Marianne Faithfull has led a
larger-than-life life, neatly divisible into iconic phases:
aristocratic ingenue, folk/pop princess, Stones consort, street
junkie, comeback queen. In the beginning she sang like a convent
girl, a gorgeous teen with a gorgeous soprano, as sharp and bright
as an icicle. In the famous words of Stones impresario Andrew Loog
Oldham, who discovered her at an industry party, “I saw an
angel with big tits and signed her.” On his orders,
Faithfull’s future boyfriends Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
wrote her first single, “As Tears Go By.” Her new pals
must have been somewhat relieved to learn that the 17-year-old
beauty with the long blond bangs and pillowy lips (and, of course,
the all-important rack) could also carry a tune. But despite her
fetching warble, the young Faithfull seemed unfinished, inauthentic
somehow. She performed at an odd remove, as if she were singing in
a foreign language that she’d learned phonetically and never
bothered to translate. Back then, being pretty meant sounding
pretty, and pretty was enough — enough for two albums, which
would probably go unheard today if she hadn’t mastered the
art of self-sabotage.
As Faithfull writes in her fascinating 1994
biography, finding herself meant destroying herself: “The
Baroness’s Daughter, Pop Star Angel, Rock Star’s
Girlfriend . . . even after the brutal bashing I’d given
them, these demon dolls of myself would not go away. . . . By the
mid-seventies I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that if I
was ever to obliterate my past I’d have to create my own
Frankenstein, and then become the creature as well.”
She found her Frankenstein in 1979 with the
release of Broken English, a savage, profanity-laced rock/punk/disco
manifesto that remains the purest expression of female rage ever
committed to tape. Cocaine and cigarettes had ravaged the girlish
trill, replaced it with a crone’s rasp, a desperate, cracking caw
that seemed to be the distillation of an entire life. Anger and pity,
desire and shame, greed and guilt, hatred and love — all the
brutal, contradictory emotions that most singers only feign found their
apotheosis in that defiantly unlovely voice. Ex-boyfriends were creeped
out; critics were gaga. It’s been that way, to varying degrees,
for the past 25 years as Faithfull has gone from cathartic rock to
postmodern cabaret and back again, recording with everyone from Hal
Willner to Beck.
Two years after her previous album, the
star-studded but uneven Kissin Time, the 58-year-old singer has a new label and a new
set of co-conspirators. Half the songs on Before the Poison were
written or co-written with PJ Harvey; the rest are collaborations
with Nick Cave, Damon Albarn, and Jon Brion. Although
Harvey’s excoriating ballads are a perfect fit for
Faithfull’s voice and temperament, Cave’s
contributions, with the exception of the goofy skronk-funk
experiment “Desperanto,” yield the most surprising
rewards. “Crazy Love” is a magnificent downer, at once
bitter and redemptive; “There Is a Ghost” is grim and
mysterious, a slurry of strings scraping against a tinkling piano
and Faithfull’s radiant croak. Albarn’s “Last
Song” is elegant and edgy, a love song disguised as an
anti-love song (or vice versa). “City of Quartz,”
co-written with Brion, teems with toy pianos and fake
glockenspiels, conveying a tone of doomed frivolity that
underscores Faithfull’s apocalyptic lyrics. Despite their
disparate co-authors, the CD’s 10 tracks form a cohesive
whole. Obviously, some of the credit must go to her collaborators,
who clearly understand Faithfull’s peculiar genius. But
it’s her voice, her beautiful wreck of a voice, that
transforms these songs into something greater than the sum of their
parts. In it Faithfull has found her final Frankenstein, and
it’s perfect.
This article appears in Feb 3-9, 2005.
