Music: Sixties icon: Marianne Faithfull is dead

Her voice has been described as scratchy in recent years, sometimes as croaky or broken. But at the beginning of Marianne Faithfull’s career in the mid -1960s, in the sad song “As Tears Go by”, she sounded very different: girlishly tender, shy, vulnerable. Little by little her singing was tanned and roughened – and that was really no coincidence.

Blonde symbol of the “Swinging London” and teen mother, at times homeless drug wreck of the 70s, survivor of rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, after a miraculous comeback, highly regarded songwriter, character actress in the cinema and finally Grande Dame des Pop: Faithfull’s life was without Exaggeration extraordinary.

Now she died in London at the age of 78, as the British news agency PA reported to a spokesman. “With great grief we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,” said a statement from which other media like the BBC also cited.

The relationship with Mick Jagger

The artist born in London in 1946 often annoyed that many of them were primarily classified as a (ex) girlfriend of Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger. “It would be great if people could see me as a working musician with an incredible work,” she said once. “This is much more important than my fabulous life. Most of it is a lie, a gossip column version of me.”

And yet it was hunting who, together with Keith Richards, wrote the first big hit of his flame at the time. Faithfull returned several times to “As Tears Go by” (1964), this key song of her life, reinterpreted it with her changed voice: 1987, as mature woman, and 2018, with over 70 on her excellent old -age work “Negative Capability”.

At that time she said on Deutschlandfunk about the touching Jagger/Richards-Track, he came from “two boys who were not even men and wrote from the perspective of an older woman. It was an extraordinary song, and I was very lucky that they were very lucky gave it to me. “

“It broke me”

Again and again she hit the headlines. A notorious raid in the Richards house in February 1967, where they were said to be naked in a fur in front of the police officers, hung for a long time. “Naked girl at Stones party” is the headline of the “Evening Standard”. According to Faithfull, her life got out of joint after the raid.

“It broke me,” she wrote in her autobiography. “If you are a man -dependent as a man and behave in this way, it is always considered upgrading and glamorous. A woman in such a situation is seen as a bitch and bad mother.”

Faithfull, who fought at times with hepatitis, cancer and also with the lung disease Covid-19, celebrated musical success. Songwriters and artists like Nick Cave accompanied them throughout their career as well as Beck, PJ Harvey, Damon Albarn, Jarvis Cocker or Roger Waters.

On her song collection “Broken English” Stach “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”, born and anger, a second key song on her career. The third (with direct connection to the drugs) is the Stones song “Sister Morphine”, which Faithfull wrote together with Jagger and Richards.

When she was finally clean in the 1980s, other large works such as “Strange Weather” and “Before The Poison” followed. In between, she delighted as a Kurt-Weill interpreter and as a character actress in the cinema, for example in the tragicomedy “Irina Palm”. Marianne Faithfull only spoke on her album “She Walks in Beauty”, but you heard her shortness of breath. Now she died surrounded by her beloved family, as PA cited from the statement.