About Me
The accepted wisdom regarding Marianne Faithfull is that in the 1960s she was the mere puppet of oft-considered shady, behind-the-scenes operators like Andrew Loog Oldham and his then partner-in-crime Tony Calder, that her scarred, blues-soaked voice of the seventies and beyond was the product of damage done by having her wings burnt flying to close to the solar force that was The Rolling Stones and her subsequent addiction to heroin. The romantic myth of Marianne as the fallen woman, who at one time even lived upon a Soho wall, is regularly trotted out, and it undoubtedly fits the mood of the music she made from the mid-seventies onwards. As much as there might be some truth to the myth, it's only part of the story. Maybe, just maybe, something of the Marianne of songs like "Broken English" and "Why'd Ya Do It?", the Marianne Faithfull of today, something of the haunted darkness of her music, can be heard in her first album.
After the instant success of "As Tears Go By", her label was obviously all keyed up for an album that would capitalise on the single's success, but Marianne had other plans. With little affinity for pop music, Marianne instead had her heart set on recording an album of folk songs rather than the pop collection that Decca would undoubtedly have had in mind. Showing a precocious awareness of how to get what she wanted in an age when artists didn't generally even consider the possibility of getting what they wanted, Marianne approached Tony Calder at her label and said that she' d happily go along with whatever plans they might have for a pop-based album if they allowed her to record an album of folk songs of her choosing with hotshot session guitarist Jon Mark, later a member of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and an eponymous component of Mark Almond (a band who surely went on to confuse many Soft Cell fans). In so doing Marianne proved herseIf to be capable of being just as much of an operator as Calder himself
and, also, his partner in Immediate Records, Andrew Loog Oldham, the man who had birthed Marianne's career as a singer. Pretty impressive for a girl of a mere eighteen years with little experience of the machinations of the music industry. Being no fool, Calder realised that this was too good an opportunity to pass up as it meant they' d get two albums for the price of one, but he wasn't convinced Decca would see the merits of the plan, so it wasn't with the most hopeful of hearts that he suggested the plan. However, to his surprise, they were more than receptive, giving the idea their full backing. At that point Marianne sat down with Calder, who was to be the album's producer, and Mark to listen to songs that might be included on the album. Calder remembers this process as being hard work, as they ploughed through many a, in his words, twee folk standard. He c1aims the credit for the final selection of songs for himself, saying he picked the most memorable of the songs offered. Whoever it was who picked
them, it seems all were originally suggested by Marianne or Mark, and hard indeed is the heart that could describe a song such as the brooding, nineteenth century Appalachian ballad "Black Girl" as twee. Indeed so untwee is this song that it later provided Nirvana with one of their defining musical statements. With the songs selected, recording began - the sessions running concurrently with the recording of the pop album, Marianne Faithfull. The unusual step of producing and recording two albums at the same time must have been viewed with some sceptism in some quarters
but Calder remembers that having two albums released at the same time seemed to give a boost to the way Marianne was perceived, as if somehow an artist wbo merited the simultaneous release of two very different albums at the same time, must possess a certain level of inherent artistic merit and heft. Upon their release both albums found success in the charts, but it was the pop album that sold more, outsel1ing it' s folk sister by two to one. So the world was presented with two Marianne Failhfulls, and though today the Marianne of the sixties is remembered as much for a mythical Mars Bar and a boyfriend called Mick, as she is for her music, Come My Way shows clear indications of the music that she would produce a decade or more thence, and demonstrates that the dark heart of Marianne's music was there long before the rock heroes and the heroin. The fact that Come My Way was an album that Marianne manoeuvred to record proves that it was something close to her heart, something important to her. Though only
eighteen years old, the music Marianne loved was not the pop music made by her contemporaries in the Hit Parade, bul the folk sounds of singers like Joan Baez, Judy Collins and Bob Dylan. Any eighteen year-old girl who finds herself drawn more toward the hypnotically dark, swirling waters of a song like "In The Pines" rather than towards the more standard, uncomplicaled pop fare enjoyed by her peers is obviously cut from a very particular kind of cloth. Admittedly at the time there were many young British girls drawn to the folk sounds coming out of America, but Marianne seems to have been drawn to the darker seams of American folk. Just as Jagger and Richards heard something in the blues sounds of cities like Chicago and Memphis that spoke to them in a way that homegrown Brilish music didn't, Marianne seems to have found the same connection in folk.
