Nobody was ever better at being an old rock star, except maybe Leonard Cohen. She played Ophelia in the film version of Hamlet , a hauntingly tragic performance, at a time when the real-life Faithfull was speeding to an early grave of her own.
But she was the Ophelia who rose up and outlived her gravediggers. She knew her way around the dark places, and she felt at home there. By the s, she was a burnout, a homeless junkie on the streets of London.
But her greatest work was ahead of her, starting with her post-punk hit Broken English. She got more playful and experimental as the decades went by. She knew pop history inside out, especially its taboos, and she took aim right at the most squeamish of pop taboos โ the presence of an old woman with shit to talk. New Auction Gives You a Chance. When the sad news of her death arrived, the first music I turned to was She Walks in Beauty , from , her final album and one of the most powerful things she ever did.
Ay, where are they? Keats died young and pretty; Faithfull lived to be old and weathered. It could have been the other way around, and you can hear how much she savors the irony. But nothing could stop her from making this album, not even a near-fatal Covid case that destroyed her lungs. Yet she refuses to go quietly, making her art with the broken instrument she has left. Nobody else could have made such magnificent music โ such punk rock โ out of this Keats poem.
People always wanted to duet with Marianne, because she made everyone sound cooler. Not shown on the tele, natch. She grew up as a nice Catholic schoolgirl, schooled in the convent. She had the archetypal fallen-aristocrat mystique โ her great-great uncle was Leopold van Sacher-Masoch, the kink pioneer who wrote Venus in Furs. She also became best friends for life with Anita Pallenberg , the other bad girl in the Stones scene; Anita and Marianne taught these boys how the art of badness is really done.
