Marianne Faithfull was a towering artist, not just the muse she was painted as | Music

It is difficult to think of a moment in pop history less receptive to a 1960s icon relaunching their career than in 1979. At that point, British rock and pop resolutely inhabited a world shaped by punk: it was the year of 2-Tone and Tubeway Army’s Are ‘Friends’ Electric?, of Ian Dury at No 1 and Blondie releasing the bestselling album of the year. And it was a central tenet of punk that the 1960s and their attendant “culture freaks” were, as Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren put it: “fucking disgusting … vampiric … the most narcissistic generation there has ever been,” and that the decade’s famous names should no longer be afforded the kind of awed reverence they had enjoyed for most of the 70s. “No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones,” as the Clash had sung.

And yet Marianne Faithfull, who has died aged 78, turned out to be the kind of famous face from the 60s that a world shaped by punk could get behind. She was living proof that the rock aristocracy were remote and decadent and ripe for the culling. Never given the credit due to her by her most famous associates, the Rolling Stones, she had to go to court to get her name appended to the credits of Sister Morphine, a song she had co-written. She subsequently spiralled downwards, at startling speed, from having a seat at swinging London’s top table to life as a homeless junkie. Her years of addiction on the streets had so ravaged her voice that, by the late 70s, it was completely unrecognisable as coming from the woman who had sung As Tears Go By and Come and Stay With Me.

So, while Mick Jagger was nastily dismissed in the theme song to the Sex Pistols’ film The Great Rock‘n’Roll Swindle, Faithfull was offered a part in it, as Sid Vicious’s mother. Her comeback gig was at the Music Machine, a bearpit venue where Bob Geldof had been punched in the face mid-song. Moreover, the ensuing album, Broken English, fitted perfectly. It was filled with enough bile, bad language and provocation (what was the daughter of a baroness doing singing John Lennon’s Working Class Hero?) to give Johnny Rotten pause. The songs picked through the wreckage of the decade that had made her famous with unmistakable relish – how the era’s penchant for mind expansion and radical politics had curdled into addiction and terrorism – or railed at the way women were treated: the album is populated by a female cast of suicidal housewives, betrayed lovers and oblivion-seekers.

It was all performed with conviction: she sounded like she meant it. Of course, Faithfull was an actor, but you could also see why she might be genuinely pissed off, and not merely because of her fall from grace. Her initial burst of fame may have looked good from the outside – she was beautiful, she had hit singles, she was the partner of one of the biggest pop stars in the world. But there was something dismissive and sexist about the way she was treated as if she were “somebody who not only can’t even sing but doesn’t really write or anything, just something you can make into something,” she later recalled. “I was just cheesecake really, terribly depressing”.

The Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who launched her singing career, described her as “an angel with big tits”. The records she made strongly suggested that music came low on his list of priorities: he saw her as a means of living out his fantasy of becoming a British Phil Spector, and as a light entertainer: a pretty, posh girl whose niche would be essaying folk songs for an MOR, Saturday-night variety show audience. When he got his way, the results were horrendous: her version of Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind is terrible; her version of Greensleeves, larded with a production that saw Oldham doing his best Spector impersonation, is even worse.

But Faithfull was smarter than to fall under the sway of a svengali. She had other ideas about pop music, and, as it turned out, they were better than his. Initially, her best records dealt in a very English, very wintry-sounding brand of orchestral pop: on This Little Bird, Go Away from My World, Morning Sun or Tomorrow’s Calling, the arrangements twinkled like frost; you can imagine Faithfull’s breath forming clouds in front of her face as she sings.

The material was lightweight but something about Faithfull’s performances injected a note of eeriness: her vocals were more yearning and melancholy than the songs needed them to be. It was a side of her work that might have developed fruitfully in the psychedelic era, but by then Faithfull had lost interest in singing, apparently content to be Mick Jagger’s muse. It was a role she was good at – it was Faithfull who got him to read Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which inspired Sympathy for the Devil – but it seemed a shame: the first of a number of bad decisions Faithfull made regarding her career.

The second was that, having been sharp enough to quickly ditch Oldham as her producer and insist her label simultaneously release two albums – one pop, one folk – she didn’t fight harder to stop her record company pulling her 1969 comeback single Something Better. This was far grittier than anything she’d released before – country-ish, with Ry Cooder on slide guitar – but the problem, as her label saw it, was the B-side, her original version of Sister Morphine: so bleak and so obviously written by someone who knew of what she spoke that they balked and withdrew it entirely.

As she sank further into addiction, there were more missed opportunities. A 1971 album, Masques, went unreleased. By the time of its recording, her personal situation was desperate and her 60s producer, Mike Leander, had concocted it primarily as a means of helping her. Faithfull later dismissed its contents but it was better than she thought, the material well-chosen and apropos; her performances raw and vulnerable. Her versions of Phil Ochs’ Chords of Fame and Terry Reid’s Rich Kid Blues were powerful in a way her 60s hits were not. Two years later, she appeared on David Bowie’s TV special The 1980 Floor Show, wearing a nun’s habit, sounding like Nico and duetting with him on a version of I Got You Babe. She could have reinvented herself for the glam era – her public image certainly had a suitable amount of decadence attached – but Faithfull was visibly still in a bad way, and nothing more happened.

It took Broken English to finally re-establish Faithfull, even if it initially looked like a one-off. Its followup albums, Dangerous Acquaintances and A Child’s Adventure were less striking and edgy, although the latter’s closing track, She’s Got a Problem, had some of Broken English’s bite. The 1987 album Strange Weather was another triumph, its mood dark and affecting, with Faithfull as a dramatic and gifted interpreter of songs, rather than a writer, on selections ranging from Leadbelly, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan to the Great American Songbook.

She repeated the trick with Brecht and Weill songs on the live album 20th Century Blues (1996), and later recorded an entire album of their material, The Seven Deadly Sins (1998). She also began attracting a noticeably hipper class of collaborator than any of her more commercially successful 60s peers. The superb 2002 album Kissin’ Time alone featured contributions from Beck, Pulp, Billy Corgan and Blur (the title track, with Blur, very much in the vein of the looser, more experimental music found on Blur’s album 13, was a particular highlight). The 2005 album Before the Poison was essentially split between collaborations with PJ Harvey, operating in minimalist garage-rock mode, and Nick Cave.

Faithfull self-deprecatingly suggested that younger artists flocked to work with her because they enjoyed hearing her war stories from the 60s, but the reality was that she was willing to take risks, challenge herself and push at the boundaries of public perception: Easy Come, Easy Go reunited her with Keith Richards, but elsewhere on the same album she covered songs by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and the Decemberists and duetted with Anohni and Cat Power.

She would occasionally delve into her history, revisiting As Tears Go By and Broken English’s Witches Song on Negative Capability (2018), or underline her place among the rock aristocracy by tapping Elton John, Lou Reed and Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters for songs or guest appearances. But you would never accuse her of trading on past glories, or of knocking out an album in order to tour and play the hits, as many of her peers were evidently doing.

For someone whose public image was inexorably linked with what she had done 50 years earlier, she seemed artistically intent on pressing forward, in establishing herself in a context that had more to do with Anna Calvi and Mark Lanegan than the Rolling Stones. “She walked through the whole thing on her own terms,” noted Warren Ellis, Nick Cave’s latterday musical foil, who co-produced Negative Capability. It’s not hard to imagine Faithfull would have thought that a fitting epitaph.