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Melancholy, morphine and the Baader-Meinhof group: Marianne Faithfull’s 10 best recordings

From a career-detonating collaboration with the Rolling Stones in 1969 to a hypnotic experiment with 13-era Blur, Marianne Faithfull’s career was one of reinvention – yet always underpinned by her wrenching, affecting vocals

Moreover, Faithfull seemed happy to dance on the grave of 60s nostalgia, reporting – with a certain relish – how the decade’s excesses had resulted in addiction, her own included, and, on the title track, how its political idealism had curdled into terrorism: its obliquely handled subject is the Baader-Meinhof gang, the Stones’s Street Fighting Man turned murderous. The Ballad of Lucy Jordan was a song that had been knocking around for years: the saga of a depressed, possibly suicidal housewife, it had been recorded by Lee Hazlewood, country star Johnny Darrell, and, most famously, Dr Hook, a band its author Shel Silverstein regularly worked with. Co-written by Ed Harcourt, No Moon in Paris is almost unbearably sad, a reflection on fading memories and lost loves, its poignancy heightened by Faithfull’s voice, which had been audibly affected by her various health scares: “Everything passes, everything changes … it’s lonely.”

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