Muse and musician – the many lives and loves of Marianne Faithfull

If the true method of knowledge is experiment, then Marianne Faithfull was scholarly informed.

Singer and actor Marianne Faithfull. Picture: Redferns

If the true method of knowledge is experiment, then Marianne Faithfull was scholarly informed. She sang, she wrote songs, she had songs written about her, she acted, she appeared on a Beatles’ hit, co-wrote the Rolling Stones’ Sister Morphine, performed with David Bowie and on stage with Glenda Jackson, took exotic lovers, briefly married three men, became addicted to heroin and lived in a grimy London squat in which she repeatedly contracted laryngitis that made her hoarse and lowered her vocal range.

And she was God – in two episodes of Absolutely Fabulous.

“Of course I have regrets, I’m not stupid,” she said on turning 60.

By then she had lived several lives with several to come.

But what happened to her and some friends on Sunday February 12, 1967 was a collision between the old and new. At the height of the so called Swinging Sixties when London was, briefly, the world’s cultural lightning rod and music had become the repository of contemporary thought, it ­famously clashed with the old.

For weeks London newspapers had been publishing stories, often wildly incorrect, about the lifestyles of rock stars including details of their girlfriends and drug taking. Reporters were regularly advised in advance, by detective sergeant Norman Pilcher, of drug raids he planned the following morning.

Faithfull with Mick Jagger in Sydney in 1969 as she recovers from a drug overdose.

Pilcher was regularly photographed on front pages with these stars – John Lennon, George Harrison, Brian Jones and Dusty Springfield – escorting them to a police station after their arrest.

He was particularly keen to add Keith Richards and Mick Jagger to his famous tally.

That winter weekend, Pilcher leaked to newspapers that he would raid Keith Richards’ country house, Redlands, in West Sussex (Richards had bought it by mistake the previous year and owns it to this day) on Sunday morning. He was aware – apparently informed by a chauffeur – that Jagger would be there, along with the Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham, noted gallery owner Robert Fraser, Harrison and Faithfull, and he planned to catch them with drugs in their possession.

When he knocked on the door, pretending as usual to be a postman (on a Sunday?) with a phalanx of police – including two women PCs so one could body search Faithfull – he was too late. Harrison and his wife had left; Jagger, Richards and Faithfull had that morning consumed the last of their hallucinogens. Richards looked out the window at the visitors and thought them a knot of dwarfs. Faithfull had just showered and to keep warm had wrapped herself in a fur. She recalled later that while being questioned by Pilcher and his men the three of them could not stop ­giggling.

Jagger and Faithful arrive in Sydney in 1969 for the filming of Ned Kelly. Picture: Getty Images

The newspaper headline was “Nude Girl in Fur Rug”. It was the most infamous drug raid of that decade, but Pilcher found only some speed tablets. They missed Richards’ cocaine stash. They saw it but didn’t know what it was. The pills were apparently Faithfull’s, but gentleman Jagger took responsibility. The men were arrested days later, convicted and jailed, but friends – some in unlikely quarters – took up the fight to free them. The then voice of The Establishment, London’s The Times newspaper, published perhaps its most famous editorial in support of the musicians and their absurdly harsh sentences headlined “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” They were freed.

(Soon to face criminal charges for falsifying evidence in police diaries, Filcher fled to Australia, was extradited to the UK and jailed. Lennon made him “Semolina Pilchard” in I Am the Walrus.)

But Faithfull’s drug battles were just beginning. And her music career would soon fizzle out.

Faithfull had entered the Stones orbit when she and husband-to-be, artist and gallery owner John Dunbar, attended a launch party and she met Loog Oldham. He was struck by her beauty and later asked her to record a song Oldham had written with his young charges – the uncharacteristically plaintive As Tears Go By. When she sang it in the studio an excited Loog Oldham told her “You’ve got yourself a No. 6!” It went to No. 9 but was a hit around the world.

She had a series of other minor singles, and on the rounds in London ended up singing backing ­vocals on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. Not long after the Redlands raid she met members of The Hollies, who, besotted by her beauty, wrote a song about her, originally called Marianne. Fearing Jagger’s reaction, they changed it to Carrie Anne, and its lyrics were curiously prophetic:

You were always something special to me

Quite independent, never caring

You lost your charm as you were ageing

Where is your magic disappearing?

Faithfull at her London flat in October 1964. Picture: Getty Images

Faithfull’s rise and fall were swift. She scored film roles, including I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname, Hamlet, and The Girl on a Motorcycle. But her personal problems were deepening. She had a son, Nicholas, but lost custody of him, became addicted to cocaine, gave birth to a stillborn daughter to Jagger and attempted suicide.

Jagger came to Australia in 1969 to play Ned Kelly in a long planned film about the gang (originally to star Albert Finney and Angela Lansbury) and his relationship with Faithfull, who was to play Ned’s sister, was on edge. While in Sydney she overdosed on sleeping pills and was admitted to the city’s St Vincent’s Hospital.

The front page of Sydney’s Sunday Mirror in 1969 showing Marianne Faithfull in a coma in a Sydney hospital bed after taking a drug overdose.

Cleaning up her act she recorded a country-styled album across 1975-76. It failed, but its title song, Dreamin’ My Dreams, would be an Australian chart-topper for Colleen Hewitt. She did a low-profile tour of Australian venues and it was at this point I interviewed her for the first time. She was clever, unassuming and articulate. We moved to the bar and an afternoon was lost.

Nothing much was expected of her after that. But she stormed back with the extraordinary post-punk work of belligerent beauty – Broken English. Its bitter songs of angst – the title track, Why’d ya do it?, Lennon’s Working Class Hero, and The Ballad of Lucy Jordan.

The pretty voice was long lost; in its place was the husky rasp delivered by too many drugs for too many years. It was a masterpiece. She said so.

Broken English charted strongly and she toured the album as a live show for years. Of course it appears in the book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. And you must.

Her life of chaos returned along with the addiction. She fell in love several times – one boyfriend, also addicted, jumped from their 14th-floor apartment.

Faithfull performing on stage with David Bowie in London in 1973. Picture: Getty Images

But she kept bouncing back – even from breast cancer and Covid – played a role in Roger Waters rock opera of The Wall and later in The Threepenny Opera, published a biography and recorded adventurously even updating As Tears Go By.

“I always childishly thought that was where my problems started, with that damn song,” she told Time Magazine.