Rock survivor Faithfull looks ahead

By Ian Youngs
Music reporter, BBC News

Marianne Faithfull's life story is to be turned into a feature film

It is difficult to separate Marianne Faithfull - the veteran singer and actress now attracting acclaim for her 22nd album - from the 1960s party animal whose legend looms over her older self.

"It's my story but it's not that important right now," says the exasperated 62-year-old.

Faithfull was the convent girl who became a teen pop star. She was the rock chick who became Mick Jagger's muse, who was famously dressed in nothing but a fur rug during a police drugs bust.

She then became the troubled star who descended into heroin addiction, lost custody of her son, miscarried Jagger's baby and ended up in a coma after attempting suicide. She then became homeless and lived in a squat with no hot water or electricity.

Faithfull is now a husky-voiced, straight-talking middle-aged woman with a cigarette habit but no other obvious hangovers from her years of excess and exhilaration.

"I feel like I was very lucky and I had a great time and I wouldn't change anything," she says.

"I do have fond memories, but I don't really look back. I'm not a nostalgic person. I live right now. I'm afraid."

If we want to know any more, we can read her two memoirs. And that is that.

Faithfull was one of the first rock stars to live her triumphs and troubles in the public eye, and her trajectory has been followed, with different routes and results, in the 45 years since.

The young Marianne Faithfull had four UK top 10 hits in the mid-1960s

She has an unflapping sympathy with Amy Winehouse. "I believe in recovery. I think people get better," she says, speaking as living proof of her words.

"It all seems a little different because of technology and the paparazzi, which have always been bad but which have probably got worse."

Would she like to be a young star growing up today? "I don't know if I would, especially with Aids," she replies. "That wouldn't be such fun, would it? It's hard for them."

Faithfull readily admits life was more free in the '60s. "It was much more fun, [we] didn't have to worry too much," she says.

She now seems relieved to be entering a phase of being cherished as an artist in her own right, with sufficient years and applause under her belt to make her a treasured icon of rock.

"I like people getting respect on their own terms and I like me being one of them," she says.

On the new album, Easy Come, Easy Go, Faithfull covers 18 songs by artists ranging from Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith and Ella Fitzgerald to Morrissey, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and The Decemberists.

Although they are other people's songs, Faithfull makes them sound so personal that it is hard not to apply some of the lines to her story.

The singer says she has a personal connection with each song. "Just a tiny one - it can just be a line or a phrase or something. But they're not telling my life story, they're songs that I really like."

Chemical devotions

"Compared to some I've been around, but I really tried so hard," she sings on Hold On, Hold On by US singer-songwriter Neko Case, perhaps the album's outstanding track.

She sings of "chemical devotions of the night" on Children of Stone by indie-folk group Espers, and drowning "her past regrets in coffee and cigarettes" in Fitzgerald's classic Black Coffee.

With producer Hal Willner, she spent a week listening to records, working out which ones to record.

"We had a lot of fun," Faithfull says. "And then we made a CD of the songs we'd chosen and I got the lyrics printed up and spent the next three months working on them at home.

My health is really good and everything is better - I'm amazed at how better I've become

"And that's the bit where some sort of alchemy happens and the songs become part of me."

The album also features an array of guests, including Keith Richards, Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave, Rufus Wainwright and Antony Hegarty, all friends of Faithfull.

"They're people I got to know before I worked with them. They're brilliant. They happen to be my friends and they happen to be Hal's friends too, and they happen to be incredibly good and very popular. Little stars, you know."

The full 18 songs were laid down in just 10 days, with Faithfull performing in the studio alongside her orchestra and band.

"We were all in the same room and we did it together," she says. "The old-fashioned way.

"I do like it very much. It's much more exciting, more adrenalin. Very intense. It was very hectic. And I got an ear infection I think. It was so hard. But I loved it, and I got through all that."

She chose to record other peoples' songs, she says, because her own songwriting was going through "a bit of a block".

'Very positive'

The cause of the writers' block is a mystery, but Faithfull dismisses the notion that it was a result of recent health problems. "That's a long time ago now, and I'm perfectly all right. So that's not it," she declares.

Faithfull was treated for hepatitis C in the 1990s, had successful surgery for breast cancer in 2006, and cancelled concerts as a result of exhaustion in 2004 and again last year.

But those scares are behind her, she insists, and she is focused on the future rather than the past.

"My health is really good and everything is better. I'm amazed at how better I've become. It took a little time but it's there now and I'm very positive."