Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025): A life in three songs

They’re all the same song---“As Tears Go By!”

📸 Photo: Clive Arrowsmith / Camera Press / Redux

Well, I know I promised the long-gestating Marc Campbell memorial today, and I’m still working on it. I am hoping it will be up on Monday. He was a friend, and I am struggling to do the man justice. It’s coming, I swear.

But dammit, it’s not everyday that Marianne Faithfull dies.

I have been obsessed with Marianne, the daughter of fallen aristocracy and descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, since before I could shave. Her arc was just so damned compelling. She was a folk-pop thrush who sang and looked like a fallen angel. She was Mick Jagger’s muse, the woman in the fur rug at the Redlands bust. She co-wrote “Sister Morphine” (and recorded its best version, backed by the Stones). It was she who first uttered the phrase “wild horses couldn’t drag me away” to Jagger, following a drug overdose. Then: homeless addict. Then: punk-inspired singer in her early ‘30s. Then: Gothic cabaret artist who could give Nick Cave a run for his money, whose ravaged voice served her scorched material well. Back in the ‘90s, she also wrote a compelling memoir Faithfull: An Autobiography, co-written with David Dalton, who penned some of the most gripping books in the rock ‘n’ roll canon. She even included a killer recipe for roast chicken. After that, my criteria for a great r’n’r memoir changed forever: There had to be at least one recipe among the tales of ODs, rehab, and the subject’s first exposure to Ray Charles.

Marianne debuted with what was reportedly the first Jagger-Richards original, “As Tears Go By,” a song their manager Andrew Loog Oldham had practically forced them to write. As the New York Times’ obituary noted, she later reflected in 1987 that it was “a very strange song for two 21-year-old boys to write, and an even stranger one for an 18-year-old girl to sing.” But how could anyone watching TV in 1964, stumbling across this gorgeous, lapsed Catholic schoolgirl with, as Salman Rushdie put it, “the voice of a slightly zoned-out chorister,” possibly resist? The song’s melancholy was almost beside the point—she was hypnotic.

Honestly, Marianne is such a beautiful performer and personage in this clip, Brian Epstein is practically tongue-tied—and looks like he’s questioning his sexuality.

The thing is, this is an end-of-life song, written and sung by people who haven’t lived yet. The arrangement is far too jaunty—like Phil Spector producing Joan Baez as a chamber pop artist. Marianne sings it way too beautifully. This is a song for someone who once had hopes and dreams, loved and lost, and lost BIG TIME. This is a song with all the regret and pain in the world. 18-year-old Marianne Faithfull still has those hopes and dreams when she sings “As Tears Go By.” She needs to be crushed by them first.

Which is why her 1987 album Strange Weather was so compelling. Produced by Hal Willner, this was the album that recast Marianne as a post-punk Marlene Dietrich, crooning everything from show tunes to blues to Tom Waits. Everything is imbued with that beautifully honeyed, tubercular rasp we’d been hearing since her 1980 resurgence with the punk-informed Broken English. Then, out of nowhere, she hits us with “As Tears Go By”—this time sung by a 41 year old.

This is one of music’s greatest what-the-fuck moments. The arrangement is more redolent of the Stones, minus the chamber strings. Willner strips them out for musique concrete drones and steel guitar, underpinning Marianne’s ravaged vocal with just the right cushion of dread. And the once-crystalline soprano is now a cracked-and-bruised alto. She can finally rue those playground children, doing things she used to do—because they think them new. In that moment, she’s probably singing about 1964 Marianne, thinking, “Ohhh, you silly thing…”

But she wasn’t done with the song yet.

It was redone for her 2018 album Negative Capability, a seeming return to her chamber folk roots after years of collaborations with younger acolytes—Beck, Jarvis Cocker, PJ Harvey, and on this album, Cave (a seeming inevitability). Here she was, only three songs in, reprising “Tears” a third and (it turned out) final time. The arrangement even more closely resembles the Stones’, the chamber strings restored, all her original jauntiness now just a ghost of a memory. The voice remains cracked and crackling, now delivering more melancholy to her signature song than ever before.

Does it top the ‘87 rendition? No. That one was shocking and avant-garde, a gut punch to the still-active memory of 1964 Marianne. But this final “As Tears Go By” does something different—it resigns itself to time. It says what the lyrics to “In My Own Particular Way,” the track that follows on Negative Capability, make explicit: “I know I’m not young and I’m damaged/ But I’m still pretty, kind of funny/In my own particular way…”

This final “As Tears Go By” took her back into the UK Top 50 that year. It should have gone to Number One. One more album followed in 2021, She Walks in Beauty, a full-length collaboration with Warren Ellis. But how perfect would it have been if the 2018 “As Tears Go By” had been the last notes Marianne Faithfull recorded? A superb life and career, bookended by one song, each rendition more weathered than the last. Jagger, Richards, and Oldham gave her a fresh coat of paint in 1964. And year after year, we got to watch it erode—in the most beautiful, artistic way.

R.I.P, Marianne. And now, more than ever, I wish I’d taken up Lee Black Childers on his offer to introduce us all those years ago.

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