point, I know this sounds weird but she was also very similar to my mother: cigarette husky voice, very very sweary and a fiery feminism born from the male attitudes towards women in the 60s. Mal Campbell the first keyboard player in MLS texted me on Thursday when she passed, to say; 100% you are the only person right now that would say you liked her because she reminded you of your mum!
As label mates, we spent some brief but valuable time together. Notably at the Brit Awards in 1999 where I became her kind of chaperone for the night. I mean you know it’s gonna be an interesting evening when you’re seated at a round table on the main floor of the London Arena with Marianne Faithfull on one side and Sir Tim Rice on the other. I have a healthy / unhealthy obsession with Brian Jones and wanted her to fill in the gaps of my knowledge. So a lot of questions were asked!
We really bonded over that, she basically told me she loved Brian more than Mick. I mean she really loved Brian, I can see her beautiful face light up now talking about his fragility. Her and Anita Pallenberg (who I also met, yeah I know!) had this strange kind of sisterhood with members of the Stones.
I found a couple of simple entries in my diary for this time:
I love the above page, you can see I’m working on It’s A Girl Thing (note IAGT) on Friday. I appear on a TV programme about the Dice Man on Saturday and then footie and Faithfull on Sunday. I’m just glad I can say that I do genuinely appreciate those times.
Mason Cardiff, son of legendary film director Jack Cardiff, was good friends with MLS Drummer Simon (The Saint) Wray and came to many of our shows. Simon nudged me to ask Marianne about her experience working with Jack as you can see from this reminder (above). I have no recollection of a picture of Mick Jagger I was supposed to bring!
The 1999 Brits became infamous for drug taking, in fact they changed the format the following millennium year by moving the toilets further away from the tables. How fantastically headmasterish!
I have wonderfully funny story about this which doesn’t feel appropriate right now but will share further down the line when I reflect on that bizarre evening.
Here are some lyrics from the title track of her album on It Records released in 2000 the same year as JUT :
Oh, doctor please, I drink and I take drugs, I love sex and I move around a lot
I had my first baby at fourteen
And yes, I guess I do have vagabond ways
This is and Why D’ya Do It? contains very similar language to how my mother used to speak. I can’t say I was particularly comfortable about this when I was a young teenager, but as a grown adult I appreciate the direct, antagonistic approach. There’s a lot of humour in there too. I think this is why I got on so well with Marianne, I had a decade of learning how to speak my mother’s language.
In an attempt to round this story off with a conclusion, I wanted to post a song about her that Mal Campbell and I wrote. I think about 2003? Mal and I reunited to work on the second ExileInside album entitled EI060 in the years after MLS disbanded in 2000.
It’s very much about the quote I posted earlier ‘being photographed all the time’
Hanging high for treason, they bought you roses out of season is a reference to Redlands, the infamous Rolling Stones drug trial, witch hunt.
and here is the track he wrote