
Overnight it was announced that singer, songwriter, actor, activist, provocateur, Marianne Faithfull (or as ABC radio news described her in an embarrassing mix of Google “research” and lazy thinking, “Mick Jagger’s former girlfriend … drug addict”) had died.
That was a lot of living packed into her 78 years, much more than a “muse” too, if anyone is tempted to use that stupid WAGs-level term. Easy Come, Easy Go may have been the title of one of her late-career albums, but it certainly wasn’t a life description. Nor would it cover her approach to work and song choice.
As Wind Back Wednesday finds in this 2009 interview with her - run ahead of its usual Wednesday spot because waiting seems too slow and someone needs to educate folks at the ABC among others - Marianne Faithfull had both amusement and boredom with the usual blather around her.
But then, surviving and thriving in her 60s came with some understanding, if not necessarily the accoutrements of a successful British life.
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HOW DOES ONE ADDRESS a woman who has been a performing artist, singer and actor, for five decades and sounds like a husky, provocative but elegant upper-class matron? Someone who has survived a stylish but fractured childhood, a decade-plus addiction to heroin and a very public relationship with one of the most famous men of his time to make some of the best work of her career, on film and disc, into her 60s.
Surely for longevity and survival as much as achievement she should be at least Lady Marianne Faithfull, if not Dame Marianne. Should not someone have a word to the Queen?
“No, no no,” she says with an amused glint in her voice. “I’m just Marianne Faithfull."
Would she, long a resident of France and before that Ireland, accept an honour if it was offered?
"Um, I'm not sure," she says, adding with a drawl. "I don't think it would ever be offered you know. I don't get on with the British establishment. [Pause] I'd accept a knighthood."
There are many people who spend their careers seemingly rebelliously anti-establishment and then fall slavishly on any bauble handed out by, to quote one of Faithfull’s more recent collaborators, Morrissey, “some old queen or other”. Sir Michael Jagger, to name one. He who wrote As Tears Go By for Faithfull at the height of their famous love affair in the 1960s.
Maybe we should bestow one on her ourselves, a people's Damehood for services to the dramatic arts. And here we are not just speaking of her film roles, including most recently as a grandmother making some money on the side providing, ahem, hand relief. Her dramatic arts cover a singing career where in the past 30 year she has marked herself out as a superb interpretive, that is, dramatic, singer.
Take for example last year's album, Easy Come Easy Go, a double album of songs from across the 20th century which brought to the fore Faithfull’s skill as an actor who can grasp the heart of a story or song and convey it.
Her rugged, pitted but richly textured voice, the one which first startled us in 1979 with the career resurrecting album, Broken English, was described to me by Easy Come Easy Go producer Hal Willner as “one of those instantly, totally emotional voices … that puts her, for me, in the pantheon of Piaf, Holiday”.
"Yes, I guess I'm …," Faithfull pauses. "Good with words. Quite good with tunes too.”
More than words it requires understanding of character. In reviewing that record, I made the now standard reference to Faithfull's rather eventful life in arguing that her interpretations of songs by Merle Haggard, Randy Newman and Smokey Robinson, not to mention her earlier recordings of Kurt Weill, reflected an artist with rich experience of highs and lows and the beauty and ugliness of living. More so than most of us would ever want to have.
I feel like I should apologise to her for going down such a well worn path. But then Willner, who has enticed Faithfull to perform in his Sydney Festival concert of sea shanties and pirate songs, Rogue’s Gallery, did also say that “whatever you think about it, she's had that life and her voice is that life and you cannot learn to sing like that". And Faithfull agrees.
"I don't think I could [have done these songs as well] if I hadn't had my life experience,” she says. “I'm not sure I could have done it as it's given me understanding: understanding of other people, understanding of myself."
Understanding yourself of course is one of those things young actors and singers don't realise is vital before you take on another persona or character. Probably not something the young Marianne Faithfull, with her crystalline light voice knew at the time of her first foray into singing.
Now though, from the perspective of a long life lived since then, Faithfull argues that the harsh, near fatal, life she led in the 1970s did have the positive side effect of giving her a voice more suited to an adult career.
"That [young pure voice] would have been the end of my career. It wouldn't have lasted,” she says. “I managed to make it last, I still sing As Tears Go By, in the original arrangement now, and it's really very special, as are the other early songs. But they’re not the same. I'm not the same."
When we hear her sing As Tears Go By now, as we will in her own shows next month, she sounds like a woman who has lived enough to feel it not just read it. She sounds like someone for whom tears really have fallen
"And they sure have," she laughs with a smoker’s chesty gurgle. “I'm actually very happy you know, but I can act it.”
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