Faithfull

Marianne Faithfull’s Faithfull is the memoir of a woman who began as the pale, beautiful voice of sixties innocence and then spent the next few decades proving that innocence is often just the first costume history makes you wear. She arrived in the public imagination as the convent-educated singer of “As Tears Go By,” floated into the Rolling Stones orbit, became muse, scandal, girlfriend, casualty, survivor, artist, addict, comeback figure and walking correction to anyone who thought the 1960s were all flowers and flattering lighting.

Written with David Dalton, this is the story told from inside the wreckage and the glamour: London, records, fame, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, parties, tabloids, drugs, courtrooms, exile, homelessness, theatre, reinvention and the long, painful business of becoming more interesting than the myth that nearly killed you. Faithfull is not here to sit nicely in the corner of someone else’s rock biography, draped decoratively over a sofa while men with guitars make history. She has her own account, and it arrives with smoke in its voice.

The great irony of Marianne Faithfull’s life is that the image came first, and the artist had to claw her way out from underneath it. The world adored her when she looked like a doomed Pre-Raphaelite schoolgirl with a record deal, then punished her for surviving the very excesses it had been applauding from a safe distance. Pop culture enjoys a muse, provided she stays ornamental. Faithfull declined the job description, though not without taking a considerable beating from fame, addiction and public appetite along the way.

This memoir has all the required rock-life furnishings: beautiful people behaving badly, expensive rooms, disastrous decisions, legal unpleasantness, chemical enthusiasm, doomed romance, bright clothes, dark mornings and the press waiting outside like an unpaid moral guardian. But the book’s interest is not simply the gossip, although the gossip has certainly brought its own luggage. It is the voice of someone looking back on the whole circus with wit, damage, intelligence and the useful contempt of a woman who has seen what mythology costs up close.

Faithfull’s later life gives the story its real bite. The ravaged voice, the cabaret darkness, the Brechtian edge, the return not as a restored ingénue but as something much stranger and stronger: that is where the memoir stops being a sixties souvenir and becomes a survival document with better cheekbones. She did not come back polished. She came back altered, which is more valuable and much harder to market.

For readers of rock memoirs, Rolling Stones history, sixties London, female survival in the machinery of fame, or stories where the muse eventually lights a cigarette and starts correcting the record, this is essential shelf material. It has glamour, ruin, wit, bitterness, art, scandal and the deeply satisfying spectacle of a woman refusing to remain the supporting character in a man’s legend.

As New copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. Alarmingly tidy for a memoir containing this much beautiful damage. A clean, sharp Penguin copy, ready to sit on the music shelf looking far more composed than almost anyone inside it had any right to be.

Keep browsing: See more Biography books Other books by Marianne Faithfull with David Dalton