The late singer made her share of bad decisions – but someone this artistically adventurous and unafraid was never going to have an ordinary life

• News: Marianne Faithfull, singular icon of British pop, dies aged 78

• Life in pictures

It is difficult to think of a moment in pop history less receptive to a 1960s icon relaunching their career than in 1979. At that point, British rock and pop resolutely inhabited a world shaped by punk: it was the year of 2-Tone and Tubeway Army’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, of Ian Dury at No 1 and Blondie releasing the bestselling album of the year. And it was a central tenet of punk that the 1960s and their attendant “culture freaks” were, as Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren put it: “fucking disgusting … vampiric … the most narcissistic generation there has ever been,” and that the decade’s famous names should no longer be afforded the kind of awed reverence they had enjoyed for most of the 70s. “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones,” as the Clash had sung.

And yet Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, turned out to be the kind of famous face from the 60s that a world shaped by punk could get behind. She was living proof that the rock aristocracy were remote and decadent and ripe for the culling. Never given the credit due to her by her most famous associates, the Rolling Stones, she had to go to court to get her name appended to the credits of Sister Morphine, a song she had co-written. She subsequently spiralled downwards, at startling speed, from having a seat at swinging London’s top table to life as a homeless junkie. Her years of addiction on the streets had so ravaged her voice that, by the late 70s, it was completely unrecognisable as coming from the woman who had sung As Tears Go By and Come and Stay With Me.

As Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag turns 60, we rate the prolific funk/soul powerhouse’s finest studio, live and soundtrack albums

If you want a roll call of James Brown’s formative influences, just check the covers on this album: Hank Ballard, Roy “Good Rockin’ Tonight” Brown, dirty blues supremo Bull Moose Jackson and Billy Ward’s impressively morbid The Bells, which – never knowingly understated – Brown used to perform on stage with a doll representing his lover’s corpse.

(Jagjaguwar)
Fronting a brand new band, the singer-songwriter dives into the dark side, with confusion and foreboding creeping through 80s moods, big choruses and fine melodies

The last time the world heard from Sharon Van Etten, it was 2022. She was pictured on the cover of her sixth album, We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong, standing in front of a house while wildfires raged worryingly close by. The songs lurking inside were informed not just by the environmental catastrophe unfolding on her doorstep, but the “collective trauma” of lockdown and the fraught complexities of parenthood. It was well reviewed and sold enough to dent the charts in several countries: business as usual for a perennially acclaimed and influential singer-songwriter. Perhaps too usual.

Over the course of her career, Van Etten has gradually bolstered and rounded out her sound, from the austere acoustic confessionals of her 2009 debut, via trebly Velvet Underground-ish indie, to something noticeably bigger and smoother, a tasteful – but not bland – take on widescreen alt-rock: mid-paced, stately, buoyed by synths and swelling choruses. For all the strength of its songwriting, there wasn’t much on We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong that her fans wouldn’t have heard before. The laudatory reviews contained adjectives that, viewed in a certain light, could take on a faintly troubling tone: “comfortable”, “tried-and-true”, “familiar”.