“Can she sing?” So asked Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of The Rolling Stones, at a party in 1964, pointedly ignoring Marianne Faithfull’s presence and instead addressing the 17-year-old’s boyfriend. Yes: she could sing, initially in a sweet folk-pop vibrato with very English diction, then later — several lifetimes later — in the weathered tones of hard experience.
Faithfull’s career, if that prosaic term can be applied to such a free spirit, was launched by the hustling Oldham. He promoted her, in her words, as “an eerie fusion of haughty aristocrat and folky bohemian child-woman”. There was a grain of truth to the fantasy. Faithfull was born in 1946 to an Austro-Hungarian baroness who moved to England after marrying an eccentric British intelligence officer. The marriage foundered, a wartime folie d’amour. Faithfull was raised by her mother as a penniless blueblood. From her she learnt the intoxicating but ruinous habit of living beyond one’s means.
Her first single was the Françoise Hardy-style ballad “As Tears Go By”, which was also the first song written by Jagger and his Stones partner, Keith Richards. A chart success in 1964, predating the Stones’ version by a year, it sparked a run of hit singles. But Faithfull did not relish pop stardom. In the description of her superb 1994 memoir Faithfull, she was bedevilled by “grotesque contracts, lying, cheating crafty legalisms, mad and bungling managers and barbaric schedules”.
Relief of a sort came with entry into the Stones’ inner sanctum. She was attracted to Richards at first, culminating in “a wonderful night of sex” with the guitarist while tripping on LSD, as she reminisced in Faithfull. Afterwards, to her surprise, the guitarist breezily told her to give the “smitten” Jagger a call: “Go on, love, give him a jingle, he’ll fall off his chair.”
Emblematic of the group’s louchely complicated dynamics, she and Jagger became the golden couple of the Swinging Sixties. Barely 20 when she moved in with him in 1966, she arrived with a baby son from an undissolved marriage to the gallerist John Dunbar. She continued releasing records and also had a successful sideline acting in high-profile plays and films. But her work was overshadowed by her off-stage life.
Having affairs with women and men alike, opening her mind with LSD and hashish, she embodied the era’s spirit of libertinage. But there were risks too. Lurid lies about sexual depravity circulated after Jagger and Richards were arrested in the notorious Redlands drug bust of 1967, at which Faithfull was present, wearing a fur rug and nothing else. A nearly fatal sleeping pill overdose in Australia in 1969 prompted a Conservative MP to dub her “a rather stupid young lady” in a House of Commons debate.
The pop ingénue had become vilified as a monster of corruption. But Faithfull’s hedonism had an innocent quality. She gave herself to sensual pleasure wholeheartedly. As she sang in “Guilt”, from her 1979 landmark album Broken English: “I never lied to my lover/But if I did, I would admit it.”
Her outlook was formed by Romantic poetry, aestheticism and decadent literature (her mother was descended from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, author of erotic novella Venus in Furs). When she co-wrote the lyrics to the song “Sister Morphine”, she drew on John Milton’s poem “Lycidas” for inspiration. Released by Faithfull in 1969 (the Stones’ version followed in 1971), it foreshadowed her descent into heroin addiction.
In 1970, she broke up with Jagger. The years ahead were her nadir, a time of alcoholism, drug dependency and a period of homelessness in central London during which she lost custody of her son. The spiral was unexpectedly arrested in 1979 by Broken English. Its new wave sound and Faithfull’s battered but unbowed voice established kinship with a post-punk generation that rejected The Rolling Stones and their ilk as out-of-touch rock aristocrats.
She continued to lead a challenging personal life, not quitting heroin until 1985. Survived by her son Nicholas Dunbar, she was married three times. But the woman who unwillingly submitted to the role of muse to Jagger (“So destructive for anybody trying to be an artist in her own right”) released 21 studio albums in total. She was a cult figure for collaborators such as Jarvis Cocker and Nick Cave, venerated as the epitome of the rock survivor. Her philosophy was encapsulated by one of her favourite poets, William Blake, cited in her memoir: “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”