Ireland's enduring love affair with Marianne Faithfull

"Ireland is a sanctuary..." Joseph Hoban explores Ireland's enduring love affair with singer and actress Marianne Faithfull, who has died at the age of 78.

There are many curiosities in the online treasure chest of the RTÉ Archives. Yet few are as unlikely (and surprising) as a short interview by journalist Tom McGurk with the legendary singer-songwriter, actor and cultural icon Marianne Faithfull:

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Watch, via RTÉ Archives: Marianne Faithfull talks to Tom McGuirk, circa 1976

It's 1976, and Marianne is in Ireland, ready to ride the tattered coat-tails of an unprecedented comeback. Her version of the song Dreamin’ My Dreams has gone to number one in the Irish charts on foot of sustained airplay by Pat Kenny. No one, it seems, is as surprised as Marianne herself. Fascinatingly, nothing in the piece betrays the reality of the calamitous years that preceded this amiable conversation: the public fall from grace into drug addiction and homelessness that saw this ultimate sixties It girl (top-ten recording artist, girlfriend of Mick Jagger, actor at the Royal Court, the swingiest of the decade’s swingers) end up on the streets of Soho. And nothing in the interview suggests what is to follow a mere three years later: the acclaimed post-punk, pre-new-wave classic Broken English.

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That album presaged the second act of an artist who playfully evaded definition then and now. Marianne would go on to deliver an astonishingly consistent catalogue of new work across the eighties, nineties and noughties, right up to her final release, She Walks in Beauty. That collection, featuring spoken-word readings of her beloved Romantic poets set to arresting soundscapes by Warren Ellis, would be the final word in a career of singular quality, artistry and vision.

Listen: Marianne Faithfull talks She Walks in Beauty with RTÉ Arena circa 2021

If it was a happy – and perhaps poetic – accident that Marianne found herself at the top of the Irish charts in 1976, there was nothing accidental in her evolving and enduring relationship with Ireland in the decades that followed. An exotic visitor (with her Rolling Stones entourage) to Leixlip Castle and Luggala in Wicklow throughout the sixties, Marianne eventually found a semi-permanent home in Ireland, most memorably for seven years in her fabled Shell Cottage bolthole nestled in the Capability Brown-designed landscape of Carton Estate in Kildare. I interviewed Marianne in the shell room itself in 1995. Her majesty and elegance were shaded with just the right amount of faded edging – this was not lapsed grandeur, but grandeur knowingly transposed, just as her own voice had shifted down the register from the pure soprano of her early releases to the famed smoky huskiness that would endear her to fans.

Watch, via RTÉ Archives: Marianne Faithfull talks and sings on RTÉ 2's Nighthawks, circa 1990

It was there in Kildare, in Shell Cottage, that Marianne Faithfull would find artistic renewal in the late eighties, entering her first decade of sobriety. From Ireland she released the classic autobiography Faithfull and recorded yet another "comeback" album (the lush A Secret Life, with famed Twin Peaks composer Angelo Badalamenti); it was from here that she returned to the stage, this time at the Gate Theatre in Frank McGuinness’s adaptation of Brecht’s Threepenny Opera. She was to broker that experience into a decades-long exploration of the Brecht/Weill songbook.

And yet, that rich sonic seam, so suited to her desolate harmonics, was not a surrender to late-career novelty or niche. In parallel, Marianne would develop her own unique sound, writing, producing and collaborating with Beck, PJ Harvey, Damon Albarn and, latterly and most fruitfully with her musical knight-in-shining-armour, Nick Cave. Her work with this gallery of acclaimed musicians across a sequence of exceptional releases is rightfully poised for new attention and reappraisal.

I heard the news of Marianne’s passing as I emerged from a show at Dublin’s Gate Theatre (the boards she once trod). Justine Mitchell’s one-woman performance of the works of Emily Dickinson was strangely apposite. What made Dickinson remarkable was not her genius (there are plenty of those around) but rather the quiet, sustained artistic fortitude that produced 1,800 unique poems from the self-imposed isolation of an ever-shrinking world, without an audience to fuel her ambition. Marianne Faithfull shared that singular fortitude (and thankfully, unlike Dickinson, enough of an audience to be encouraged).

Listen, via RTÉ Arena: Marianne Faithfull remembered, by Dave Fanning

Unlike any of her contemporaries from the sixties, Faithfull continued to produce, publish and collaborate almost to the end – with poets, playwrights, authors, songwriters, producers, directors. She was more than a muse and more than a co-writer – from Heathcote Williams ("Why’d You Do It") to Hal Wilner (1997’s pristine Strange Weather) Faithfull transformed collaboration into co-conspiracy. The alchemy of these conspiracies is rousingly manifest on her final albums, from the rocky Give My Love to London, with Anna Calvi and Brian Eno, to the heart-breaking Negative Capability, with Nick Cave and Ed Harcourt. Her creative conspiracies movingly concluded with the soft farewell of 2021’s She Walks in Beauty, with Warren Ellis.

Marianne would eventually leave Ireland for Paris. But her unique relationship with Ireland, and Ireland’s unique affection for her, did not fade. There is perhaps something in the Irish cultural character that picks up artists in search of home. From Nanci Griffith to Daniel Day Lewis to Marianne Faithfull herself, the "Honorary Irish" badge is granted sparingly, yet always wisely. Ireland gave temporary sanctuary to Marianne Faithfull when she needed it most, and shared her back to an appreciative world when the time came for her to spread her wings again. As she takes her final journey, it’s in the land of myth and legend that this particular legend may find the most renewed, and enduring, appreciation.

FIVE ESSENTIAL MARIANNE FAITHFULL TRACKS

Come and Stay With Me – Reputedly the first single bought by Morrissey, this breezy early cut from Faithfull's foundational folk-pop phase is as close to perfect as the decade’s three-minute pop ditties get (actually two minutes and twenty-six seconds).

Sister Morphine (1969 Version) – With lyrics by Marianne, this song was the subject of a dispute when it was recorded by the Rolling Stones without crediting her. This version from 1969 provided the first glimpse of Faithfull's lowering register and an insight into the darkening mind of the public’s erstwhile English Rose.

Broken English – With a driving bass riff that foreshadows Michael Jackson's Billie Jean and Madonna’s Like a Virgin, Faithfull shocked the industry with this post-punk/new-wave attack that no one saw coming.

Mother Wolf – On this track from 2014's Give My Love to London, Faithfull once again glides over a dense, driving rhythm, joining forces with famed Madonna collaborator Patrick Leonard (Like a Prayer). The mysterious lyric reminds of us of Faithfull’s enduring facility for scorn.

She Walks in Beauty – In Faithfull's reading of the Byron classic, she could be speaking of herself. "And on that cheek, and o’er that brow / So soft, so calm, yet eloquent / The smiles that win, the tints that glow …" The haunting album of the same name was to be her final release.

Ireland's enduring love affair with Marianne Faithfull

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