Melancholy, morphine and the Baader-Meinhof group: Marianne Faithfull’s 10 best recordings
From a career-detonating collaboration with the Rolling Stones in 1969 to a hypnotic experiment with 13-era Blur, Marianne Faithfull’s career was one of reinvention – yet always underpinned by her wrenching, affecting vocals
• News: Marianne Faithfull dies aged 78
• Alexis Petridis: ‘Faithfull was not just a muse’
• Peter Bradshaw: ‘Faithfull was a magnet for film-makers’
Marianne Faithfull’s 60s releases were wildly variable, perhaps because she seems to have been beholden to the whims of producers who didn’t really know what to do with her: one minute she was recording rounded-edged folk – Cockleshells, What Have They Done to the Rain – the next retooling the Ronettes’ Is This What I Get for Loving You? to no great effect. But, occasionally, she rose above it all, injecting her cut-glass delivery with an alarming degree of melancholy, as on Morning Sun. The B-side of her hit This Little Bird, it’s a pretty but slender song, driven by what sounds like a echoing harp, that her voice transforms into something weirdly wrenching: “I’m very sad, tears follow me,” she sings, and she genuinely sounds it.
Continue reading...