Marianne Faithfull: regrets, she's had a few

MARIANNE Faithfull's voice is a testament to an adventurous life among interesting people.

Marianne Faithful sticks to the mineral water these days.

MARIANNE Faithfull has never been much for nostalgia throughout a career that has found her constantly reinventing herself.

But when her band played As Tears Go By on her recent US tour, she found herself flashing back to where her wild ride began.

"If you'd have told me that at 62, I'd still be singing As Tears Go By to a rapt audience, I couldn't imagine that," Faithfull says. "For years I've done it very acoustically, but with this band we decided to make a new arrangement that was more close to the original with horns and strings. It's incredibly moving for me. It's like [turning] back the years."

The song takes Faithfull back to 1964 when the 17-year-old convent school girl turned up at a party at an art gallery owned by John Dunbar, who would become her first husband. Andrew Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager, spotted the blonde and asked if she could sing.

"The first party I went to in London where I was discovered by Andrew Oldham, all the Beatles were there and the Stones were there, too," Faithfull says. Soon after, Oldham brought her into the studio to record the melancholy As Tears Go By, the first song co-written by Keith Richards and her soon-to-be boyfriend Mick Jagger.

"It's a strange song to get a 17-year-old to sing. It's all about a woman looking back on her youth, not participating, I couldn't really feel it. But now I can really feel it and it's very beautiful. I got to the right age where the woman in the song is," says Faithfull, who now sings the song in her world-weary contralto voice roughened by too much tobacco and booze in her colourful past.

But Faithfull has little in common with the song's protagonist, who is content "to sit and watch" as her life goes by. She has gone from singing light folk rock in the 1960s to becoming a leading interpreter of the dark pre-World War II Berlin theatrical music of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

Faithfull is proud of her role as muse to the Rolling Stones in their early years, inspiring songs such as You Can't Always Get What You Want, Wild Horses and Sister Morphine (for which she belatedly received a writing credit).

Her new album, Easy Come, Easy Go, on which she interprets songs spanning nearly a century of popular music from Duke Ellington and Dolly Parton, has a contemporary feel thanks to collaborations with younger musicians such as Chan Marshall, known as Cat Power, and two children of her friends, Rufus Wainwright and Sean Lennon.

"It's not just an old person singing covers, no, thank god," she says, distinguishing it from albums by contemporaries such as Rod Stewart. It's also a mix of jazz, blues, country, folk and rock because, she says, "nobody listens to one style of music, nor do I".

The album closes poignantly with Faithfull and Richards joining voices on Merle Haggard's death-row ballad Sing Me Back Home, a tune she first heard the Stones' guitarist play with Gram Parsons in the 60s.

"I think I'm ready to do that now. I wasn't before," says Faithfull, who has made a successful recovery after being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006. "I've been very anti-nostalgia all my life, always thinking about what I'm going to do next rather than what I've done. I think maybe this is a good moment for me to just sit on my haunches and reflect."

She says little remains of the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll lifestyle of her youth. "I'm very professional. I don't use drugs and I don't drink. I can't help thinking that that's one of the reasons that everything is so good in life," she says, sipping a glass of sparkling water. "I'm a workaholic now. There's always sex."

Faithfull teamed again on the album with Hal Willner, who produced her previous covers album in 1987, Strange Weather, her first album after undergoing rehab. It marked her resurrection as an avant-cabaret artist and masterful song interpreter.

"She is our Lotte Lenya, our [Marlene] Dietrich, our [Edith] Piaf. You can't learn to sing like that," Willner says.

"None of them were trained, really, and their voice was what they've been in their life. Marianne comes from rock 'n' roll and pop, so her roots are different than those classic singers. But I do believe she's a treasure."

They selected songs that are like snapshots into different chapters of her life, such as Ellington's Solitude, performed by her favourite singer, Billie Holiday.

"Solitude is probably my natural condition," she says.

Smokey Robinson's Ooh Baby Baby (performed with Antony Hegarty) brings back memories of the good times with Jagger. "Mick played all the Miracles to me, a lot of soul, and he would act it out for me."

The song also features the line "Mistakes, I know I've made a few", which hits close to home: "I wish I hadn't done drugs. It was a waste of my time and a huge handicap. It didn't help at all."

Faithfull identifies with the album's Bessie Smith title song, the ragtime blues Easy Come, Easy Go, saying the blues singer inspired her during difficult times in the 70s.

"What I like about Bessie Smith, apart from the songs and her voice, is the feeling where she's obviously at a rough gig . . . with all sorts of mayhem going on, but she just keeps singing and doesn't take the slightest notice. That was a great help to me in the 70s when I was touring in strange places . . . and I would manage to pretend to myself that I was in a Bessie Smith record and it made it very romantic."

Faithfull says it has taken a long time to get over the anger that found voice on her 1979 punk-infused comeback album Broken English.

That's when she established herself as a songwriter with such songs as the obscenity-laden Why'd Ya Do It?, about a homicidal spurned lover.

Today, Faithfull goes to see the Stones in concert whenever she can and reminisce with that "strange dysfunctional family" she belonged to. In her latest memoir, Memories, Dreams and Reflections, she's much less bitter about her break-up with Jagger.

"I think we could have been very happy but there were . . . big problems. One was the usual - not able to be faithful - and I understand that now . . . We were really very young and there were a million girls.

"If I had been more grown up I would have understood; well, let him do that. He can be faithful as well.

"I liked him very much. I still like him, an interesting guy."

AP