Marianne Faithfull’s dark history with Mick Jagger in Sydney

The British pop icon cheated death when she was just 22 and in Sydney with then boyfriend Mick Jagger.

British pop icon Marianne Faithfull, who has died in London aged 78, cheated death in Sydney when she was just 22.

Faithfull accompanied her boyfriend Mick Jagger, who had been cast in the lead role in the feature film Ned Kelly, to Australia in 1969.

The As Tears Go By pop star, who left her husband for Jagger in 1966, had embraced the drug scene of the swinging 60s.

The pair’s relationship was in bad shape when they arrived in Sydney and Faithfull was devastated by the death of Stones guitarist Jones just days earlier.

On July 9, after it is rumoured she caught Jagger in bed with another woman, the singer overdosed on barbiturates in her hotel room and was rushed to St Vincent’s hospital.

Less than an hour after she collapsed, Jagger fronted the Sydney media to talk about his role in Ned Kelly, which was about to commence filming in Braidwood in the NSW southern tablelands.

Faithfull in Sydney after her recovery from a drug overdose in 1969. Picture: NCA.

The official explanation for Faithfull’s hospitalisation was fatigue due to the long flight from London. And when Jagger was asked if she had taken drugs, he told the media “I don’t think so - it’s not true.”

“She’s a very delicate woman and the trip just knocked her,” he said.

Faithfull’s dire condition was revealed when, in a gross breach of privacy, a photographer posing as a doctor snatched a blurry picture of the comatose singer in intensive care, and sold it to newspapers in Australia and around the world, who were obsessed with the king and queen of Swinging London.

“Oh, it was awful,” she said ahead of her Sydney festival appearances in 2010.

“People were disgusted. Because, you know, the guy had a flash and it could have made all the machines ... they could have short-circuited.”

She was in a coma for six days and was moved to Mount St Margaret Hospital in Ryde to continue her recovery, protected from any further paparazzi invasions.

A few weeks later on July 28, Jagger and Faithfull posed in the hospital gardens after enjoying lunch together; the singer looked frail but happy and declared “it was a lovely day.”

Jagger visiting with his girlfriend in the hospital grounds in Ryde.

Accompanied by her baroness mother, she later joined Jagger on the film set for Ned Kelly.

Faithfull has been acknowledged as a muse for Rolling Stones hits, including She Smiled Sweetly and Let’s Spend the Night Together.

She wrote in her autography that the Sydney overdose and hospitalisation partly inspired their 1971 hit Wild Horses.

After waking from the coma, she wrote she assured a fearful Jagger that “wild horses couldn’t drag me away.”

Keith Richards has said he started writing the song as a lullaby for his son Marlon because of being separated from him while touring.

Jagger as Ned Kelly on the Braidwood set.

And Jagger disputed the assumption the song was about Faithfull, despite the lyric “You know I can’t let you slide through my hands.”

“Everyone always says this was written about Marianne,” he said in the liner notes to the Jump Back greatest hits compilation. “But I don’t think it was; that was all well over by then.”

The pair would split in 1970 but Jagger was among the first to pay tribute to Faithfull with a social media post after her family announced her death.

“She was so much part of my life for so long. She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer and a great actress. She will always be remembered.”