Friday March 29, 2024
AN EVENING WITH MARIANNE FAITHFULL
Review

AN EVENING WITH MARIANNE FAITHFULL

February 4 2010

MARIANNE FAITHFULL Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, February 3, 2010

THIRTY years ago, or thereabouts, advance copies of a new album were being hawked around London’s groove meisters; and suspicion and lukewarm enthusiasm greeted it. It was apparently a comeback effort by a singer whose track record as a sort of folkie, so-called groupie, gorgeously pretty girl, lost cause and bit of a joke meant that few were prepared to take her seriously or give the recording a chance.

I was chucked the album because nobody else in the office was much interested and the very thought of doing anything on (roll eyes knowingly at this point) Marianne was so not cool. That’s how I got to hear Broken English for the first time. It was an electrifying and never-to-be-forgotten experience. The pounding intro, so infectious and so sexy; then that voice, omigod, that voice. The fey, little girl tones that took As Tears Go By to the top of the charts were gone. In its place was something primeval, dangerous, womanly, world-weary, and utterly appealing.

My co-workers in the City Limits collective thought I’d flipped my lid, which was not surprising. At that time I was – it has to be admitted – the discerning writer who’d said of one up and coming outfit “they’re an okay pub rock band,” (Dire Straits) and “they’re lousy but the singer’s pretty hot” (The Pretenders). On reflection, I still think they’re pretty reasonable assessments. Nevertheless, when I raced into the office saying this thing called Broken English was brilliant and we had to do a story before anyone else got on to it, the reaction wasn’t instant eagerness.

Perhaps it was a slow week; perhaps we didn’t have anything else in the pot, perhaps I was obsessively persistent on this occasion but whatever, I was sent off to the Chelsea Arts Club to interview the artist. It was her chosen location, a louche joint around the corner from where she was then living. It suited her, I suspect because it was full of ravaged and raddled survivors of bohemian cliques long gone and even though she was hanging on to some semblance of a straight life by the skin of her teeth at that time, they would have made her feel she was at least ahead of the game.

We went out into the gardens for the standard half-hour audience with the star, Marianne leading the way to her favourite dell, tiptoeing lightly across the grass like a slightly uncertain fairy. Hours later, as dusk turned the gardens into deep shadows, fireflies began to light their lights and it was truly like fairyland. And still Marianne talked, answering questions with carefully thought out, penetrating responses; laughing, reminiscing and talking frankly about her rackety past, her tenuous present and her vivid hopes for the future.

Feminism had taken a firm grip on thinking women in London at that time, which was probably partly why she had been unable to shake off her old image of Jagger’s moll and drug-enfeebled sex toy. Yet, sitting in the dusk, trying to catch fireflies, she was far from being away with the pixies, or pathetic. Rather, it quickly became clear that she was a standard-bearer and lightning rod, right there in that social and political moment – on the crest of the wave – with The Ballad of Lucy Jordan. In front of the wave with the wildly controversial and honest Why’d Ya Do It? and with her radiant refusal to be beaten or to not look the world right in the eye once again. And she talked about it all in the voice that some might have considered drug-ruined, but which turned out to be life-enhanced and magnificent.

It was a memorable few hours, then she departed for Denmark to begin a tour to support the album’s release, and I humbly went home to write what turned out to be a landmark cover story for City Limits and for her career. It was the rebirth of an artist and the birth of the cool. Suddenly everyone was on the Marianne bandwagon and they’ve pretty much never got off.

AN EVENING WITH MARIANNE FAITHFULL

All this went through my mind while watching her in the Opera House Concert Hall, three decades on from the fireflies and the comeback. There was something about the familiar mixture of vulnerability, honesty, fragility, and toughness; the self-deprecating humour and the way she still tiptoes uncertainly and lightly out onto a stage that reached my heart all over again. And it provoked the thought that the childlike innocence and other-world worldview was what got her into such trouble in the first place, but now shields her from the worst of what might hurt.

It’s telling, for instance, that as a small part of the Rogues’ Gallery fandango of a few nights before her own show, it was Marianne who copped a bucketing in blogs and the press. Headlines and online complaints lambasted “her show” and “woeful performance” – as if she were responsible for the entire evening and the idea of an evening of – ye gods! – sea shanties. Yet women would be familiar with being blamed for the stuff-ups of blokes. The more things change, the more they stay the same. But when she is on her own turf, within the framework of her own songs and sensibility; she is awe-inspiring.

She needs a constant prompt now – a music stand with a road map of the show is her companion on stage – but as soon as the (wondrously tight and terrific) six member, multi-instrument band started into a song, she is all there and into it. Even when she turns over two pages at once and needs to be gently reminded that she’s left out Dolly Parton’s Down From Dover. “Well, if someone would just tell me what’s going on sometimes,” she remarks, unfazed, then gets right on with it – singing the lament for lost love as if freshly written just for her.

A sneezing fit and a few chesty coughs are taken in her stride too, and make you suddenly figure that the perfection demanded of anyone who gets in front of a microphone is just plain silly. Why should there be a pretence that singers (or broadcasters) don’t sneeze, sniffle or cough, just like the rest of us? Why is it the worst sin that can be committed in front of an open mike? Marianne sneezed and just carried on; someone should have yelled, “Bless you!” and she would have said, “Thanks lovelies,” and still carried on. Instead she took the adoring interjections and requests in her stride and delivered a well-judged, beautifully coloured, nicely balanced and rapturously received show of close on two hours non-stop with two vociferously demanded encores.

it wasn’t the same old same old. For instance, the arrangement for When Tears Go By included a piano accordion in a version that was rollicking rather than mournful, and which had the effect of making it genuinely melancholy. Why’d Ya Do It? was tougher than ever in a pared back rap rendition, while old favourites were mixed with newer material from Morrissey, Nick Cave and so on, and all delivered with panache and pleasure. As she reluctantly left the stage for the last time she said she’d had a good time and would like to return to Australia. The roar of agreement could well bring back, yet again, the toughest fragile fairy princess of our times.

 

Subscribe

Get all the content of the week delivered straight to your inbox!

Register to Comment
Reset your Password
Registration Login
Registration