Monday Music: Another Hero Passes
Marianne Faithful's Punk-New Wave-era Music and Career of Nonconformity Makes Her a Singular Figure in Our Times
Marianne Faithful, who died on Thursday, is one of those figures in popular music destined to be remembered for the wrong reasons. After early stardom in Great Britain in the early 1960s, recording the Jagger-Richard composition “As Tears Go By” (before The Rolling Stones), she became embroiled in a high-profile relationship with Mick Jagger. She descended into drug addiction, found herself homeless, then crawled from these depths and experienced a musical rebirth.
NPR called hers a “raucous life” and Lindsay Zoladz in The New York Times described her as an artist and voice that “upended expectations
For me, she deserves to be remembered for three albums recorded in the punk-new wave era — during her second act as an artist. Those albums came after years of drug abuse robbed her of what AllMusic.com called her “high, fragile voice” that was often set “against delicate orchestral pop arrangements.”
Broken English, which I think was her finest, was released in the fall of 1979, during my senior year of high school. I don’t remember the song or album making much of a mark on me at the time — they didn’t chart and, aside from a performance of it on Saturday Night Live, I doubt I noticed much.
I enrolled at Penn State the following fall (1980), joined one of its radio stations (WEHR), and was growing more and more obsessed with 1960s culture and with punk and new wave music.
We had a copy of the Broken English at the station and, because I recognized Faithful’s name as being associated with The Rolling Stones, I started to include it in my DJ sets. Some songs — her version of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero”
and the album closer “Why d’Ya Do It?”
were laced with profanity and unplayable on the air. But the title track, with its refrain
It's just an old war Not even a cold war Don't say it in Russian Don't say it in German Say it in broken English Say it in broken English
and its repeated question — “what are you fighting for?” — captured me. Faithful, an early-60s chanteuse, centered herself within the punk ethos, found herself and her ravaged, deeper voice, rasping through a set of angry, defiant songs that touched a nerve.
The late-’70s and early-’80s were a strange time politically. We were at a kind of seam in the ideological firmament, one that frayed and split — like her voice. Ronald Reagan’s conservatism won over much of the country, including a large share of the late-Boomer and early-Gen X demographic, and with it a more war-accepting attitude that included the notion that it was possible to maintain a nuclear advantage. This was madness, and the music I was attracted to made that clear.
Faithful’s lines — “it’s not my / security” and “it’s not my / reality” — were of a piece with songs by The Clash, the Shirts, the Talking Heads and others, who saw the threat of nuclear annihilation in the language of the Cold War, in Reagan’s presidency.
Dangerous Acquaintances followed, a strong if inferior follow-up. She released the remarkable Strange Weather, which moved her from Act II to Act III, from rock icon to a very different kind of chanteuse than she had been two decades earlier.
She Walks in Beauty was her final recording. On it, she recites British Romantic poetry over music by Warren Ellis, an Australian composer and member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and once again confounds our expectations.
As a friend said to me on Facebook, all our heroes are dying. I’m not sure I thought of her as a hero, but re-listening to Faithful over the last few days made it clear just how important she was.