Marianne Faithfull RIP

Just died aged 78. She did well to get that far considering.

As Tears Go By is an iconic sound of the sixties

 

RIP. She had been very uncomfortably ill a long time.

Not many artists make anything as good as Broken English so far into their career.

 

Her version was better than the Rolling Stones.

 

Yes it was

 

Broken English is brilliant i played it over the weekend. RIP

 

A brilliant and very underrated artist. I have all her albums from 1971’s Rich Kid Blues and there isn’t a bad one among them. In fact, her albums got better and better. Just look at the artists that worked with her in her later years - Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, PJ Harvey, Jarvis Cocker, Ed Harcourt, Angelo Badalamenti, Beck, the list goes on. If you haven’t heard them, try Before The Poison (2004), Vagabond Ways (1999) and Negative Capability (2018), which are my three favourites.

She was seriously unwell with COVID a few years ago and wasn’t expected to pull through, but she did, albeit with complications. She could no longer sing, but that didn’t stop her, as she released an album of poetry, to music composed by Warren Ellis.

It’s quite possible that I’ve spent more time listening to her music than anybody else’s over the past 3-4 years and it’s sad to think there’ll be nothing more. I recently listened to (Audible is brilliant!) a great book about her by Mark Hodkinson, the chap who wrote the book about our Premiership season. She certainly packed a lot into her 78 years.

Her best known song is As Tears Go By and she recorded it three times. Firstly, the most famous version in the 60s, when she was a 17 year old folk singer. Then she recorded it again in 1987, as her career was (critically at least) beginning to take off again. And finally, on the excellent Negative Capability in 2018. I’m not usually a fan of artists re-recording songs, but in this case it really works. The world-weariness of her voice, with a croak influenced by her years of smoking and substance abuse, give the words both vulnerability and more gravity. If this link works you can hear it yourself. The song could have been written for the 2018 Marianne. She’ll be missed.