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Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Marianne Faithfull – best known for song As Tears Go By – dies, aged 78
Marianna Faithfull, a singer and actress known for her hit song As Tears Go By, has passed away at the age of 78. A spokesperson for the singer said: "It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull. Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed." The singer started her career in 1964 when she was discovered by music manager Andrew Loog Oldham. Marianne had been attending a party hosted for The Rolling Stones at the time. A year later, she released her self-titled debut album, which became a critical and commercial hit. The album contained some of her best-known songs, including As Tears Go By, which was co-written with the Rolling Stones, and Come and Stay With Me. She released five more albums during the 1960s, but due to a turbulent personal life, she then underwent a period of silence. She returned to the music scene with her 1976 album, Dreamin' My Dreams, but it was her 1979 album, Broken English, which revitalised her career. The album also contained some of Marianne's most personal songs, as she addressed her drug and alcohol addictions. The star continued to experiment with her musical style throughout the rest of her life. Her final album, She Walks in Beauty, was released in 2021 and focused on putting music to some of Britain's most iconic love poems. Marianne acted on both the screen and theatre and she made her professional acting debut in 1967 in a production of Three Sisters. Other notable theatre roles include Ophelia in a 1969 production of Hamlet and as Alice in the 1973 showing of Alice in Wonderland. On the silver screen, she appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's Made in U.S.A., where she made a cameo appearance singing As Tears Go By. The star leant her voice to Absolutely Fabulous where she played God over three episodes and her final role was as the narrator in 2023's Wild Summer. One of her most-famous roles was as Maggie in 2007's Irina Palm. Marianne played a grandmother who turned to sex work in order to fund her grandson's medical treatment and her role saw her nominated as Best Actress at the European Film Awards. Marianne was the ex-girlfriend of The Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, with the pair having dated for four years. Marianne fell pregnant with their daughter, Corinna, however, seven months into the pregnancy she tragically miscarried. Marianne was still married to music producer John Dunbar when she dated Mick, with the couple divorcing in 1966. The singer subsequently married The Vibrators singer Ben Brierly in 1979, with the pair splitting in 1986. Her third marriage was to actor Giorgio Della Terza, with the pair walking down the aisle in 1988 before splitting in 1991. Reflecting on her love life in 2011, she said: "I've had a wonderful life with all my lovers, and husbands." However she joked that Giorgio "was a nightmare". Marianne was a mother-of-one, welcoming her first son, Nicholas, with her husband John. Marianne lost custody of Nicholas after news emerged of her drug addictions. The pair were thankfully able to reconcile, with the star calling her son "sensible". Through Nicholas, she is a grandmother to Noah, Oscar and Eliza. Marianne's life was marked by her drug addictions and in 1967, she was discovered in just a fur rug when police conducted a drug search at Keith Richards's home. Reflecting on the experience with Details, she shared: "It destroyed me. To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother." During the 1970s, she spent two years living on the streets of SoHo, while she was addicted to heroin. She told the Guardian in 2018: "My answer to everything was to get as stoned as possible and live on the street, which made me sort of unattractive." Her life was plagued by other health issues, with the star calling off the European stint of her 2004 tour after collapsing on stage while in Madrid. In 2006, Marianne was diagnosed with breast cancer, thankfully, as the illness was caught early, she was given the all-clear just two months later. In 2012, she went public with her diagnosis of hepatitis C. Speaking on This Morning, she said: "I have hepatitis C and the worst thing for that is alcohol. I found out about 12 years ago. I was incredibly lucky. I shouldn't be alive - I know that. "Life has become much more precious to me and my health has become much more precious to me. I do not miss the drugs. I suppose it would be nice to have a glass of wine or something but it really would not be good for my health." In 2020, the star contracted COVID-19 and pneumonia. She was released from hospital three weeks later, and she thanked the staff who "without a doubt" saved her life. Reflecting on the experience a year later, she said: "Three things: the memory, fatigue and my lungs are still not OK – I have to have oxygen and all that stuff. The side-effects are so strange. Some people come back from it but they can't walk or speak. Awful."
Yahoo
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Singer Marianne Faithfull known for 'As Tears Go By' dies aged 78
Singer and actress Marianne Faithfull has died at the age of 78, a spokesperson has said. Faithfull's hits included As Tears Go By, which was written by The Rolling Stones' Sir Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. In addition to her music career, Faithfull also acted in films including The Girl on a Motorcycle, as well as theatre productions. A statement said: 'It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull. 'Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. 'She will be dearly missed.' Along with her hit, As Tears Go By, Faithfull had many other well-known songs including This Little Bird, Come and Stay With Me, Why D'Ya Do It? and Broken English. In her acting career, Faithfull starred in the likes of Irina Palm, Dune, Marie Antoinette, This Much I Know To Be True and Intimacy.
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Marianne Faithfull was a towering artist, not just the muse she was painted as
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. So, while Mick Jagger was nastily dismissed in the theme song to the Sex Pistols' film The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle, Faithfull was offered a part in it, as Sid Vicious's mother. Her comeback gig was at the Music Machine, a bearpit venue where Bob Geldof had been punched in the face mid-song. Moreover, the ensuing album, Broken English, fitted perfectly. It was filled with enough bile, bad language and provocation (what was the daughter of a baroness doing singing John Lennon's Working Class Hero?) to give Johnny Rotten pause. The songs picked through the wreckage of the decade that had made her famous with unmistakable relish – how the era's penchant for mind expansion and radical politics had curdled into addiction and terrorism – or railed at the way women were treated: the album is populated by a female cast of suicidal housewives, betrayed lovers and oblivion-seekers. It was all performed with conviction: she sounded like she meant it. Of course, Faithfull was an actor, but you could also see why she might be genuinely pissed off, and not merely because of her fall from grace. Her initial burst of fame may have looked good from the outside – she was beautiful, she had hit singles, she was the partner of one of the biggest pop stars in the world. But there was something dismissive and sexist about the way she was treated as if she were 'somebody who not only can't even sing but doesn't really write or anything, just something you can make into something,' she later recalled. 'I was just cheesecake really, terribly depressing'. The Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who launched her singing career, described her as 'an angel with big tits'. The records she made strongly suggested that music came low on his list of priorities: he saw her as a means of living out his fantasy of becoming a British Phil Spector, and as a light entertainer: a pretty, posh girl whose niche would be essaying folk songs for an MOR, Saturday-night variety show audience. When he got his way, the results were horrendous: her version of Dylan's Blowin' in the Wind is terrible; her version of Greensleeves, larded with a production that saw Oldham doing his best Spector impersonation, is even worse. But Faithfull was smarter than to fall under the sway of a svengali. She had other ideas about pop music, and, as it turned out, they were better than his. Initially, her best records dealt in a very English, very wintry-sounding brand of orchestral pop: on This Little Bird, Go Away from My World, Morning Sun or Tomorrow's Calling, the arrangements twinkled like frost; you can imagine Faithfull's breath forming clouds in front of her face as she sings. The material was lightweight but something about Faithfull's performances injected a note of eeriness: her vocals were more yearning and melancholy than the songs needed them to be. It was a side of her work that might have developed fruitfully in the psychedelic era, but by then Faithfull had lost interest in singing, apparently content to be Mick Jagger's muse. It was a role she was good at – it was Faithfull who got him to read Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which inspired Sympathy for the Devil – but it seemed a shame: the first of a number of bad decisions Faithfull made regarding her career. The second was that, having been sharp enough to quickly ditch Oldham as her producer and insist her label simultaneously release two albums – one pop, one folk – she didn't fight harder to stop her record company pulling her 1969 comeback single Something Better. This was far grittier than anything she'd released before – country-ish, with Ry Cooder on slide guitar – but the problem, as her label saw it, was the B-side, her original version of Sister Morphine: so bleak and so obviously written by someone who knew of what she spoke that they balked and withdrew it entirely. As she sank further into addiction, there were more missed opportunities. A 1971 album, Masques, went unreleased. By the time of its recording, her personal situation was desperate and her 60s producer, Mike Leander, had concocted it primarily as a means of helping her. Faithfull later dismissed its contents but it was better than she thought, the material well-chosen and apropos; her performances raw and vulnerable. Her versions of Phil Ochs' Chords of Fame and Terry Reid's Rich Kid Blues were powerful in a way her 60s hits were not. Two years later, she appeared on David Bowie's TV special The 1980 Floor Show, wearing a nun's habit, sounding like Nico and duetting with him on a version of I Got You Babe. She could have reinvented herself for the glam era – her public image certainly had a suitable amount of decadence attached – but Faithfull was visibly still in a bad way, and nothing more happened. It took Broken English to finally re-establish Faithfull, even if it initially looked like a one-off. Its followup albums, Dangerous Acquaintances and A Child's Adventure were less striking and edgy, although the latter's closing track, She's Got a Problem, had some of Broken English's bite. The 1987 album Strange Weather was another triumph, its mood dark and affecting, with Faithfull as a dramatic and gifted interpreter of songs, rather than a writer, on selections ranging from Leadbelly, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan to the Great American Songbook. She repeated the trick with Brecht and Weill songs on the live album 20th Century Blues (1996), and later recorded an entire album of their material, The Seven Deadly Sins (1998). She also began attracting a noticeably hipper class of collaborator than any of her more commercially successful 60s peers. The superb 2002 album Kissin' Time alone featured contributions from Beck, Pulp, Billy Corgan and Blur (the title track, with Blur, very much in the vein of the looser, more experimental music found on Blur's album 13, was a particular highlight). The 2005 album Before the Poison was essentially split between collaborations with PJ Harvey, operating in minimalist garage-rock mode, and Nick Cave. Faithfull self-deprecatingly suggested that younger artists flocked to work with her because they enjoyed hearing her war stories from the 60s, but the reality was that she was willing to take risks, challenge herself and push at the boundaries of public perception: Easy Come, Easy Go reunited her with Keith Richards, but elsewhere on the same album she covered songs by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the Decemberists and duetted with Anohni and Cat Power. She would occasionally delve into her history, revisiting As Tears Go By and Broken English's Witches Song on Negative Capability (2018), or underline her place among the rock aristocracy by tapping Elton John, Lou Reed and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters for songs or guest appearances. But you would never accuse her of trading on past glories, or of knocking out an album in order to tour and play the hits, as many of her peers were evidently doing. For someone whose public image was inexorably linked with what she had done 50 years earlier, she seemed artistically intent on pressing forward, in establishing herself in a context that had more to do with Anna Calvi and Mark Lanegan than the Rolling Stones. 'She walked through the whole thing on her own terms,' noted Warren Ellis, Nick Cave's latterday musical foil, who co-produced Negative Capability. It's not hard to imagine Faithfull would have thought that a fitting epitaph.
