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Marianne Faithfull was a towering artist, not just the muse she was painted as
The late singer made her share of bad decisions – but someone this artistically adventurous and unafraid was never going to have an ordinary life
And it was a central tenet of punk that the 1960s and their attendant “culture freaks” were, as Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren put it: “fucking disgusting … vampiric … the most narcissistic generation there has ever been,” and that the decade’s famous names should no longer be afforded the kind of awed reverence they had enjoyed for most of the 70s. The songs picked through the wreckage of the decade that had made her famous with unmistakable relish – how the era’s penchant for mind expansion and radical politics had curdled into addiction and terrorism – or railed at the way women were treated: the album is populated by a female cast of suicidal housewives, betrayed lovers and oblivion-seekers. The records she made strongly suggested that music came low on his list of priorities: he saw her as a means of living out his fantasy of becoming a British Phil Spector, and as a light entertainer: a pretty, posh girl whose niche would be essaying folk songs for an MOR, Saturday-night variety show audience.
Or read this on The Guardian
