01/30/2025
♥️🐦⬛🎶🎀
“Faithfull’s voice, raggedly notched and erratic, sometimes starts flat or strikes a note that’s like a bald tire hitting a patch of glare ice. But what’s there all the time is this ripping knife of an alto, rueful and accusing and strangely vulnerable. What is in this voice? Only a few notes perhaps but a gallon of prussic acid, a season of tropical cloudbursts, the grittiest pale Northern skies, the emptiest grey hotel rooms. And endless, sleepless flights, thousands of ci******es, Remy Martin, s*x that’s the nostalgia of s*x and happiness that’s just the memory of happiness. Hope that if you die before you awake you really won’t be aware of it. And the most unexpected sweetness.”
/ Gary Indiana reviewing Marianne Faithfull’s concert at the Bottom Line in NYC for The Village Voice on 15 December 1987 /
“She’s the aunt offering you a cigarette at a wedding when you’re 11 …”
/ Tom Waits on Marianne Faithfull /
Farewell to exquisitely ravaged, resilient and timeless gravel-voiced art-rock diva of broken hearts Marianne Faithfull. It’s been announced that the closest British equivalent we have to a present-day, post-punk Jeanne Moreau or Juliette Greco died aged 78 today. The news isn’t surprising (Faithfull has suffered myriad health issues in her later years, including emphysema and long covid), but the news still feels like a slap in the face. I’m still absorbing it! (David Lynch AND Marianne Faithfull in the same month!). What a woman, what an artist, what a loss. Her greatest albums (like Broken English (1979), Strange Weather (1987) and A Secret Life (1995)) will live forever. Pictured: 1990 portrait of Faithfull by Annie Leibovitz. (This was actually a Gap ad! I tore it out of a magazine – probably Details! – and stuck it to the wall of my student accommodation at the time). To quote Leonard Cohen: So long, Marianne.
