Marianne Faithfull was the darling of the 1960s. With her classic English rose beauty and her rock star boyfriend - Mick Jagger - she appeared to have it all. But her association with the Rolling Stones almost killed her. To many, it seems as if she was dragged into a mire of drugs and depravity by the Stones, although by all accounts Marianne didn't need much encouragement. By 1970 she was being haunted by the ghost of Brian Jones (she would actually see his face in mirrors), she'd attempted suicide and was a full blown heroin addict. Much of the 1970s would find Marianne homeless, sometimes actually living on the streets, moving from one filthy squat to another. There were a couple of attempts at resurrecting her recording career - in 1975, in conjunction with Joe Cocker's band, she recorded a number of country standards that weren't properly released until many years later.
But in 1979 she returned. Encouraged by her then boyfriend Ben Brierley (at the time a member of the Vibrators) she worked up a number of excellent new wave songs, the demos of which impressed Island Records enough to give her a 3 album deal. The resulting sessions were overseen by Mark Miller Mundy who managed to draft in some formidable musicians, including Steve Winwood, Morris Pert and Barry Reynolds (who was concurrently working with another new Island signing, Grace Jones).
Broken English is very 1979 in sound and production, and very English too. The drums have that peculiarly British dry crispness that many songs had at that time, and the undeniable funkiness of the band is played down rather than up as an American production would have done. It also rocks, hard. The title track has some excellent dynamics – a solidly pounding beat but with all sorts of guitar / keyboard clashes over the top, and Marianne’s cracked and rasping voice topping it all off. Marianne's voice had changed considerably since the 1960s; never a particularly strong voice it had now deepened and lowered, ravaged by years of nicotine and narcotics. But it suited the new material so very well, investing the songs with a weary, worn out quality that was perfect.
There are a couple of lighter songs, like "Brain Drain" or "What’s the Hurry?" but these are balanced by tracks like the darkly brooding "Guilt" or the snarly cover of Lennon’s "Working Class Hero". Side two opens with the delightful "Ballad Of Lucy Jordan" – one of Annie Nightingale’s favourite songs ever – which sounds like it was perfectly written for Marianne (but it wasn’t - it was, slightly alarmingly, actually a Dr Hook song from the early 1970s…). The album closes with one of the most vicious songs ever, "Why’d Ya Do It?", which still, even now, surprises me with the depth of bitterness and loathing in Marianne’s voice. A stunning performance.
Left off the album, but used as a b side, was a brilliant new version of "Sister Morphine". After all her troubles throughout the 1970s, homelessness, addictions of all sorts, near death illnesses, it’s here, ten years on from when the song was written, that Marianne invests the song with the level of gravitas that the slightly sensationalist lyrics require. Much as I admire the Stones version from Sticky Fingers, I can’t help thinking that Jagger is play-acting the role. I just can’t quite believe his version, but I can believe every word that Marianne sings on this recording, and it’s pretty damn scary too.
Interestingly the album nearly didn't sound as contemporary and as New Wave as it did. All the songs were originally recorded in a far more conventional AOR style, and it was only as the masters were being readied for pressing that Marianne and Mundy decided to remix the whole thing into a more synth / new wave style, and that's when they employed Steve Winwood to add a whole bunch of new keyboards. The original backing tracks sound not unlike Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. Not a bad thing per se, but the reworked album was clearly better and more original and has stood the test of time rather better than the original version would have, as that sounds very late 1970s.
Having said that though there’s something very impressive about the original versions, mixing new wave musicians with straight up old school UK session men. The mixture works well and gives the songs both an edgy feel and also a strength and effortlessly commanding quality that punk musicians didn’t possess. Without the overbearing synths of the finished album we have saxophones and slide guitars taking centre stage. A track like "Lucy Jordan" is much closer to the Dr Hook original (yikes!!), with gentle guitars and an insistent shuffle on the drums, rather than the weirdly burbling synth dominated finished version (which had no drums at all, and apart from keyboards, virtually no other instruments at all, for that matter). The closing "Why’d Ya Do It?" is much longer in it’s original form, though not quite as scathingly harsh; there are more backing vocals too, across the whole album. Fascinating stuff. Marianne has said that she now prefers the original version, although she’d assumed the tapes to be long lost. But apparently the master had simply been sitting on a shelf in a store room marked DNU, 'do not use'.
The next couple of Faithfull albums – Dangerous Acquaintances and A Child’s Adventure kept to a similar new wave style as Broken English, but with more of an eye to getting a hit. No hits were forthcoming of course, and the albums were rather weedier and less impressive than intended, though both contain a number of excellent songs amongst the lesser numbers. Most notable is Barry Reynolds' brilliant "Times Square" which opens A Child's Adventure and which stands head and shoulders above the rest of the album.
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