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Andrew Curry writes: Marianne Faithfull, who died last week, was best known for being one of the faces of the ‘60s, and perhaps also for her outstanding post-punk record Broken English, but she also had a lifelong relationship with folk music.

On a wall at home I have a set of photos of musicians. Bob Dylan is there, kibbitzing with civil rights workers in the deep South, a teenaged Bernice Reagon hanging on every word. Charlie Parker is in full swing, while an unknown News Orleans player walks home though the dawn.

(Marianne Faithfull, 1967. Original photographer not known. Image: Andrew Curry, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

And then there’s Marianne Faithfull. It’s a long shot from a member of the press pack, and she’s walking down the path of an English country cottage with a newspaper under her arm. It’s 1967, and she is 20.

One of the triumphs of Marianne Faithfull’s life is that she managed, eventually, to escape from the fame and the notoriety that dogged her in the 1960s, when she was one of the most beautiful and desirable young women in England.

And talented too, as a singer and an actor. A whole generation of young men, and perhaps women too, watched the 1968 film Girl on a Motorcycle to see her step naked into a set of biker leathers.

In the photo, you can just about make out the headline: NAKED GIRL AT STONE’S PARTY. The police had raided Keith Richards’ house just as Faithfull had stepped out of the shower, and she wrapped herself in a rug to cover herself up. By all accounts the press stories (which included a fictitious detail about a Mars Bar) were more or less completely made up: the scene inside when the police arrived was one of dull domesticity. But she was the only woman in the house.

Faithfull was signed by Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ manager, at the age of 18, and within months had a top ten hit with As Tears Go By, written for her by Jagger and Richards. Oldham wanted to position her as a perky pop diva, but she wanted to sing folk songs.

In the end she released her first two records simultaneously, the pop LP Marianne Faithfull and the folk Come My Way. Come My Way sold better. Although I’m biassed—I write for Salut! Live—Come My Way, and her next record, the folk North Country Maid have aged better as well.

In the ‘60s, her singing voice was a thing of beauty, high and clear. Come My Way and North Country Maid have a strong repertoire. On Come My Way, there’s a version of Once I Had A Sweetheart, a few years before the Pentangle version, as well as The House of the Rising Sun (post-Dylan and The Animals), Fare Thee Well, and Down In The Salley Gardens.

The line-up on North Country Maid is even more classic: Scarborough Fair, The Last Thing On Your Mind, Sally Free and Easy, and She Moved Through The Fair are all on here, along with Wild Mountain Thyme and The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.

(Marianne Faithfull on the Dutch television programme Fanclub, 1966. Photo: A. Vente, via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0 NL)

These are good and interesting versions of these songs, delivered with care and attention.

As Faithfull demonstrated over and over again later in her career she was always an outstanding interpreter of other people’s songs. In a parallel universe you can imagine her becoming a British folk icon.

From 1967 to 1970 Jagger and Faithfull had a four year affair—she had left her husband for him—and they were a showbiz glamour couple always in the full glare of the British press, not always for the right reasons. The Rolling Stones’s boys club wasn’t perhaps the best place for a young woman to be in the late 1960s. She had to go to court to get her co-writing credit for Sister Morphine, and then there were the drugs.

When it fell apart, she fell hard. A miscarriage and a suicide attempt didn’t help.

She ended up as a heroin addict on the streets of Soho, until friends pushed her into treatment. Her return to music, at the end of the 1970s, was described by Vulture as “one of the most striking second acts in the history of music”. Broken English is a post-punk classic that seems to channel all of the distress of the previous decade. Her voice has dropped an octave, and is rougher—the result of laryngitis and drug use—but it’s perfect for the songs. Vulture called it a masterpiece, and it’s hard to disagree.

Her reading on Broken English of the Doctor Hook song The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, which also made the singles charts, turns it from a wistful lament into a litany of despair.

Marianne Faithfull has a third act too. Part of this is associated with the much missed arranger and producer Hall Willner, who invited her to perform a song on his Kurt Weill ‘tribute’ record Lost in the Stars. This led to Strange Weather, also produced by Willner, a cabaret-inflected collection that includes little-known blues alongside show tunes and versions of Dylan and Tom Waits songs.

Her later career is full of similar collaborations, and if you judge a musician by the people who want to work with them, Marianne Faithfull comes out way ahead.

2008’s Easy Come Easy Go features the McGarrigles (on Flandyke Shore), Teddy Thompson, Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, Anthony, and Jarvis Cocker—and a version of Jackson C. Frank’s song Kimbie. PJ Harvey and Damon Albarn, turn up on Poison Arrow, released in 2005. Beck, Dave Stewart and Billy Corgan appear on Kissin Time. Cave’s collaborator Warren Ellis worked with her on her 2021 spoken word record of lyric poetry She Walks In Beauty. And so on.

I should also mention Rich Kid Blues, from the mid 1980s. It includes folk and folk-rock songs, patched together from recordings with the producer Mike Leander in 1971 for an LP that was not released, and tracks from 1978’s Faithless. There are versions of songs originally recorded by Tim Hardin, The Band, Cat Stevens, Phil Ochs, a slew of Dylan covers, and Sandy Denny’s Crazy Woman Blues. She returned to It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, first recorded in the 1971 sessions, with a bleaker version almost 50 years later on Negative Capability.

After her experiences in the 1960s and the 1970s, it would have been easy—even easier—to drift away from it all, to opt out, to let yourself go, to blame it all on other people. But Marianne Faithfull had more respect for her talent than that. She became one of the great survivors.

Marianne Faithfull, 1946-2025.

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