NEW YORK The Rolling Stones’ finest songs were inspired and written by Marianne Faithfull, a British pop queen, muse, libertine, and old soul who survived as a torch singer and a surviving member of the lifestyle she once represented. Her age was 78.
According to Republic Media, Faithfull’s music marketing firm, she died in London on Thursday.
A corporate representative said in a statement, “We regret to inform you of the passing of singer, songwriter, and actress Marianne Faithfull.” Today, Marianne died quietly in London, surrounded by her devoted family. We will miss her terribly.
When her raw, explicit Broken English album garnered her the kind of reviews the Stones had received, the blonde, voluptuous Faithfull became a celebrity before the age of seventeen, homeless by the middle of her twenties, and an inspiration to her colleagues and younger artists by the early thirties. Although Beck, Billy Corgan, Nick Cave, and PJ Harvey would be among her admirers over the ensuing decades, her history would always be inextricably linked to the Stones and the years she spent dating Mick Jagger.
The melancholic As Tears Go By, one of the earliest songs written by Jagger and Keith Richards, became her breakthrough smash when it was released in 1964 and marked the beginning of her intense and tumultuous relationship with the band.
Faithfull once said that LSD wouldn’t have been created if it hadn’t been intended to be. She and Jagger started dating in 1966 and went on to become one of the most famous and infamous couples of Swinging London. A well-publicized drug incident in 1967 that landed Jagger and Richards in temporary jail and exposed Faithfull as the Naked Girl At Stones Party—a moniker she would find degrading and unavoidable—described their rejection of traditional norms.
FILE: On Tuesday, February 13, 2007, British actress and singer Marianne Faithfull stands for a picture promoting her film “Irina Palm” at the 57th International Film Festival Berlin “Berlinale” in Berlin. (Markus Schreiber, File/AP Photo)AP
According to her 2007 biography Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, “some people won’t let go of their mind’s eye of you as a wild thing.” This is one of the risks of changing your wicked ways.
Though Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards’ longstanding companion, also introduced the band to new ideas, Jagger and Richards frequently mentioned bluesmen and early rock ‘n’ roll as their main influences. Whether as collaborators or as muses, both contributed to changing the Stones’ identities and compositions because they were more experienced than their partners at the time.
Stones songs like the sensual Let’s Spend the Night Together and the gentle homage She Smiled Sweetly were influenced by Faithfull. Faithful originally recorded and contributed lyrics to the Stones’ depressing song Sister Morphine, including the opening line, “Here I lie in my hospital bed.” Faithful also lent Jagger the Russian classic “The Master and Margarita,” which served as the inspiration for Sympathy for the Devil. During her time with Jagger, Faithfull wrote one of his most sensitive love songs, Wild Horses, and her drug usage contributed to the creation of such cynical interpretations of the London rock culture as You Can’t Always Get What You Want and Live with Me.
On late Monday, July 13, 2009, British singer and actress Marianne Faithfull takes the stage at the 43rd Montreux Jazz Festival in Montreux, Switzerland, in Miles Davis Hall. (Photo by Jean-Christophe Bott/Keystone/AP)Associated Press
When Faithfull was on her own, she initially focused on elegant ballads like “Come Stay With Me,” “Summer Nights,” and “This Little Bird.” However, Faithfull’s frail alto, even in her teens, conveyed wisdom and sorrows much beyond her years. Her voice would eventually become scratchy and cracked, and following her breakup with Jagger in 1970, she continued to live and work while reflecting on her past and enduring physical and emotional suffering.
She had developed a heroin addiction in her late 60s, miscarried when she was seven months pregnant, and almost passed away from a sleeping pill overdose. In the meantime, Jagger had an affair with Pallenberg and had a child with Marsha Hunt, an actor. Faithfull was living on the streets of London by the early 1970s and had lost custody of her son, Nicholas, from her divorce from John Dunbar, the gallery owner. In addition, she would fight hepatitis and anorexia, receive treatment for breast cancer, break her hip in a tumble, and end herself in the hospital in 2020 due to COVID-19.
In her autobiographies and songs, particularly Broken English (1979), which featured her irate song “Why d Ya Do It” and the troubled song “Guilt,” in which she chants, “I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I’ve done no wrong,” she revealed all, unvarnished. Dangerous Acquaintances, Strange Weather, the live Blazing Away, and, most recently, She Walks in Beauty were among the other albums. Despite being characterized by the 1960s, Faithfull’s sensibility frequently drew inspiration from the pre-rock German cabaret scene. She recorded many of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s songs, such as Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife and the sung ballet The Seven Deadly Sins.
She was also interested in television, movies, and theater. Faithfull started performing in the 1960s, appearing in theatrical productions of Hamlet and Chekhov’s Three Sisters as well as Jean-Luc Godard’s Made in U.S.A. She would go on to star in movies like Marie Antoinette and The Girl from Nagasaki, as well as the television show Absolutely Fabulous, where she was cast as God and didn’t hesitate to portray him.
After three marriages, Faithful recently dated Francois Ravard, her manager. Although Jagger was her most well-known lover, she also had relationships with Richards (who she said was so amazing and memorable for their one-night stand), David Bowie, and Gene Pitney, an early rock star. Among those turned down was Bob Dylan, who was so enamored of her that he was writing a song about her until Faithfull, who was then expecting her son, refused him.
She said in her 1994 book Faithfull that he suddenly changed into Rumpelstiltskin. He approached the typewriter, grabbed a stack of papers, and started tearing them into ever-tinier bits before letting them drop into the wastepaper basket.
The legacy of Faithfull was one of decadence, intrigue, and vanished empires. During World War II, her father, a British intelligence officer, assisted in rescuing her mother from the Nazis in Vienna. A number of Austro-Hungarian nobles and Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian from the 19th century whose last name and the controversial book Venus in Furs contributed to the coining of the word “masochism,” were among Faithfull’s more distant forebears.
Faithfull spent her early years in a convent and what she would describe as a crazy, sex-obsessed commune when her parents divorced when she was six years old. By the time she was in her teens, she was singing in folk clubs, reading Simone de Beauvoir, and listening to Odetta and Joan Baez. She met Dunbar, who introduced her to Paul McCartney and other famous people, through the London art scene. John Lennon claimed to have met Yoko Ono at the Indica Gallery, which Dunbar co-founded.
In her memoir, she described how the threads of a dozen small episodes were subtly twining together. I suppose I was present when the scene in London was created because it was essentially created by gallery owners, photographers, pop singers, aristocrats, and other talented laypeople.
When she went to a recording party for the Rolling Stones, one of London’s hottest new bands, in March 1964, her future was decided. She would view the Stones as snobbish schoolboys and would mock the notion that she and Jagger fell in love right away. She also saw Jagger fighting with his then-girlfriend, model Chrissie Shrimpton, who was crying so much that her fake eyelashes were falling off.
However, one man in particular, Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, greatly impressed her. He appeared strong, threatening, and self-assured. A week later, she received a telegram from Oldham inviting her to visit the Olympic Studios in London. Faithfull just required two takes to finish the demo of the extremely rudimentary tune “A Tears Go By,” which Oldham played for her as Richards and Jagger watched.
In her 1994 memoir, Faithfull stated, “It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written.” A song about a woman reflecting on her life with nostalgia. Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened, which is the strange thing. It seems as though that song foreshadowed our entire relationship.
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