We toss around the word icon too freely these days. But Marianne Faithfull, who died yesterday aged 78, was a force of nature. From the dewy-faced 17-year-old lending her sweet, high-pitched voice to As Tears Go By to the gravelly voiced sage on her anthemic New Wave-meets-punk masterpiece, the 1979 album Broken English, she was a shape-shifter crashing through the eras of her life.
Many of the tribute images posted on social media were of the big-eyed, blonde-fringed poster girl for the Swinging ‘60s. Swanning about London with Mick Jagger – who co-wrote her breakthrough debut song for her with Keith Richards. Idyllic photos from the era show her clad in velvet tunics and paisley blouses, fur coats, leather trousers and all the romantic boho adornments – lace and ruffles and feathers – that characterized the Queen’s Road fashion youthquake. She was muse to the band, inspiring Wild Horses and You Can’t Always Get What You Want, but the photos of Faithfull from that time have crystallized into our collective consciousness. She embodied a movement, giving a face to what young women everywhere aspired to be. “If I wasn’t there, it didn’t happen,” was her own take on the ‘60s.
She sharpened her look towards the end of the decade, a sign of growing confidence. There is a famous photo of her on the courthouse steps with Jagger in 1969, facing cannabis charges. She wears a short caped dress, her hair pulled back in a middle part, and she looks the epitome of modernity. The clean, streamlined look was a great middle finger to the establishment, the tabloids and the massive scandal surrounding the arrest, which cemented her “bad girl” image in the public’s mind. Nicknamed the Redlands bust, for Keith Richards’ country house, Faithfull was exiting the shower when the police arrived and grabbed a rug to cover herself. Thereafter she was forever ‘the girl in the rug.’
Faithfull then took the free love too far, falling into homelessness and heroin addiction after her breakup with Jagger, losing custody of her son (from her early marriage). She wrote in her biography, though, that she also found freedom, and anonymity, in that time, having had a spotlight on her since she was a teenager.
The interesting bit comes when she pulled herself out of the tailspin, and went back to work. In her second autobiography, she summarized the experience of being typecast in life: “One of the hazards of reforming your evil ways is that some people won’t let go of you in their mind’s eye as a wild thing.” She threw that into her work, and it gave her an edge. She wore her hair short, rimmed her eyes in smudged kohl and dressed all in black, or white, with kickass boots. Her voice, after decades of dedicated smoking and drug use – and a bout with severe laryngitis – became the raspy, intense, low-register growl that gave The Ballad of Lucy Jordan and her re-recordings of As Tears Go By and Sister Morphine their depth and soul. She was singing what she knew, and you could hear what she lived through in every note. She got fully clean and sober in 1985.
Faithfull weathered breast cancer, and a tough bout with COVID-19 landed her in the hospital for weeks in 2021. Again, she fought back, though doctors had warned her she might never sing again. “I don’t feel cursed, and I don’t feel invincible. I just feel f***ing human,” she said at the time. She went on to release her final album, She Walks in Beauty, that same year.
The real definition of an icon should be someone who faces each project, each decade of life with fresh energy. Marianne Faithfull went from being an It Girl to being an accomplished woman in full, a messy genius.
Tributes Pour In
Upon news of Faithfull’s death, some of music’s biggest names, including Mick Jagger and Kieth Richards, took to social media to pay tribute.
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