Marianne Faithfull, voice of Britain’s Swinging ’60s, dies at 78

But she got better and within a year she finished the album she had been working on before falling sick, She Walks in Beauty, a collection of Romantic-era poems read by her and set to music.
She later complained of symptoms of long COVID, such as tiredness, breathing problems and memory loss, and had to cut short a podcast interview in June 2021.
In March 2022, Faithfull moved into Denville Hall, a retirement home in London that houses actors and other professional performers.
Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was born on December 29, 1946, in London to a British intelligence officer who interrogated prisoners of war. Her mother was closely related to the Austrian aristocracy.
She attended a Roman Catholic convent boarding school from the age of seven but even there she nurtured a rebellious heart.
“Ever since my days at the convent my secret heroes had been decadents, aesthetes, doomed Romantics, mad Bohemians and opium-eaters,” she wrote in her 1994 book Faithfull: An Autobiography.
Faithfull’s formative years were in the swinging London of the mid-1960s when she was a budding folk singer. At 18, she was married and had a son but attended a party that changed her life.
There she met Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who launched her popular music career and brought her into the band’s inner circle.
In 1966, she left her husband, artist John Dunbar, and started a relationship with Jagger, the pair becoming the It Couple of London’s psychedelic scene.
Faithfull contributed backing vocals to the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine and gave Jagger a copy of the Russian novel The Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, which helped inspire the lyrics of the Stones’ Sympathy For The Devil.
She also inspired the key lyrical refrain in Wild Horses when she uttered the phrase “wild horses couldn’t drag me away”, and co-wrote Sister Morphine, which she released as a solo single in 1969, two years before the Stones’ version appeared on Sticky Fingers. Although she received writer credit on her own recording, she didn’t earn parallel status on the Stones album until 1994, after a long legal battle.
But much of her fame came from her involvement in drug- and drink-fuelled antics with the bad boys of rock.
She and Jagger were arrested in 1968 for possession of cannabis. Perhaps her most notorious caper was when police came across her, wrapped in a bearskin rug, during a drugs raid at Keith Richards’ country home in 1967.
The incident permanently earned her a place in rock’n’roll legend but Faithfull later pointed out that she had not in fact been taking part in a wild orgy, as British tabloid reports suggested; she had been taking a bath when the police entered the house, and grabbed the nearest thing, a rug, to cover up.
She complained that double standards for women meant she was slandered while the arrests helped boost the image of Jagger and Richards as rock outlaws.
Faithfull also took exception to her portrayal as no more than Jagger’s artistic muse. “It’s a terrible job. You don’t get any male muses, do you? Can you think of one? No,” she said in 2021.
As the 1960s ended, Faithfull’s life of glamour faded quickly and she spent two years living on the streets of London as an anorexic heroin addict after she and Jagger split in 1970. But among the squalor, she found an upside.
“For me, being a junkie was an admirable life,” she wrote in her autobiography. “It was total anonymity, something I hadn’t known since I was 17. As a street addict in London, I finally found it. I had no telephone, no address.”
The experience was grist for the mill for her album Broken English, which she described as her masterpiece.
Despite the personal cost, including an overdose of sleeping pills in Australia in 1969 that put her in a coma, Faithfull appreciated the chance to learn from great songwriters like Jagger, Paul McCartney and John Lennon.
She had planned to attend Oxford University to study literature, comparative religion and philosophy but instead got another kind of education.
“You know, I didn’t go to Oxford,” she told The Guardian in 2021. “But I watched the best people working and how they worked and, because of Mick, I guess, I watched people writing, too – a brilliant artist at the top of his game.
“I watched how he wrote and I learned a lot, and I will always be grateful.” she told The Guardian in 2021.
Reuters