Marianne Faithfull, singer and pop icon, dies at 78

She and Jagger began to see each other in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples to “swing London”, with faithful when he once declared that if LSD was “not intended to happen, it would not have been invented. ” Their rejection of conventional values ​​was defined by a broadly published drug Mabust from 1967, leaving Jagger and Richard’s maps in prison and faithful, identified in tabloids such as “Naked Girl on Stone’s Party”, a label she would find humiliating and inevitable.

“One of the dangers of reforming your evil ways is that some people will not let go of their minds’ eye with you as a wild thing,” she wrote in “Memories, Dreams and Reflections,” a memoir in 2007.

Jagger and Richards often quoted the blues and early rock ‘n rolls as their most important influence, but faithfully and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards’ long -time partner, also opened the band for new ways of thinking. Both were worldwide than their boyfriends at the time and helped transform Stones’ songwriting and personas, whether like Muses or as partners.

Faithfull helped inspire such stone songs as the soft tribute “She smiled sweetly” and the desire of “let’s spend the night together.” It was faithful that borrowed Jagger the Russian novel “The Master and Margarita”, which was the basis of “Sympathy for the Devil” and who first recorded and contributed to texts to The Stones’ Dire “Sister Morphine” I am in my hospital bed . “Faithful’s drug use helped shape such horses. “

On their own, they specialized in London-born faithful at first in gentle ballads, among them “Come Stay With Me”, “Summer Nights” and “This Little Bird.” But even in her teens, faithfully sang in a fragile everything that suggested knowledge and burdens well beyond her years. Her voice would later crack and the pig, and her life and work after splitting with Jagger in 1970 was one of the looking back and continuing through emotional and physical pain.

She had become addicted to heroin in the late 60s, suffered a spontaneous abort while she was seven months pregnant and almost died of an overdose of sleeping pills. (Meanwhile, Jagger had an affair with Pallenberg and had a baby with actor Marsha Hunt). In the early 70s, faithfully lived in the streets of London and had lost custody of her son, Nicholas, she had with her alienated husband, gallery owner John Dunbar. She would also fight against anorexia and hepatitis, was treated for breast cancer, broke her hip in a fall and was hospitalized with Covid-19 in 2020.

She shared everything, uncensored, in her memories and in her music, especially “Broken English”, which came out in 1979 and contained her that lowered “why I feel guilt, even though I know I have done nothing wrong . , and she covered several songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, including “Ballad of the Soldier’s Wife” and “Sung” Ballet “the seven deadly sins. “

Her interests are expanded to theater, film and TV. Faithfull began shopping in the 1960s, including a performance in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Made in USA” and stage roles in “Hamlet” and Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.” She would later appear in films like “Marie Antoinette” and “The Girl From Nagasaki” and the TV series “Absolutely Fabulous”, where she was thrown as – and not good from playing – God.

Faithfully married three times, and in recent years her manager dated Francois Ravard. Jagger was her most famous lover, but other men in her life included Richards (“SO big and memorable,” she would say about their one-night stand), David Bowie and the early rock star Gene Pitney. Among the rejected: Bob Dylan, who had been taken so that he wrote a song about her until faithfully, pregnant with his son at the time, turned him down.

“Without warning he turned into rumbling tile,” she wrote in “Faithfull,” published in 1994. “He went over to the typewriter, took a crooked paper and began to tear them up into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he let them fall into the garbage basket.

Faithfull’s heritage was one of intrigue, decadence and fallen empires. Her father was a British intelligence officer during World War II who helped save her mother from the Nazis in Vienna. Faithful’s distant ancestors included various Austro-Hungarian aristocrats and Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian from the 19th century, whose surname and scandalous novel “Venus in Furs” helped create the phrase “Masochism.”

The parents of the Faithful Departed when she was 6 years old and her childhood would include time in a monastery and in what she would call a “nutty” sex-occupied municipality. Of her teens, she read Simone de Beauvoir, heard at Odetta and Joan Baez and sang in folk clubs. Through the London art scene, she met Dunbar, who introduced her to Paul McCartney and other celebrities. Dunbar also founded the Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would say he met Yoko Ono.

“The threads on a dozen small scenes were invisible winding together,” she wrote in her memoir. “All these people – gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristocrats and various talented drugs more or less invented the scene in London, so I assume I was present at creation.”

Her future was set in March 1964 when she attended a recording party for one of London’s hot young bands, The Rolling Stones. Scoring the idea that she and Jagger immediately fell for each other, she would consider the stones as “Yobby Schoolboys” and witnessed Jagger who fought with her then girlfriend, model Chrissie Shrimpton, saw in tears that her false eyelids peeled off .

But she was deeply impressed with a man, Stones Manager Andrew “Loog” Oldham, who saw “powerful and dangerous and very confident in herself.” A week later Oldham sent her a telegram and asked her to come to London’s Olympic Studios. When Jagger and Richards looked at, Oldham played her a demo of a “very primitive” song, “A Tears Go By”, which faithfully needed only two taking to implement.

“It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written,” Faithful wrote in his 1994 memoir. “A song about a woman who looks nostalgic back on her life. The creepy thing is that Mick should have written these words so long before everything happened. It’s almost as it is if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song. “

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Brian Mallley contributed from London.