Latest news with #SwingingLondon
Telegraph
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘Man Ray was very intense... I wasn't shy and I was pretty and that helped'
The American artist Liliane Lijn works in an old textile warehouse in north London, a low brick building with vast wooden doors. On a cold spring morning, she opens them dressed in silvery green, yellow and azure blue, as if she had recently escaped from a Matisse painting. Lijn, who has lived in Britain for nearly 60 years, made her mark with the kinetic art movement in early 1960s Paris and the counterculture scene in Swinging London. Now 85, she remains a lively force, with intense eyes and a brisk confidence. 'Let me turn some work on,' says Lijn, as she ushers me into her studio, where rooms unfold around a glass courtyard. She leads the way, flicking various switches, and one artwork after another slowly grinds into action, filling the space with tocks and clicks. Lijn has an exhibition at Tate St Ives this month, Arise Alive. It coincides with the publication of her memoir and the display of two pieces in Tate Modern's group show Electric Dreams. St Ives is the coup, though. Despite having a rich body of work and a successful career, it is her first major museum survey in Britain – and sorely overdue. 'Kinetic art was never taken seriously by the establishment,' Lijn tells me. 'It wasn't marketable and that was a problem. I had a period in the 1990s where there was practically no interest in my work. Of course it was depressing, but somehow I didn't really doubt what I was doing. I always felt I was on the right path.' Arise Alive is conceived jointly with Haus der Kunst in Munich and Vienna's museum of modern art, Mumok. The display has been slightly adapted for St Ives by Tate director Anne Barlow, who says she believes Lijn has been 'consistently ahead of her time. Over the past six decades, her work has had significant influence. This focus on her now feels very important.' Lijn's art is easy to like, less so to define. Typically, it takes the form of sculpture or installation, but she has also created prints, performances and a libretto. It depicts cosmological phenomena, energy, light and vibration, sometimes drawing on myths and archetypes. Words are a recurring feature, as are futuristic materials. In the 1960s that meant various plastics; today, something like aerogel, a solid that is typically 98 per cent air and is used by Nasa to collect interstellar dust. Lijn shows me some of the work she made with it during a Nasa-funded fellowship at the Space Sciences Laboratory in Berkeley, California, in 2005. 'Stardust' is hermetically sealed inside a vitrine, and breathtaking: a cluster of milky shards with blurry edges, which resembles glowing, frozen smoke. 'I broke it a lot at first,' she says. 'But they told me: everything fragments. It's important to every cosmic process, and so that became the piece.' Nearby stands a twisting female form made of sheet mica frills – Lijn's husband of 55 years, Stephen Weiss, used to own a mica factory – and some Poemdrums, nested cylinders bearing words, the layers of which rotate at different speeds. They are descendants of the Poem Machines with which Lijn enraptured Paris in the 1960s: Letraset words on a motorised drum that in motion creates a pattern, 'pregnant with energy', as Lijn describes it. Perhaps it makes sense that Lijn was drawn to make art that reflects on the forces of the cosmos. She came of age during a time of exhilarating technological and scientific advances, after all, not least the space race. Born Liliane Segall in 1939 (she changed her name to avoid any confusion with the American pop artist George Segal), she grew up in New York, the elder child of Russian Jews who had fled Nazi Germany. Her father played the violin, her grandmother sang sad Russian songs; her mother 'did everything beautifully without any mistakes'. At home, conversation centred on literature and philosophy. When she was 14, her family resettled in Switzerland. By 18, Lijn had left for Paris to study archaeology at the Sorbonne and art history at the Ecole du Louvre. She lasted six months. 'When I told my father I was quitting to be an artist, he said, 'Well, I should have known you would do that.'' Lijn devised her own programme of learning: long hours in museums, drawing classes with the painter and filmmaker Robert Lapoujade, evenings at the Blue Note jazz club. Of greatest importance, however, was an introduction to the surrealist cafés, via the painter Manina, the mother of a school friend. Here, Lijn met the artists Max Ernst, Roberto Matta and Meret Oppenheim, the poet Joyce Mansour, and the grandaddy of surrealism himself, André Breton. 'He was very formal, kiss your hand, that sort of thing,' says Lijn. 'There was still a glamour attached to the group and it felt exciting to go – I had read practically everything Breton wrote – but surrealism was disintegrating. Breton had excommunicated so many. It was kind of sad, and when they just gossiped about other people, even boring. It could also be tough for women, but the thing is that I wasn't shy and I was pretty, and that helped.' The Greek artist Takis, a former pupil of the sculptor Constantin Brâncuşi, who experimented with kinetic pieces that used magnets, was the first to take Lijn's work seriously. They married in 1961 (she taught herself Greek by reading Aristophanes with a dictionary) and had a son, Thanos, the following year. She also has a son, Mischa, and a daughter, Sheba, with Weiss. Between 1961 and 1963, Lijn and Takis lived in New York City. She shares fragments of her time there with me: meeting Franz Kline –'but abstract expressionism was over, more or less; those artists were old heroes' – and buying so much Perspex from a store in Lower Manhattan that the owner cleared his second floor for her experiments. On returning to Paris, Lijn began devouring scientific journals. 'I thought that with physics, which is about the very small, and astronomy, which is about the very large, I would somehow get an understanding of reality,' she tells me. 'I wanted to understand what reality was beyond the image of it, to be illuminated, in the Buddhist sense. That, to me, is the most important function of art.' In 1963, she held her first solo exhibition. The great photographer Man Ray visited, and was so impressed by her Poem Machines that he invited her to his studio. He was 'warm and friendly', but 'very intense'. The Beat author William S Burroughs was similarly taken, and she became a regular at the Beat Hotel. 'He wanted to make his text move off the page, and I was very excited about that. But Takis said, 'You don't want to do that', and he had a very persuasive way.' The lack of other female artists disturbed her – 'I'd go to exhibitions and look for them' – but she found a mentor in Caresse Crosby, patron to Salvador Dalí and Ernest Hemingway. Peggy Guggenheim was another champion and friend. Lijn performed at the famed collector's 61st birthday party in Venice. In 1966, Lijn moved to London, where she had been invited to exhibit at Signals, a new gallery dedicated to kinetic art. She drove all the way from Athens, but found Signals had shut, having lost its funding after the management criticised the Vietnam War. John Dunbar, the 22-year-old owner of the Indica Gallery (married at the time to the crown princess of Swinging London, Marianne Faithfull) came to the rescue. He had taken on a few Signals artists and extended the offer to Lijn. 'I met Liliane through Takis,' Dunbar tells me, 'but I chose the work I showed on the basis of impulse.' He still has 8mm footage of her 1967 exhibition, which debuted the kinetic work Liquid Reflections (1966-68). Its Perspex spheres mimic planetary forces by rolling across a hollow acrylic disc of condensed liquid. Lijn had landed on her feet: Indica was the hippest gallery in London at the time. Dunbar's co-founders were the author Barry Miles and the pop star Pete Asher (brother of Jane). Paul McCartney helped paint the walls and put up shelves, and Dunbar had recently staged Yoko Ono's first London show. Lijn recalls a dinner at which she 'chatted peace and love' with McCartney. 'He said he didn't understand why people couldn't love each other.' Exhibitions at the Hanover Gallery in 1970 and the Serpentine in 1976 kept Lijn in London. 'I was very successful here, it was a good anchor,' she says. 'And, of course, I met Stephen.' View this post on Instagram A post shared by Tate St Ives (@tatestives) In her office, with its egg-yolk-yellow floor, Lijn pulls out a box of old journals and leaves me to leaf through them. The pages are a mix of scrawled impressions, self-admonishments and fierce resolutions. 'I'm determined, that's just a character trait,' she says. She makes coffee and we sit at a table she designed herself, a circle of glass set on striped ceramic cones. Cones have appeared in her work since the mid-1960s. She calls them 'koans', after the puzzles used in Buddhist meditation, and explains that 'all energy is emitted in a conical form'. Her conversation is filled with things like this – talk of quasars and whether the universe is mathematical, and we are mathematical beings, and that is the way we understand the cosmos. I ask Lijn how this stash of prodigious scientific knowledge sits with her interest in myth and spirituality. 'Oh, quite nicely,' she replies. 'I think what many scientists think: that there are a lot of things we don't know or understand, and one of those things is consciousness. The unconscious is the wellspring, where all the most important discoveries are made, in science and art, and in poetry and music.' It is her view that eventually science will understand 'the entanglement of our mind with the universe. If we're not all blown to smithereens by some idiot, that is.' She smiles. 'I hope I have a few more years.'
Khaleej Times
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Khaleej Times
Dubai: Celebrity hair stylist Rossano Ferretti on how he came up with The Method to cut locks
Rossano Ferretti knows the science and art of hair. That he has come to be known for haircuts that are — believe it or not — seen as works of architecture imbued with near-scientific precision is a testament to his craftsmanship. 'When I was a little boy, my teachers used to tell my parents that I ought to be an architect or a designer,' says Rossano, at his salon in Park Hyatt Dubai. 'I wanted to be an architect because I was very good in design. My teachers would tell my mother that I had hands that could practically design everything. But that was the time when my hands would bleed because of the excessive shampooing at my mother's salon.' Rossano came from a small village in Italy, and studying in Florence or Venice was 'like going to the moon'. His grandfather, who had been a barber wanted him to try his hand at hairdressing. So, he did the next best thing — he sent Rossano to London to study hairdressing. 'The hairstyles I had seen coming from that part of the world had elements of architecture. The first bob, for example, was also the first geometric haircut to come out of 'Swinging London'. I went there and learnt how to cut a bob in three days,' recalls Rossano. This was unprecedented, given that it would usually take someone a year to master it. 'I have since spent the rest of my life trying to destroy the geometrical method,' says Rossano. By this time, Rossano had come to realise he had a special talent. He was not wrong. Three years later, in 1979, Rossano would do his first catwalk, which opened the world of fashion for him. Rossano catapulted into popular imagination with 'The Method', a form of haircut that involves texturised scissors (patented by Ferretti) being employed to cut the hair in sync with its natural course. It honours the natural flow of hair, enhancing its texture and shape without rigid geometric structures ('This scissor is the only scissor that can texturise hair fibre without crunching it,' he says). The technique, performed only by artists trained by Rossano himself, uses custom-designed scissors, and creates a personalised, effortless look. Rooted in Italian craftsmanship, it allows hair to fall naturally, requiring minimal styling while maintaining elegance and sophistication. Stay up to date with the latest news. Follow KT on WhatsApp Channels. What I do in The Method is that my arms follow the hair fall and my arms and scissors become a prolongation of my hands. It does not matter whether your hair is curly, straight or wavy, this technique is bespoke to every individual" Rossano says when he started talking about the natural hair look and invisible haircut, everyone thought he was 'crazy'. In doing so, he also became an advocate for 'skinification' of hair before it became a trend. The logic was simple — hair needed to be cared for the same way we care for our skin. 'It's all about hair health,' he says. 'Haircare is the new skincare.' Coming back to 'The Method', Rossano says it was born in a moment of 'big happiness, big success but also great frustration'. 'It was quite successful, but I was never happy, because I was telling myself that everyone loves it, but they don't really see it for what it is. It was not about the scissor movement, it could not have been completely geometrical either. When you have wet hair, and you straighten it with a comb and then attempt to cut it, what happens is the hair takes a different form when it dries. It's a disaster. What I do in The Method is that my arms follow the hair fall and my arms and scissors become a prolongation of my hands. It does not matter whether your hair is curly, straight or wavy, this technique is bespoke to every individual. In that sense, The Method evolves every single time, depending on whose hair you cut,' says Rossano who's stopped implementing The Method himself and has instead trained his staff in it. Today, international A-listers like Kate Middleton, Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Lawrence, Anna Wintour, Dakota Johnson, Pippa Middleton, Sophie Windsor, Poppy Delevingne, Richard Gere, Al Pacino and others have been spotted at Rossano Ferreti's salons across the world. In fact, the hair maestro recalls the time when Pacino famously told the world press about visiting his salon. 'He had come to Rome to attend a film festival and then went back to New York. When asked what his best memory of Rome was, he mentioned visiting the salon. I've got to admit, it did feel quite nice.' It's not just the people who visit Rossano Ferretti salons, but the moment he truly discovers the person underneath that true magic happens. 'Consultation is the moment when everything actually comes together,' he says. 'That's the moment when a person actually opens up to you — tells you their story, their frustration, what they like, what they dislike, what their personal problems are.' Once the personality is revealed, a suitable style emerges. 'I think there is a lack of information about haircare. People don't really know what it means to have a haircare regimen. They know what it is like to have a skincare regimen, but not haircare. They buy products for price or marketing, not necessarily for quality. Longevity of hair is dependent on how you eat, how you move, how you think. Hair health is a consequence of all these things. If you have a high cholesterol or something, it won't help.' From his range of products to hairstyles, everything about the Rossano Ferretti brand speaks of luxury. The hair maestro maintains that luxury is an emotion. 'Think about it, you can buy a bag that costs $10 (Dh36). Then why do buy a bag that costs $45,000? You are actually buying an emotion, you are buying a moment. For me, it's all about experience. Life is about moments, and every single moment cannot be special. So that's where luxury comes in.' The irony is that despite the promises of the beauty industry, there are very few bright professionals who actually enter the haircare business. This is when Rossano speaks most passionately about the problems of the industry. 'I could write a book on it. It's devastating that today, you don't find people who are passionate about this business. People cannot imagine that a hairdresser can actually be a rich man. No father encourages his children to become a hairdresser because they think it is a poor man's profession. With a change in the mindset, you can actually give a profession to poor people.' As for his dreams of becoming an architect, Rossano says he has fulfilled it. 'I became the most famous architect in the history of haircare. I have created the most trendy looks of the past 40 years. I began with reading the person, and give them a haircut that matches their style, but it ended up becoming some form of trend.'
Telegraph
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
How the Telegraph predicted Swinging London
On April 16 1965, The Daily Telegraph's Weekend magazine had a cover feature by John Crosby entitled 'London: The Most Exciting City', which declared: 'Suddenly, the young own the town', and claimed that it was now the place 'where the action is, the gayest, most uninhibited – and in a wholly new, very modern sense – the most coolly elegant city in the world.' Crosby, a well-known American journalist and television critic, was the London correspondent of the New York Herald Tribune, living on the King's Road in Chelsea at the heart of much that was newly fashionable. What makes his piece especially significant is that it appeared an entire year before the article that is often credited with having prompted the whole mid-1960s ' Swinging London ' legend, Time magazine's famous April 1966 US cover, 'London: The Swinging City'. These two high-profile features reflected a shift in popular culture that had been building up since the middle of the previous decade, exemplified by the recent American success of multiple 'British Invasion' bands, notably The Beatles. The initial stirrings had begun around 1955, when the UK's home-grown skiffle craze led many young people to pick up guitars and try to make music of their own, and Mary Quant opened her first boutique on the King's Road. In those days, pop music was supposed to only come from America, and ground-breaking new fashions solely from the Paris catwalks, yet during the early part of the following decade, British bands gradually began showing up on music charts worldwide, and Quant's innovative styles were breaking through internationally, as she explained when I interviewed her in 2004: 'From 1962 I started to design clothes and underwear for [American department store chain] JC Penney – as well as my own Mary Quant collection. I was commuting to New York once a month, which I loved.' The year 1962 also saw the release of the first James Bond film, Dr No, based on Ian Fleming's million-selling novels. Fleming grew up in Chelsea, and the fictional spy in his books lives in an un-named square off the King's Road. Sean Connery, star of the new film series, had cheap lodgings in the area in the late 1950s, and John Barry composed most of his classic Bond themes such as Goldfinger at his home on nearby Cadogan Square. This irreverent, wisecracking and stylish movie star appeared on the scene just as the first flush of more gritty, 'kitchen sink' films was drawing to a close. Many of the latter were the work of directors who had started out in 1956 at the Royal Court Theatre on Sloane Square, at the eastern end of the King's Road, empowered by the shock waves created by John Osborne's debut play for the resident company there, Look Back in Anger. Moving decidedly away from middle- or upper-class drawing-room locations, and placing working-class characters at the heart of the action, such plays and films – together with the anti-heroes depicted in the so-called Angry Young Men novels of the late 1950s – helped prepare the ground for the kind of 1960s figures on-screen, in the pop charts and elsewhere in the wider culture who talked back and didn't play by the old rules. A prime example of the latter would be a group of scruffs in 1962 who were living at the cheaper reaches of the King's Road in a squalid flat and gigging around town at any venue that would let them play their own interpretation of US rhythm and blues. John Gunnell, who together with his brother Rik ran the Flamingo Club in Wardour Street, once told me he booked the band for a month of Monday night shows during that era, but sacked them after the first one after they failed to pull a crowd. Nevertheless, The Rolling Stones did not let this deter them, and within two years they had progressed from Chelsea to the US charts. John Crosby originally considered calling his 1965 Telegraph feature 'Swinging London', and a year earlier had already informed readers of his New York Herald Tribune column that Britain was a 'swinging' nation. Now, in the wake of the 1966 Time magazine cover article, the US media descended in force on London looking for stories, and at one point that year, as Mary Quant told me, 'American news magazines and TV were often filming both sides of the King's Road at the same time'. Time declared that 'in a once sedate world of faded splendour, everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming at the top of London life', and the King's Road seemed to be the epicentre of all that had been declared groovy. 'Saturday afternoon in Chelsea, at La Rêve restaurant. Wolfing down a quick lunch are some of the most switched-on young men in town: Actor Terence Stamp, 26, star of The Collector and steady date of model Jean Shrimpton; actor Michael Caine, 33, the Mozart-loving spy in The Ipcress File; hairdresser Sassoon, 38, whose cut can be seen both at Courrèges in Paris and on Princess Meg; Ace photographer David Bailey, 27, professional associate of Antony Armstrong-Jones; and Doug Hayward, 28, Chelsea's 'innest' private tailor.' Much of the attention on the modish capital was met with predictable derision by Londoners themselves, and by the satirists at Private Eye, who printed a 'Swinging England All-Purpose Titillation Supplement' to assist the 'very small number of American periodicals which have not yet produced their 24-page survey of the Swinging, Vibrant, Thrusting New England Where Even the Hovercraft Wear Mini-Skirts etc etc'. Time's own letters column also received some scathing responses from British readers, including one that said: 'For the year's most ridiculous generalisations, you deserve to swing indeed. All of you. And not in London either.' Despite all this, the image of the capital as a wellspring of the emerging 1960s pop culture would continue to be disseminated as the decade progressed by numerous fashion articles worldwide, books such as Len Deighton's London Dossier, Karl Dallas's Swinging London – A Guide to Where the Action Is or the self-consciously trendy pulp novels of Adam Diment such as The Dolly Dolly Spy, scores of famous rock stars including Chelsea resident Keith Richards in his artfully tattered velvet jackets and scarves from hip King's Road boutique Granny Takes a Trip, by films such as Alfie or Blow-Up and stylish London-based TV shows like The Avengers (now shot in colour for the benefit of the American market), and by a blizzard of magazine articles either celebrating or decrying the myth of Swinging London. As for the man whose Telegraph feature helped unleash the hysteria, the Liverpool Echo reported in June 1966 that 'Crosby today nervously acknowledges paternity of the swinging movement but says he was only trying to be funny about one minor aspect of English life', and faced with the prospect of being interviewed by Paris Match for yet another article about the subject, Crosby himself observed: 'When Frenchmen come to England to ask an American questions about London's sex, you know the millennium has arrived.'
CBC
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Marianne Faithfull, British singer and icon, dies at 78
Marianne Faithfull, the British pop star, muse and libertine who inspired and helped write some of the Rolling Stones' greatest songs and endured as a torch singer and survivor of the lifestyle she once embodied, has died. She was 78. Faithfull passed away Thursday in London, her music promotion company Republic Media said. "It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull," a company spokesperson said in a statement. "Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed." The blonde, voluptuous Faithfull was a celebrity before turning 17, homeless by her mid-20s and an inspiration to peers and younger artists by her early 30s, when her raw, explicit Broken English album brought her the kinds of reviews the Stones had received. Over the following decades, her admirers would include Beck, Billy Corgan, Nick Cave and PJ Harvey, although her history would always be closely tied to the Stones and to the years she dated Mick Jagger. One of the first songs written by Jagger and Keith Richards, the melancholy As Tears Go By, was her breakthrough hit when released in 1964 and the start of her close and tormented relationship with the band. Swinging London She and Jagger began seeing each other in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples of "Swinging London," with Faithfull once declaring that if LSD "wasn't meant to happen, it wouldn't have been invented." Their rejection of conventional values was defined by a widely publicized 1967 drug bust that left Jagger and Richards briefly in jail and Faithfull identified in tabloids as "Naked Girl At Stones Party," a label she would find humiliating and inescapable. "One of the hazards of reforming your evil ways is that some people won't let go of their mind's eye of you as a wild thing," she wrote in Memories, Dreams and Reflections, a 2007 memoir. Jagger and Richards often cited bluesmen and early rock 'n' rollers as their prime influences, but Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards' longtime partner, also opened the band to new ways of thinking. Both were worldlier than their boyfriends at the time, and helped transform the Stones' songwriting and personas, whether as muses or as collaborators. Faithfull is known to have inspired numerous Stones songs. Among them, her drug use helped shape such jaded takes on the London rock scene as You Can't Always Get What You Want and Live with Me, while her time with Jagger also coincided with one of his most vulnerable love songs, Wild Horses. Iconic voice On her own, the London-born Faithfull specialized at first in genteel ballads, among them Come Stay With Me, Summer Nights and This Little Bird. But even in her teens, Faithfull sang in a fragile alto that suggested knowledge and burdens far beyond her years. Her voice would later crack and coarsen, and her life and work after splitting with Jagger in 1970 was one of looking back and carrying on through emotional and physical pain. She had become addicted to heroin in the late '60s, suffered a miscarriage while seven months pregnant and nearly died from an overdose of sleeping pills. (Jagger, meanwhile, had an affair with Pallenberg and had a baby with actor Marsha Hunt). By the early '70s, Faithfull was living in the streets of London and had lost custody of the son, Nicholas, she had with her estranged husband, the gallery owner John Dunbar. She would also battle 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 memoirs and in her music, notably Broken English, which came out in 1979 and featured her seething Why'd Ya Do It and conflicted Guilt, in which she chants "I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I've done no wrong." Other albums included Dangerous Acquaintances, Strange Weather, the live Blazing Away and, most recently, She Walks in Beauty. Though Faithfull was defined by the 1960s, her sensibility often reached back to the pre-rock world of German cabaret, and she covered numerous songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, including Ballad of the Soldier's Wife and the "sung" ballet The Seven Deadly Sins. Her interests extended to theatre, film and television. Faithfull began acting in the 1960s, including an appearance in Jean-Luc Godard's Made In U.S.A. and stage roles in Hamlet and Chekhov's Three Sisters. She would later appear in such films as Marie Antoinette and The Girl from Nagasaki, and the TV series Absolutely Fabulous, in which she was cast as — and did not flinch from playing — God. Faithful was married three times, and in recent years dated her manager, Francois Ravard. Jagger was her most famous lover, but other men in her life included Richards ("so great and memorable," she would say of their one-night stand), David Bowie and the early rock star Gene Pitney. Among the rejected: Bob Dylan, who had been so taken that he was writing a song about her, until Faithfull, pregnant with her son at the time, turned him down. "Without warning, he turned into Rumpelstiltskin," she wrote in Faithfull, published in 1994. "He went over to the typewriter, took a sheaf of papers and began ripping them up into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he let them fall into the wastepaper basket." A life of intrigue and connections Faithfull's heritage was one of intrigue, decadence and fallen empires. Her father was a British intelligence officer during World War Two who helped saved her mother from the Nazis in Vienna. Faithfull's more distant ancestors included various Austro-Hungarian aristocrats and Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a 19th century Austrian whose last name and scandalous novel Venus in Furs helped create the term "masochism." Faithfull's parents separated when she was six and her childhood would include time in a convent and in what she would call a "nutty" sex-obsessed commune. By her teens, she was reading Simone de Beauvoir, listening to Odetta and Joan Baez and singing in folk clubs. Through the London art scene, she met Dunbar, who introduced her to Paul McCartney and other celebrities. Dunbar also co-founded the Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would say he met Yoko Ono. "The threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together," she wrote in her memoir. "All these people — gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristocrats and assorted talented layabouts more or less invented the scene in London, so I guess I was present at the 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. Scorning the idea that she and Jagger immediately fell for each other, she would regard the Stones as "yobby schoolboys" and witnessed Jagger fighting with his then-girlfriend, the model Chrissie Shrimpton, so in tears that her false eyelashes were peeling off. But she was deeply impressed by one man, Stones manager Andrew "Loog" Oldham, who looked "powerful and dangerous and very sure of himself." A week later, Oldham sent her a telegram, asking her to come to London's Olympic Studios. With Jagger and Richards looking on, Oldham played her a demo of a "very primitive" song, As Tears Go By, which Faithfull needed just two takes to complete. "It's an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written," Faithfull wrote in her 1994 memoir. "A song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened. It's almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song."
Boston Globe
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Marianne Faithfull, singer and pop icon, dies at 78
The blonde, voluptuous Ms. Faithfull was a celebrity before turning 17, homeless by her mid-20s, and an inspiration to peers and younger artists by her early 30s, when her raw, explicit 'Broken English' album brought her the kinds of reviews the Stones had received. Over the following decades, her admirers would include Beck, Billy Corgan, Nick Cave, and PJ Harvey, although her history would always be closely tied to the Stones and to the years she dated Mick Jagger. Advertisement One of the first songs written by Jagger and Keith Richards, the melancholy 'As Tears Go By,' was her breakthrough hit when released in 1964 and the start of her close and tormented relationship with the band. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up She and Jagger began seeing each other in 1966 and became one of the most glamorous and notorious couples of 'Swinging London,' with Ms. Faithfull once declaring that if LSD 'wasn't meant to happen, it wouldn't have been invented.' Their rejection of conventional values was defined by a widely publicized 1967 drug bust that left Jagger and Richards briefly in jail and Ms. Faithfull identified in tabloids as 'Naked Girl At Stones Party,' a label she would find humiliating and inescapable. 'One of the hazards of reforming your evil ways is that some people won't let go of their mind's eye of you as a wild thing,' she wrote in 'Memories, Dreams and Reflections," a 2007 memoir. Jagger and Richards often cited bluesmen and early rock 'n rollers as their prime influences, but Ms. Faithfull and her close friend Anita Pallenberg, Richards's longtime partner, opened the band to new ways of thinking. Both were worldlier than their boyfriends at the time and helped transform the Stones' songwriting and personas, whether as muses or as collaborators. Ms. Faithfull helped inspire such Stones songs as the mellow tribute 'She Smiled Sweetly' and the lustful 'Let's Spend the Night Together.' It was Ms. Faithful who lent Jagger the Russian novel 'The Master and Margarita,' which was the basis for 'Sympathy for the Devil,' and who first recorded and contributed lyrics to the Stones' dire 'Sister Morphine,' notably the opening line, 'Here I lie in my hospital bed.' Ms. Faithfull's drug use helped shape such jaded takes on the London rock scene as 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' and 'Live with Me,' while her time with Jagger also coincided with one of his most vulnerable love songs, 'Wild Horses.' Advertisement Ms. Faithfull, with Mick Jagger as they appeared at a courthouse for possession of marijuana in London in 1969. Eddie Worth/Associated Press On her own, the London-born Ms. Faithfull specialized at first in genteel ballads, among them 'Come Stay With Me,' 'Summer Nights,' and 'This Little Bird.' But even in her teens, Ms. Faithfull sang in a fragile alto that suggested knowledge and burdens far beyond her years. Her voice would later crack and coarsen, and her life and work after splitting with Jagger in 1970 was one of looking back and carrying on through emotional and physical pain. She had become addicted to heroin in the late '60s, suffered a miscarriage while seven months pregnant, and nearly died from an overdose of sleeping pills. (Jagger, meanwhile, had an affair with Pallenberg and had a baby with actor Marsha Hunt). By the early '70s, Ms. Faithfull was living in the streets of London and had lost custody of the son, Nicholas, she had with her estranged husband, the gallery owner John Dunbar. She would also battle 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 memoirs and in her music, notably 'Broken English,' which came out in 1979 and featured her seething 'Why'd Ya Do It' and conflicted 'Guilt,' in which she chants 'I feel guilt, I feel guilt, though I know I've done no wrong.' Other albums included 'Dangerous Acquaintances,' 'Strange Weather,' the live 'Blazing Away,' and, most recently, 'She Walks in Beauty.' Though Ms. Faithfull was defined by the 1960s, her sensibility often reached back to the pre-rock world of German cabaret, and she covered numerous songs by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, including 'Ballad of the Soldier's Wife' and the 'sung' ballet 'The Seven Deadly Sins.' Advertisement Her interests extended to theater, film, and television. Ms. Faithfull began acting in the 1960s, including an appearance in Jean-Luc Godard's 'Made In U.S.A.' and stage roles in 'Hamlet' and Chekhov's 'Three Sisters.' She would later appear in such films as 'Marie Antoinette' and 'The Girl from Nagasaki,' and the TV series 'Absolutely Fabulous,' in which she was cast as — and did not flinch from playing — God. Ms. Faithful was married three times, and in recent years dated her manager, Francois Ravard. Jagger was her most famous lover, but other men in her life included Richards ('so great and memorable,' she would say of their one-night stand), David Bowie, and the early rock star Gene Pitney. Among the rejected: Bob Dylan, who had been so taken that he was writing a song about her, until Ms. Faithfull, pregnant with her son at the time, turned him down. 'Without warning, he turned into Rumpelstiltskin,' she wrote in 'Faithfull,' published in 1994. 'He went over to the typewriter, took a sheaf of papers and began ripping them up into smaller and smaller pieces, after which he let them fall into the wastepaper basket.' Advertisement The cast from Chekhov's play "Three Sisters" at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 1967: from left, Avril Elgar, Ms. Faithfull, Glenda Jackson, George Cole, and Alan Webb. Frank Leonard Tewkesbury/Associated Press Ms. Faithfull's heritage was one of intrigue, decadence, and fallen empires. Her father was a British intelligence officer during World War II who helped saved her mother from the Nazis in Vienna. Ms. Faithfull's more distant ancestors included various Austro-Hungarian aristocrats and Count Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, a 19th century Austrian whose last name and scandalous novel 'Venus in Furs' helped create the term 'masochism.' Ms. Faithfull's parents separated when she was 6 and her childhood would include time in a convent and in what she would call a 'nutty' sex-obsessed commune. By her teens, she was reading Simone de Beauvoir, listening to Odetta and Joan Baez, and singing in folk clubs. Through the London art scene, she met Dunbar, who introduced her to Paul McCartney and other celebrities. Dunbar also co-founded the Indica Gallery, where John Lennon would say he met Yoko Ono. 'The threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together,' she wrote in her memoir. 'All these people — gallery owners, photographers, pop stars, aristocrats and assorted talented layabouts more or less invented the scene in London, so I guess I was present at the 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. Scorning the idea that she and Jagger immediately fell for each other, she would regard the Stones as 'yobby schoolboys' and witnessed Jagger fighting with his then-girlfriend, the model Chrissie Shrimpton, so in tears that her false eyelashes were peeling off. But she was deeply impressed by one man, Stones manager Andrew 'Loog' Oldham, who looked 'powerful and dangerous and very sure of himself.' A week later, Oldham sent her a telegram, asking her to come to London's Olympic Studios. With Jagger and Richards looking on, Oldham played her a demo of a 'very primitive' song, 'As Tears Go By,' which Ms. Faithfull needed just two takes to complete. Advertisement Ms. Faithfull maintained a singing career well into the 2010s. 'It's an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written,' Ms. Faithfull wrote in her 1994 memoir. 'A song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened. It's almost as is if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.'
