Has any performer ever looked as uncomfortable and confused on stage as Marianne Faithful in 1965? Here she is awkwardly lip-synching on some television show or another. “What am I doing here?”
What you are doing is helping Mick and Keith promote a song (they wrote “As Tears Go By”).
There’s a hell of a movie in her life, much of it not pretty. Partly descended from Austro-Hungarian nobility, her parents divorced when she was six and she spent time in a convent school. She was “discovered” at 18 by Andrew Loog Oldham– what a great name!– and propelled to stardom. By “propelled” I mean, it was all arranged. I mean, she was hot looking, and connected, so it all could be arranged. You will be on TV. You will be on the cover of magazines. You will learn to sing.
She married, had a baby, left her husband to live with one of the Rolling Stones– she tried three before settling on Mick– was arrested wearing only a fur rug at a scandalous party at Keith Richard’s house, lost custody of her son, declined into cocaine addiction, broke up with Mick…. Some time during those lost years, her mother attempted suicide, and Marianne Faithful disappeared off the radar screen, except for one eerie appearance with David Bowie, singing, of all things, “I got You Babe”.
But it is that first video I’m mainly interested in. This was an era in which powerful men who controlled the music industry made and broke stars. Marianne Faithful was never a particularly good singer, but she was strikingly beautiful. In the first video, you can see that she doesn’t have much of a stage presence either. It feels painful just to watch her sitting there, looking like she was petrified of losing her timing. The audience was not expected to notice or care that she wasn’t actually singing or performing– she was lip-synching.
Brian Epstein mismanaged the Beatles around the same time. He steered them into signing horribly disadvantageous contracts, but wasn’t shy about paying himself extremely generously. It was part of the music industry culture of the time. The artists had one thing in common. They were young and they knew nothing about how the music industry worked.
The music companies lavished cash and luxury on them– the cost of doing business, which was the business of ripping off the talent– and the law did not protect their interests then and it doesn’t protect them today.
In fact, it’s far worse.
Sometimes, as in the movie “The Wrestler”, real personal history and artistic expression intersect in surprising and intriguing ways.
Marianne Faithful started out her career with a breathy little alto, singing delicate little folky love songs and mournful ballads. Then came the years of drug use, the scandals, and the disappearance. Ten years later she reappears… and sounds like Tom Waits:
Could have come
through anytime,
Cold lonely, puritan
What are you fighting for ?
Its not my security.
Broken English is an amazing enema of an album, a purging of all the demons of the 1960’s and 70’s, and a profound statement that this woman was no longer the doe-eyed naïf of those painful appearances on Hullabaloo– it features the most caustic and bitter break-up song ever: “Why D’ya Do What Ya Did”.
One of the better album titles of the last fifty years: Marianne Faithful’s “Broken English”, 1979.
Songs allegedly written about or influenced by Marianne Faithful:
Wild Horses, You Can’t Always Get What You Want (Rolling Stones)
[2020-05-09]
Just for fun: In the Year 2525
The video is great, of course: it’s from the movie “Metropolis”. It’s genuinely horrifying.