“Can she sing?” So asked Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of The Rolling Stones, at a party in 1964, pointedly ignoring Marianne Faithfull’s presence and instead addressing the 17-year-old’s boyfriend. Yes: she could sing, initially in a sweet folk-pop vibrato with very English diction, then later — several lifetimes later — in the weathered tones of hard experience.
Faithfull’s career, if that prosaic term can be applied to such a free spirit, was launched by the hustling Oldham. He promoted her, in her words, as “an eerie fusion of haughty aristocrat and folky bohemian child-woman”. There was a grain of truth to the fantasy. Faithfull was born in 1946 to an Austro-Hungarian baroness who moved to England after marrying an eccentric British intelligence officer. The marriage foundered, a wartime folie d’amour. Faithfull was raised by her mother as a penniless blueblood. From her she learnt the intoxicating but ruinous habit of living beyond one’s means.
Her first single was the Françoise Hardy-style ballad “As Tears Go By”, which was also the first song written by Jagger and his Stones partner, Keith Richards. A chart success in 1964, predating the Stones’ version by a year, it sparked a run of hit singles. But Faithfull did not relish pop stardom. In the description of her superb 1994 memoir Faithfull, she was bedevilled by “grotesque contracts, lying, cheating crafty legalisms, mad and bungling managers and barbaric schedules”.