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Once the fallen angel of British pop, Marianne Faithfull the survivor is set to release her new album Easy Come, Easy Go. Thirty years ago she declared her rock genius with the astounding Broken English. ZigZag's Kris Needs was on hand to ask her about it in this awesome interview.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

Marianne Faithfull was the Face of the '60s Fragile, damaged little bird with the voice of an angel, broken on a spike and filled with downers; "The Girl On A Motorcycle," the girlfriend of Mick Jagger, the suicide temptress...

No music in the '70s. Sticking to the theatrical stage till the music got hold again. But the resultant 1977 album was duff, a C 'n' W dirge...

October 1979 and Marianne Faithfull, now 32, awaits the release of Broken English, her new album. Her first album, not a bunch of '45s plus fillers.

It's no phony comeback based on past reputation. To those who were fans at the time Marianne Faithfull will always be fascinating, untouchable and slightly tragic. And she's grateful. Today's kids are gonna be faced with a new album by a girl they might have heard of from their pasts. Maybe they remember their parents' venom, or read she was gonna play Sid's junkie mum in the original Russ Meyer version of The Great Rock 'N' Roll Swindle.

Marianne Faithfull sits opposite swigging vodka 'n' orange in a Jermyn Street bar. We've been talking nearly two hours and I'm on my fourth "Downfall," a little concoction which seems to be working just fine.

She's wrapped in a big, battered old black leather jacket and thinks she's going down with a cold. The hair's still yellow, the voice husky and smile warm. Time's taken away that innocent beauty, replacing it with earthy attractiveness. She's got great grey-blue eyes.

For the first few minutes neither of us are relaxed. It's her first interview for some time and she must be so wary of the scandal-hungry hacks who only want what happened 10 years ago. I'm meeting one of my heroines so I'm a grinning idiot. But first to the matter at hand. The new album. You'll be surprised. Shocked even.

The title track, "Broken English," is galloping, electronic Disco, courtesy Stevie Winwood, the reclusive genius who could "knock the Bee Gees into a cocked hat," according to Marianne. It's the only one overtly in that vein, but Winwood, an old friend of hers, is a dominant ingredient throughout. He had quite a hand in writing material along with the rest of the band, and Marianne came up with words. There's a track written by husband Ben Brierley, called "Brain Drain."

It's a pained, venomous album that Marianne says she didn't really enjoy making, but is now glad she did.

Her favorite track is "Guilt," and it's one of mine too. The song's hauntingly powerful and personal. At last she's singing about experience, her life. The only time she's done that before was on 'Sister Morphine', for which she wrote the words--one of the most graphic, harrowing songs ever.

"'Guilt' was written for me by this guitarist who's known me quite a long time now, about two years. If you knew me very well, that's one of the prime things in my character. Guilt."

Why?

"I don't know, perhaps because I went to a convent and was brought up a Roman Catholic."

The Mother Superiors would fry in their cassocks if they ever got to hear "Why D'ya Do It," the closing, most controversial track. The music manages to skip and be oppressive at the same time, as Marianne spits, intones, sneers and howls a gamut of derisive insults inspired by raging sexual jealousy. It's actually a poem by Heathcote Williams and with Marianne's delivery (I won't spoil the fun), couldn't be further away from 15 years ago on Ready Steady Go and a sweet-voiced teenager perched demurely on a stool cooing "As Tears Go By." Now her voice is dirty, guttural, lived-in, but emotional and biting. As years go by.

How did you come out with this monstrous track, Marianne?

"I know Heathcote and was seeing him a bit. Have you ever read The Abdication Of Queen Elizabeth II?"

Er, no.

"It's very funny. Somebody did a video film of that and I went to see it, and when I was there he showed me all these poems. I took them home and they were all incredibly obscene. 'Why D'ya Do It?' is the best one, I think, and it's the least obscene! I don't think I could even speak the other ones, it would be too much."

How do you feel singing it?

"Well, I really like it. I've done it live, and it's great because all your fury forever can come out. It's about sexual jealousy, it's fury, it's anger. Sexual jealousy can make you more furious than anything else."

Do you anticipate problems with it?

"I don't think about it. I don't see it like that, Heathcote sees it like dirty little schoolboy stuff, and a lot of people who hear it hear it like that. I don't." (EMI do 'cos they've just refused to press and distribute for Island, the record because of that track. The label's other past acts to gain that honour are the Snivelling S***s and Derek and Clive!)

The title track, what's that about?

"Ulriche Meinhoff," says Marianne, huddling into her leather and lighting another fag. She ain't well. "I read a book called Hitler's Children, about the Baader-Meinhoff group and it was very interesting. Then I saw something on television in Russian which had the lines in sub-titles. Someone came out with 'Broken English, spoken English', and I wrote it down because I thought it sounded so good. We were in the rehearsal studios trying to write a song and I had this in my notes, so we did that."

The chorus goes. "What are you fighting for?" Is it directed at them?

"Well, it must have been at first but it could be anything, Northern Ireland, Germany, the National Front..."

"Broken English" should be the single.

Another strange track is "The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan," an old Dr. Hook song, stripped of the country ballad treatment it might have got on Marianne's previous album, Faithless, and given a pulsing Giorgio Moroder backing courtesy Mr. Winwood--but no drums. It works.

Marianne: "We didn't want to use a drummer, we just wanted to leave it in the air which was very chancy because you don't know what's going to happen. It goes against everything you think will be alright. That's how that happened, that's all Stevie Winwood."

Are you optimistic about this album, Marianne?

"Mm! I've not got much idea of my place--what I am, who's gonna like it, what they're gonna think. I don't really know, it's very confusing after Decca or NEMS. I don't know where I fit in or anything. It's a pity but presumably I'll get a sense of that as a feedback with the record. When it's out it'll be such a relief, because I feel sort of suspended. It's very strange."

Marianne Faithfull went through the whole music biz manipulation bit of the '60s and a whole load of different styles which rarely hinted at herself. For those early hits they'd just sit the pretty face in front of the chosen track, pump it through the speakers and she'd warble away. "This Little Bird," "Come And Stay With Me," "Summer Nights," "As Tears Go By"...they've still got a sort of, uh, charm today and I enjoy playing 'em, but Marianne could have been a cardboard cutout and the voice a seasoned sessioneer. It was her convent background and fragile looks clashing so violently with her involvement avec Mr. Jagger which sparked my fascination and her aura of mystery. By the time the looks had hardened to sultry, the seedy stories begun to circulate, the drug rumors become rife and Girl On A Motorcycle, the classic '68 motorbike-macho fantasy flick which only the other week netted her a handsome sum for showing up at the Motorbike Show, had appeared Marianne was a full-blown femme fatale and totally soaked in the Stones Satanic Majestic dark image of the late '60s.

Marianne is fed up with her past being dredged up for sensational purposes (though she didn't mind my gibbering-fan-style probings for trivia). She admits she had it easy as far as finding fame went, but no soft ride with the pressures. Those drove her to an agonizing cold turkey stretch to cure the heroin addiction which sprawled with her into the '70s. They also took her out of the music biz for six years and sent her back to acting (plays, Hamlet, Vienna, all that).

Marianne (who by now I've definitely taken to as a person rather than an image): "I've never had to try very hard. I've never really been expected to try at all. I've always been treated as somebody who not only can't even sing but doesn't really write or anything, just something you can make into something. This is the first time anything's been asked of me in the music world.

"I've got quite a good brain and all that, which I've never had to use in singing at all. It just got so boring then. I was just cheesecake really, terribly depressing. It wasn't depressing when I was 18, but it got depressing when I got older because you're a person just like anyone else, even if you are a woman."

So this is the first album where you've really had control over what you do.

"Yes, I'm there. I exist. I'm not thinking about something else. It's the only good one I've ever done as an album. It was recorded as an album. It's a new thing for me, I've never done that before."

Still quite fresh and a source of annoyance for Marianne is her last record, the Faithless album, a pretty dull excursion into, the country 'n' western music she was pre-occupied with at the time. There's a load of covers, her '76 single "Dreamin' My Dreams" (which topped the charts in Ireland and led to much touring there), "It Killed Me," plus other hammy redneck croonings.

One track stands out--the delicate moving tribute to a dead groupie friend, "Lady Madeleine," which Marianne wrote herself. A glimmer which has grown. It was released on NEMS, which later went bust (stablemates were the Boys and one '77 night at the Marquee she leapt up onstage to sing with 'em).

"It wasn't recorded as an album. I'd do two or three tracks then have a break. This was over two years. When they got enough tracks that weren't too awful they put out an album. When I first started they didn't even make albums, they made singles and put them together with a few other things. Then when I started working three years ago with NEMS, I couldn't believe it, we were doing exactly the same thing, and I knew by then that people were making proper albums!"

When NEMS went bust "it was a Godsend. It meant I could get away. I was waiting for them to go bust for months, I was really getting desperate, I was gonna take a bomb in there and blow it up!"

Why did you sign with them?

"'Cos no one else would sign me and I wanted to start again. Mind you I didn't go anywhere else really, they wouldn't touch me with a ten-foot pole. They're really scared of my reputation. It's a particularly vicious reputation, mine."

But Island were okay.

"I didn't have much to do with it. It was Mark, the guy who produced the album. We did 'Broken English' and 'Why D'ya Do It?,' and they turned out really well, and he tried to get deals from various record companies. One of them was Island. I've known Chris Blackwell since I was a little girl. I thought I'd be happier with people I knew slightly."

Broken English took from February till July to record and mix. "It was so hard to do and it took such a long time. I didn't really get much pleasure out of doing it, only when I went away...I went to America for three weeks, and I played it, then I could think about it, and it was really good." Right now preparations are starting for the next album. No gigs planned yet, for several reasons, partly the expense of taking out a band to reproduce the album's sound. The videos should do for now, but Marianne does hanker to get on stage again: "It's breaking my heart, I love audiences."

You wouldn't go back to acting?

"No, I think I've got to concentrate on one thing now. My whole life has been like a total dilettante thing. I do this, I get bored. I do that, I get bored, and I've got to stop. It's very superficial, you never get anywhere."

Next we talked about Marianne's inclusion in the original Russ Meyer-directed Pistols film, at that time known as Who Killed Bambi?. She was to play Sid's mum. One scene was to show him seducing her. Marianne ducked out when Meyer did. She saw it was "falling to bits" and didn't wanna give them any free footage they could use later.

Did you ever meet Sid?

"No, I met Russ Meyer, who did Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls, which is one of my favorite films in the world. I would have liked to have worked with him but when he wasn't going to direct I didn't wanna do it, Sid or no Sid.

"It was pretty horrible actually. I'm kind of glad I didn't do it now. I was going to play Sid Vicious's junkie mother. My mother would have hated it. I've given her enough trouble! She's not a prude, but Sid Vicious's junkie mother!"

One of the things I most wanted to talk about was 'Sister Morphine.' Now you've probably heard the Stones version on Sticky Fingers, a plaintive plea from a junkie's death-bed. Marianne's version, which has Jagger on acoustic guitar, Charlie Watts on drums, Ry Cooder on slide and Jack Nitzsche, the producer, on piano, is more strident and beauty, but her low bloodless monotone is so pathetic and real--it cuts Jagger's play-acting to high camp.

You sound like the Angel of Death.

"I was."

This song stands next to Lou Reed's "Heroin" as heart-stoppingly graphic documentary of junk damnation. "Why has the nurse got no face?" The Sticky Fingers composing credits give no indication that it was in fact Marianne who wrote the words.

"Mick would always be strumming chords around the house and then forget about them, but these I remembered. I wrote the words in Rome, and it was recorded in America when they were mixing Let It Bleed.

"Keith Richard wrote to Allen Klein (the Stones's former publisher) and told him that I'd written them. Jagger and I had split up, very bad blood and all that. This story I heard from Allen Klein, it might not be true--Keith Richard told him that I did write the words and I needed the money. So now and again, I get a royalty cheque for 'Sister Morphine'. I've been living off 'Sister Morphine' for years. I just got one today. £485!" They're very heavy words.

"Yeah, I was very pleased with those. A lot of it's imaginary, some of it's experience, and some of it's what you are imagining in your highly paranoid state, that you would like to happen. You just take it out to the furthest limit. I was very paranoid at that time, still am actually, though not as bad."

What about?

"I think it's like putting something in your back to make you go on feeling things. It's a ruse that you do to make yourself go on."

Only 500 copies of "Sister Morphine" went out, according to Marianne (it was actually the B side to 'Something Better'). I paid a hefty sum for mine and had to lend Marianne my copy of the Best of...LP it appears on. She doesn't own one herself. It's still in the Cheyne Walk house she shared with Jagger probably. (She says she goes there sometimes to see Bianca and sees her stuff still on the shelves. Old Bianca even pops in on Marianne and Ben occasionally. "She comes round and sits there all grand, doesn't smoke joints, doesn't drink, just looks very beautiful!") "Sister Morphine" may be on the next LP.

I don't wanna dwell on the past but it's funny what she said about Michael J:

"Mick is mean. He'll always be a student of the London School of Economics!"

After "Sister Morphine," Marianne bowed out of the Music Biz:

"If I'd have carried on after I did 'Sister Morphine' I would have come up with something interesting, but I didn't. I lost heart. I couldn't stand it and broke away until three years ago."

You could have gone on to greater things.

"I could have done but I didn't see that, because I can only see that far, I really have got no imagination at all. When I found that the music business was so vile and ghastly I wanted nothing to do with it. I thought the best thing would be to do something else completely."

And the only time she came out and sang was in 1973 at the Marquee for David Bowie's 1980 Floor Show, for American TV. She had to dress up as a nun and duet with DB on "I Got You Babe." Also, she sang "As Tears Go By" over a backing track in a white dress, looking very nervous and out of place. The backstage booze helped but the full octave drop in her voice didn't!

"I can't use that key anymore, it was terrible. It sounds exactly as if it's broken like a boy's voice, it's really weird. I suppose it's years and years of life, drinking and smoking, time..."

Do you get annoyed with all this past-dredging that's obviously gonna start again in the next lot of interviews?

"Yeah, obviously it gets very boring. It could get to a sort of Britt Ekland level, it's pretty horrible. I don't know that much about myself but I know I don't lead my life to go off with rich, well-known men, apart from the slight aberration in the '60s." (!)

You could write a Britt-ish book and make a mint!

"It's only for money. If you've got a husband who's a successful dustman what do you want to do that for? (Ben currently earns a crust collecting, and then flogging, stuff the council won't handle.) Money that's acquired like that you spend immediately, like hookers."

Talk turns to Anita Pallenberg, a Rolling Stones woman for 15 years, 10 more than Marianne. "It's very frightening. That's what would have happened...no, that's not what would have happened to me, if I'd have stayed. I'd be dead. I'm not as strong as that."

You don't look like Benny Hill dressed up as a concentration camp kommandant either, Marianne. You've come through, as I hope I've shown. I know I've gone back in time and waffled like a fan but it's background for newcomers, not fodder for Sunday guttersnipes. Right now Broken English is the present, and the best place to start.

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