Marianne’s career in music spanned an incredible sixty years. Following that fateful 1964 party in London where she was spotted, at the age of 16, by The Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham Marianne was utterly fearless in her music and everything else besides. She remained a unique and compelling musical figure who was adventurous in her life, and adventurous in her art producing a wide and varied catalogue of releases between 1964 and 2025.
Faithfull: A Career Overview
Marianne Faithfull’s long and distinguished career saw her emerge as one of the most original female singer-songwriters this country has produced; Utterly unsentimental yet somehow affectionate, Marianne possessed that rare ability to transform any lyric into something compelling and utterly personal; and not just in her own songs, for she became a master of the art of finding herself in the words and music of others.
Marianne Faithfull’s story, has of course, been well documented, not least in her entertaining and insightful autobiography Faithfull (1994). Born in Hampstead in December 1946 Faithfull’s career as the crown princess of swinging London was launched with As Tears Go By; the first song ever written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, two folk albums two pop, and a singles collection followed whilst Marianne also embarked on a parallel career as an actress, both on film in Girl On A Motorcycle (1968) and on stage in Chekhov’s Three Sisters (1967) and Hamlet (1969) By the end of the Sixties personal problems halted Marianne’s career and her drug addiction took over.
Faithfull emerged tentatively in the mid-Seventies with a country album called Dreamin’ My Dreams (1976). Though the release attracted little attention in the UK, it was a huge hit in Ireland, where the title track spent 7 weeks at number one and led to Marianne going back on the road for the first time in a decade, but it was her furious re-surfacing on Broken English in 1979 that definitively brought her back. The virginal pop persona created around her in the Sixties was defiantly smashed: Instead with songs like The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, Guilt and Why D’ya Do It?, Marianne became a kind of oracle, and the artist people turned to, to lead them through dark times. Further new wave explorations followed with Dangerous Acquaintances (1981) and A Child’s Adventure (1983). But despite her new creative vigour, Marianne was not entirely free of the chemicals that had ravaged her in the sixties and in the mid eighties she entered recovery.
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Displaying a sadness tempered by optimism, and a despair rescued by humour Marianne returned, finally clean with a collection of classic pop, blues and art songs on the critically lauded Strange Weather (1987). A live retrospective followed on Blazing Away (CD&VHS 1990), which ably displayed why Faithfull became one of the most sought after concert artists of the last 35 years. New directions were taken on A Secret Life (1995) co-written with the Italian composer Angelo Badalementi, and in her exploration of the music of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht: Beginning in 1991 with her performance in the Threepenny Opera, at the Gate Theatre in Dublin and continuing with 20th Century Blues (1996) this journey concluded with her important recording of the opera The Seven Deadly Sins in 1998. Marianne returned to her mainstream musical career with the release of one of her most admired albums, Vagabond Ways in 1999: her lyrics and vocals had arguably never been better, and the title track, about the sterilization of women in the Seventies ended up being a positive declaration for a life lived outside convention.
The millennium ushered in a period of renewed creative vigour that saw Marianne return to her acting career in Intimacy (2001), Marie Antoinette (2006), and her acclaimed starring role in Irina Palm (2006) for which she was nominated at the EFA for best actress. Two acclaimed albums followed based around collaborations with other artists that put her firmly back in the rock idiom Kissin’ Time (2002) with Billy Corgan, Beck, Pulp and Blur and more successfully with PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Damon Albarn and Jon Brion on Before The Poison (2004). Marianne also returned to the stage in The Black Rider (2004), a Faustian musical written by old friends Tom Waits and the late William Burroughs.
Health scares put Marianne out of action for much of 2005 and 2006 but in 2007 she toured the world and released a second volume of memoirs detailing a more personal side of her life called Memories Dreams and Reflections (2007).
Marianne’s next album Easy Come, Easy Go was an eclectic collection of cover versions. Released at the end of September 2008 the album was recorded at the historic Sear Sound studios in New York, and included a wide variety of interpretations including Merle Haggard’s Sing Me Back Home and Morrissey’s Dear God Please Help Me, the album also reunited Marianne with Marc Ribot, and Barry Reynolds. Critical reception was overwhelmingly positive, and Easy Come, Easy Go went on to become one of her most commercially successful. Throughout 2008 and 2009 Marianne did a series of special spoken word performances of Shakespeare’s love sonnets, accompanied by Vincent Segal on cello. In 2011 Marianne returned to the studio to record Horses and High Heels which was again produced by Hal Willner, and for which she wrote five of the six original songs on the album.
In 2012 Marianne fulfilled a career long ambition to appear in a new fully staged production of The Seven Deadly Sins at the Landestheatre in Linz, choreographed and staged by Jochen Ulrich. The production was well received, with MOJO magazine declaring it “a career highlight” for Marianne. Whilst performing in Linz, Marianne also filmed an episode of the BBC genealogy programme Who Do You Think You Are? where she investigated her mother Eva’s early life as a dancer in 1920s Berlin researching her precarious existence in Vienna during World War Two and her families involvement with the Austrian Resistance. In 2014 Marianne celebrated the 50th anniversary of her musical career, with one of her most acclaimed albums to date. Entitled Give My Love To London, the record was a characteristically far-reaching and eclectic offering that once again saw Marianne working with a set of collaborators that ably support her special gifts as a singer and lyricist. The music was written by Roger Waters, Nick Cave, Anna Calvi, Steve Earle, Pat Leonard, and Tom McRae.
Marianne was also the subject of a luxury photo book Marianne Faithfull: A Life On Record edited by herself and Francois Ravard, published by Rizzoli, featuring iconic images of Marianne by major photographers including Helmut Newton, David Bailey, Ellen Von Unwerth, Bruce Weber, Cecil Beaton and Robert Mapplethorpe. In 2016 Marianne released a live album called No Exit (CD/DVD) recorded on her final tour in 2014/16 with her band: Rob Ellis, Jonny Bridgewood, Ed Harcourt, Head and Rob Mcvey.
In 2018 Marianne released Negative Capability one of the most emotionally powerful of her career. charged with a brutal honesty and autobiographical reflection, she addressed losing old friends, her loneliness living in her adopted city of Paris, and love. The album was driven by her florid lyricism, and realised with her stellar group of musicians, Warren Ellis, Nick Cave, Rob Ellis, Ed Harcourt, Head and Mark Lanegan, the result was Marianne’s unflinchingly honest and relentlessly beautiful late-life masterpiece. The stark emotional heft, exquisitely framed by ornately sensitive musical backdrops drew critical comparisons to the late-life works of Johnny Cash and Leonard Cohen.
In 2021 Marianne released one of the most distinctive and singular albums of her long, extraordinary life and career with musical friends and family including Warren Ellis, Nick Cave, Brian Eno, cellist Vincent Ségal and producer-engineer Head. Called She Walks in Beauty the album fulfilled Marianne’s long-held ambition to release an album of poetry with music. Recorded just before and during the Covid-19 pandemic, Marianne became infected and almost died of the disease.
Ongoing health problems made work a challenge, but undaunted Marianne returned with Burning Moonlight, a four track EP recorded to commemorate her 60th anniversary in music and conceived as a tribute to her two debut albums. Mixing her pop roots with her folk influences, these four last songs bring Marianne’s career full circle and reflect a lifetime of musical creativity. While the defining statements of many artists are made during their early years, Marianne continued to develop her own voice: She set herself aside from her contemporaries with her continuing quest to explore new creative areas in a career that was always a positive process of self-assertion.
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