1990

Marianne Faithfull
with Barry Reynolds
Old Lion, June 1990

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

I bought my first Marianne Faithfull LP. in 1964. I’d gone to the shop to buy the Stones’ Aftermath and somehow got distracted by As Tears Go By. It was a pretty feeble album really – breathless, nylon-string folk songs with recitations of Full Fathom Five and Jabberwocky to fill up the second side – but I had made a choice for Art (and the fetching cover photo) and there I was, stuck with it.I spent fifteen years wishing I’d bought Aftermath.

Then in 1979 came Broken English and I was vindicated. Surely one of the best records of modern times, it was an entirely new creation . Drawing from New Wave, Kurt Weill, and the confessional pop pioneered by Lennon and Ono -it sounded like none of them. With a voice as grainy and expressive as Lotte Lenya or even Eartha Kitt, Marianne Faithfull was no longer singing about a garden where the praties grow but a garden of earthly delights where les fleurs du mal grew instead.

She remade Working Class Hero, created (with musical collaborator, Barry Reynolds) rock incantations like Guilt, Witches’ Song. and, with lyrics from Heathcote Williams, popular music’s darkest love song, Why Did Ya Do it. And there were others- The Ballad of Lucy Jordan and Broken English, the title track, both classics.

Three more albums followed -not as distinctive in style but the strength of her work was still discernible. The last studio recording, Strange Weather, indicated a marked shift towards Brechtian cabaret with the world-weary Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and blues standards, via Berlin, such as Ain’t Goin to the Well and Trouble in Mind . There was also a remake of As Tears Go By. After more than twenty years of personal and public harrowing, Marianne Faithfull had turned a song of innocence into a song of experience. The end of exploration, it seemed, was to arrive and know the place for the first time.

Onstage at the Old Lion Marianne Faithfull is on her Blazing Away tour, accompanied by Barry Reynolds and laying ghosts from her legendary bad trip of 1969. Standing at the microphone under blue and red spotlights , a serious music stand to one side and on the other, Barry Reynolds with a heavily miked acoustic six-string, the chanteuse opened the set with a track from Dangerous Acquaintances, Falling from Grace. Straight off, complexities are established- the song is satiric, the style ironic, the singer herself, demure.

She began gradually – Strange Weather, a touch too slow, then two new songs Leonard Cohen’s Tower of Song and Conversation on a Bar stool, the latter written by Bono and The Edge but sounding like it might have belonged to an Irish tinker called Public Domain.

Then came the sea-change, not just the rock-style chord work from Reynolds or the fullness of the vocal but the sense of a song fully inhabited- I feel …Guilt. Nothing of the victim, not a response to pious yellow press diatribe but something, well, existential you’ld have to say- a slow blues about not treating yourself as you deserve. Gracious, actorly in manner, Marianne Faithfull has the kind of dignity that could be mistaken for insincerity but it is not that, it is a persona, a public presentation, in public terms, of things, not only too deep for tears but nobody else’s business either.

The title track from the new live album, Blazing Away, did rather less than that, but it was if the pressure was taken off only to be applied again with greater intensity for more of the anthems – Sister Morphine sung like a slow march to ground zero and Working Class Hero, undiminished for being sung by a blueblood. As Tears Go By became a sardonic singalong, Why Did Ya Do It, a black spell with a death-rattle guitar and Lucy Jordan a ten year history of feminism.

Closing with Times Square, Marianne Faithfull played three encores – a version of Broken English that confirms it as a great poem, with accompaniment that invoked the shades of Reynolds’s incendiary riffs from the album. When you consider the band on Blazing Away, Dr John, Garth Hudson, Lew Soloff et al, it is a wonder Barry Reynolds could deliver so much rock and roll without even a hint of overdub. Then, alone on stage, Marianne Faithfull concluded the set with the ballad, She Moved Through the Fair, not with that breathy affectation that still passes for sensitivity, but with the clear, lonely authority of an artist who knows a thing or two about the truth of art and life and was good enough to share it in a beer hall.

“High Fidelity” The Adelaide Review, No.78, July 1990.