Marianne Faithfull, a groundbreaking artist who left the status of an “IT girl” in the sixties and started an impressive second career with a large depth as a singer-songwriter, died on Thursday at the age of 78.
“With deep sadness we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,” said the singer’s representative in a statement. “Marianne died peacefully in London today in London.”
Born on December 29, 1946, Faithfull grew up in the Hampstead district of London. Her father worked at the British secret service, her mother was a baroness. Her parents separated when she was six years old, and Faithfull spent some time in a monastery. As a teenager, she tried as an actress and folk singer.
But after she got to know the producer Andrew Loog Oldham at a party, Faithfull became a breakthrough in 1964 with her first single, the ballad “As Tears Go By”, the first song that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote together. Although she was only 17 years old and sang with one voice that sounded fragile and very young, Faithfull gave the song and his text about the feeling of being excluded, a conviction that should show the way for her later work.
In the mid -1960s, she landed more hits before she disappeared from the spotlight in the haze of Heroinsucht (she reported on her experiments in the text of “Sister Morphine”, which the Rolling Stones also recorded).
In 1979 she reported back with the stunning “Broken English”, an album that was musically based on punk and new wave and expressed her newly discovered dark, sometimes vulgar attitude. Songs like “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan”, “Guilt” and a cover version of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” fit perfectly to the way her voice had deepened during her break. (Faithfull received a grammy nomination for the best female rock singing performance). In the next 40 years she stayed loyal to her way and sang about love and relationships against dramatic, musical backdrops. In recent years, she has recorded songs by PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Roger Waters, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. Her most recent album, negative capability, was released in 2018 and was praised by Rolling Stone as a “late masterpiece”.
Falled into fame at a young age, overshadowed controversies of a large part of Faithfull’s early career. She was lined with Jagger from 1966 to 1970 and was pilloried by the press after the police found drugs in a raid in the apartment of Keith Richards in 1967 and she found naked, apart from a fur blanket. Towards the end of the decade, it was homeless and heroin -dependent. After the death of her son, she attempted suicide. In the mid -1980s she finally became Clean before recalling the jazzy, cabaret -style album “Strange Weather”, which contained a new interpretation of “As Tears Go by”.
In recent years, Faithfull has been fighting a number of health setbacks. In addition to a hepatitis C diagnosis, she was treated for breast cancer in 2016 and underwent a shoulder replacement operation two years later.
At various times of her career, she picked up “As Tears Go by” several times and was amazed in an interview with the Rolling Stone in 2014 about how profound the song was. “I’m still singing it every night,” she said. “I still think it’s a beautiful song. I am still very grateful that Mick and Keith gave it to me and wrote it for me. I suddenly understood it myself when I was about 40 when I realized that it was a different version of [der Ballade des Dichters Alfred Lord Tennyson] ‘The Lady of Shalott’ was. It hit me in one of my moments of clarity, which, as I told you, seemed to appear regularly. This moment of clarity was when I became clean. “
Faithfull said in 2016 about her beginnings: “Well, it was a difficult time to be so pretty, so I would say, be careful not to attract the wrong men. I can’t imagine anything else. I had a great life. I had my ups and downs, but it was wonderful. “