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The party faithfull
By Nick Curtis, Metro Life Last updated at 00:00am on 21.11.02
When Marianne Faithfull played the Berlin Metropol, a converted Nazi-era cinema, on her current tour to promote the album Kissin' Time, the crowd loved her. Apart from all the new numbers the consummate Sixties chick wrote with young guns such as Beck, Blur and Pulp, they went wild for 'Song For Nico', her hymn to the German songstress, a contemporary who didn't make it.
'Berlin's a tough town,' Faithfull growls in that nicotine-marinaded voice, 'and they're tough people, but highly sophisticated. They get what I do.' Perhaps the denizens of that famously decadent, once-shattered city also see her as a tough woman, who took all the sex, drugs and rock'n'roll that the Sixties and the Stones could throw at her, and emerged from an Eighties heroin haze as a fully fledged, Dietrich-style diva. 'Tough?' Faithfull barks. 'I'm not tough.'
Indeed, at 56, Faithfull seems to have mellowed. For a long time, most notably in her 1994 autobiography, she raged at the various images forced on her by the times she lived in and by the tabloids. First there was the virginal convent girl, the 'angel with big tits' signed by the Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham to sing 'As Tears Go By' in her bell-like voice, and thence to be dragged into drug and fur-rug related debauchery by Brian Jones, Keith Richards and wicked, wicked Mick Jagger, her non-exclusive boyfriend for five years.
In the Seventies she switched from being the victim to being the problem. She lost custody of her son, Nicholas, the product of her short-lived marriage at 18 to gallery owner John Dunbar, she was excommunicated by the Pope for sorcery, and lived rough for two smack-addled years on a wall in Soho. ('Being excommunicated,' she laughs now, 'is still one of the things I'm most proud of.')
Then in 1987, when her lover jumped 36 storeys to his death and she finally got clean and recorded a heartbreaking, harrowing, throaty new version of 'As Tears Go By', she became 'Marianne The Survivor'. This label still rankles, but only a bit.
'A survivor is someone who comes through Auschwitz, or a war, not someone who manages to get through life,' she says. 'But I don't mind if people want to call me a survivor. The image thing has a life of its own, so you've got to let go of it.'
One of the great joys, she says, of collaborating with younger artists on Kissin' Time, is that they came to the project with fewer preconceptions about her than her contemporaries. 'All my friends from the Sixties still see me as a silly little girl,' she says. 'I don't mind, but it's hard to make a record that way.'
And Faithfull's life is, if you'll excuse the pun, very much on record. 'As Tears' was written for her, 'Sister Morphine' by her, and any number of other tunes ('Wild Horses', 'Let's Spend The Night Together') about her. The tracks on Kissin' Time are, she says, 'a celebration of love, life, joy', and they give off a pungent whiff of autobiography. Apart from 'Sliding Through Life On Charm', which seems to leap straight from the pages of her book ('Suburban shits who want some class, all queue up to kiss my ass'), the aching 'I'm On Fire' sounds like a pretty clear reference to her fraught five years with Jagger, during which time she attempted suicide and miscarried their child. Faithfull concedes that it is 'a very personal song', but will go no further. In 2000 she drew a line in the sand, saying there would be no more interviews about Mick and drugs, except in the most general terms, and no discussion of her private life.
There is someone in her life now. She won't name him, but concedes he makes the rigours of life on tour easier. 'I've learned to love performing more, and learned how to use my body,' Faithfull says. 'Your adrenal glands and your liver need to be working well, and I have a very good liver doctor at home in Dublin and an excellent chiropractor in LA.' (Faithfull is 'almost' a vegetarian now, takes exercise, watches her drinking and is even - gasp --planning to quit smoking.) She says that the stage fright and loneliness of touring have become worse over the decades, but she has to keep working. Apart from the money she blew over the years, she's convinced she never received the royalties she deserved. 'That's a fact,' she says. 'I earn quite a respectable living and I have a very nice life, but I still think if I were a man I'd have been able to earn more.'
When she hits London, for a gig at the Astoria on Sun 24 Nov, her priorities are to see Nicholas and her grandchildren, and also 'Kate's baby'. That's Kate as in Moss, part of the younger crowd including 'Alex' (James, of Blur) and 'Polly' (singer P.J. Harvey) who congregate around Faithfull. From the old crowd, she hopes to see Anita Pallenberg, her best friend since the days when they swapped Rolling Stones like cigarette cards, but Mick and Keith won't be there, 'They're in Vegas.' She's still in constant touch with them both, and she sees Bob Dylan --who failed to seduce her at the Savoy in 1965, and failed again years later in a druggy flat in Chelsea - every time he visits Britain.
Looking back over all those relationships, the ups and downs, and all those different manifestations of Marianne, is there anything she regrets? 'I wish I'd been nicer to my parents, and I wish I'd not taken heroin - that's about it,' she says. 'Heroin wastes your time and takes away your ambition, so I've had to be very busy in the 20 years since I stopped in order to catch up.' She smiles. 'And I have caught up.'
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