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her Words From the Wise interview with Alan Jackson
Not for the first time in her life, Marianne Faithfull leans back in her chair
and sadly exclaims, “So you see, I've almost entirely run out of drugs.” On
this occasion, however, she's addressing the matter in a more general sense.
The alcohol went more than a decade ago; the cocaine and heroin that
accompanied her transition from pop stardom to infamy long before that. A
few years ago, Faithfull was instructed to address an addiction to sleeping
pills. In 2006, she checked into a French hospital where a lump on her chest
was dealt with “swiftly and efficiently”. Intimations of mortality are
nothing new for the 62-year-old singer. She deals with them as and when they
come.
But there are limits. In the anteroom of a West London studio all that now
stands between Faithfull and a life of joyless abstinence is the cigarette
wedged between her lips. After a few seconds searching her handbag for a
lighter, she glances up and directs a precisely worded question at me: “Am I
going to kill you with this cigarette?” If danger is emanating from
something in this room, however, it's not the cigarette.
Somewhere along the line, Faithfull became an icon, although there have been
times over the past decade or two when she wouldn't have thanked you for
pointing that out. Published in 1994, her autobiography Faithfull seemed
designed to remind us just how amazing it was that she had completed her
return journey from fame to infamy: the transition, via her maiden hit As
Tears Go By, from convent schoolgirl to pop star; the five-year liaison with
Mick Jagger that accelerated her freefall into heroin addiction and
homelessness. After its publication, Faithfull felt she had made a terrible
mistake. In the process of drawing a line under her myth and moving on, she
wondered if she had merely added more weight to the millstone.
In fact, it turns out that with iconhood come certain privileges. As her good
friend Keith Richards showed when he lit up onstage at the O2 arena, the
right to smoke in a no-smoking area is one of them. Another, it seems, is
being able to get some of the coolest underground stars on the planet to
play on your records. On Faithfull's new album Easy Come, Easy Go, Antony
Hegarty trades breathy come-ons with her on an epic version of Smokey
Robinson's Baby Baby; Nick Cave's harmonies anchor her performance on The
Crane Wife 3 by the Decemberists; Rufus Wainwright helps her to turn Espers'
freak-folk epic Children of Stone into a yearning soft-shoe shuffle.
If Faithfull appears to have amassed the hippest address book in the world,
it's hard to begrudge her the benefits. Increasingly, her life has seemed
like an obsessive quest to ensure that posterity will have more to say about
her than the debauched misuse of Mars bars (untrue, apparently) and her
ability to survive massive overdoses (legendarily true). She always called
herself a working artist, but in the past 15 years her output - in
particular the live Weimar cabaret excursion 20th-Century Blues and A Secret
Life - has squared up to the description. Written and recorded in 1995 with
the Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti, the latter album remains a
masterpiece of electronic pop noir. With Nico dead, it was hard to imagine
that any of Faithfull's contemporaries could have made a record like it. But
Faithfull cringes when it is mentioned - not because she doesn't think it's
any good, but because of the starrier tics and traits she still had to
extinguish from her personality.
“Angelo used to give me terrible bollockings,” she recalls, flicking a few
specks of ash off her Chanel jacket. “We would meet at his Manhattan studio
and I was always late. I mean, he was absolutely right. Here was this man
who could have been charging Hollywood a million pounds a minute to do
something else, and he was working on my record.
“Now there was someone who didn't give a flying f*** about the icon thing. He
was like an old Mafia don, with a fierce work ethic. It pissed me off. But
he was the person who taught me it was unacceptable to be late.”
Faithfull chastises herself for not paying enough attention to her own
songwriting - but, of course, getting people to service her with strong
material has never been a problem. Briefed by Andrew Loog Oldham to deliver
something fitting for a 17-year-old convent schoolgirl, Mick Jagger and
Keith Richards wrote their first song, As Tears Go By, for her. In the past
few years she has been given bespoke songs by Beck, PJ Harvey and Damon
Albarn. “Damon has so many ideas crackling out of him. He wrote a song for
me that he doesn't even remember writing. It's terribly gracious of him.
When you write a good song, there must be a part of you that thinks, ‘Do I
want to give this charming but slightly annoying woman my song?'”
It must be flattering, I suggest, for younger artists to see her as a muse,
just as Mick and Keith once did. Whatever her ex-lover Mick Jagger has going
for him, no one in their right mind would suggest that the Rolling Stones
have retained any contemporary relevance. “Well, maybe had more to do with
good looks than they would like to admit.”
Not that Faithfull's early success had any less to do with good looks. Asked
what compelled him to launch Faithfull as a recording artist, Oldham
famously declared: “I saw an angel with big tits so I signed her.” Her
parents had separated when Faithfull was young, and her yearning for a
surrogate family was sated by access to the Stones' inner circle. Being a
muse made her famous, but it also planted confusions that have taken a
lifetime to untangle. She remembers being “totally fazed” by famous people,
frequently blurting out the first thing that came into her head, merely to
keep conversational plates spinning. Having seen a “marketable portrait of
me” achieve fame, she became skilled at “turning into what the newspapers
said I was”.
At the time of the 1967 drugs bust at Keith Richards's house - the one where
police found Faithfull dressed only in a fur rug - Faithfull says she wasn't
a heavy drugs user. “I had a few joints and was on my first acid trip when
25 policemen came in. But afterwards though, with all the horrible press, it
was a different story. I thought, ‘Well, if that's what they've decided I
am, then I'll work at it.' By that time my feminine integrity was gone. And
that's a big power for a woman to lose. Perhaps the only power.”
She must surely have recognised aspects of her own decline in that of Britney
Spears? Of the period she spent living on the streets of Soho, Faithfull
says: “I didn't have to be homeless. I was playing a game, Cinderella
sweeping up on Desperation Row. No one recognised me, which I loved. And
perhaps poor Britney would have done the same thing if she knew that the
newspapers and cameramen weren't going to be camped out with her.”
Revealing a hitherto unaired knowledge of the TV series South Park, she refers
to an episode in which “Britney Spears” attempts to escape her pursuers and
ends up shooting half her head off before being ploughed into the ground as
a ritual sacrifice. “They would have sacrificed me too,” she says, before
rancorously relaying an incident after her suicide attempt in Australia in
1969 that put her in a coma for six days. “A photographer got into the
hospital and took a picture of me lying there. I think that's pretty bad,
don't you?”
What seems amazing now, I tell her, is just how productive all those
supposedly drug-addled rock stars seemed to be in the Sixties and Seventies.
At the apparent height of their debauchery, the Rolling Stones produced
Beggars Banquet and Exile on Main Street. Even Faithfull went into the
studio to make an album (Rich Kid Blues) while she was still homeless.
“Well, first and foremost, we wanted to make music. Especially Keith
Richards. Drugs were really just a coping method.”
The relationship of music to drugs is something, she says, that subsequent
musicians have misunderstood. Singling out Pete Doherty, she says: “I don't
see great music being made alongside all the other stuff.” And once the
subject turns to Doherty it's but a mere stepping stone to the person
Faithfull really wants to address.
Not so long ago, she and Kate Moss were a regular night-time fixture in
Central London. The only time Faithfull seems close to rattled is when I ask
if she and Moss are still friends. “No! She's not really my friend. I
thought she was, but she's very clever. She wanted to read me like a Braille
book. And she did. It's a vampirical thing. Now I see pictures of her with a
boy who looks like Mick Jagger, and her looking like me. So there was a
reason. It's one of her gigs to do me.”
Perhaps registering her own agitation, Faithfull pauses and relaxes. “You
know, it's OK. I don't give a s***. But I was quite offended at the time. We
were very fond of each other. And then it suddenly soured. She's very
clever, but she isn't at all educated. We don't have any [common]
references. Except music.”
Having taken so long to rebuild what she calls her “feminine self”, Faithfull
says she has no intention of relinquishing it again. In France, where she
numbers Carla Bruni among her close friends, she has become something of an
honorary national treasure. As with all of her recent releases, pre-orders
there of Easy Come Easy Go portend another gold album. Yesterday, in Vienna,
she received a lifetime achievement gong at something called the Women's
World Awards. It's all grist to the mill of a self-styled working artist.
As if to illustrate her recent progress, she tells a story that dates back
some 15 years, shortly after she left England to start a new life in the
Irish seclusion of Co Kildare. “I had hardly been there any time, when -
believe it or not - I got a call from Morrissey. What did he want? Well, he
wanted to bask in the icon. But at that moment I didn't want any basking. I
was living my life and I didn't want that. So when I realised who it was I
just screamed and ran. I was just scared.”
And now? What if Morrissey came calling once again? “Oh God. Now, of course,
I'd be able to deal with him with one hand tied behind my back. Send him in.”
Easy Come Easy Go is released by Dramatico. Marianne Faithfull will perform at
the Festival Hall on July 20 (www.southbankcentre.co.uk)
