PARIS, France — Iconic British artist
Marianne Faithfull
fears she may never sing again after a brutal dose of
COVID-19 last year, but a
new album of poetry set to music has given her a beautiful outlet.
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The 74-year-old spoke to AFP by phone from her home in
London, but sounded even further away, her voice heavy with fatigue.
“I caught it really badly and nearly died and now I’ve got
what they call long-term COVID,” she said.
“It’s not the virus but it certainly feels like it. It’s in
my lungs so I can’t talk for very long.”
Asked if she will sing again, she is saddened: “Darling, I
don’t know. I hope I can. I do singing practice once a week. A friend comes
over and plays my lovely guitar and I practice.
“It’s an awful thought,” she added. “Whatever happens, I
can’t change it.”
But far from defeated, she has spent the past few months
completing an album begun before the pandemic.
It features her reading some of her favorite poetry — Byron,
Shelley, Keats, and other 19th century romantics — with backing music from an
all-star cast that includes Warren Ellis, Nick Cave, and Brian Eno.
It was Cave that suggested “
She Walks In Beauty” as a title.
She had wanted a different line from Byron — “So We’ll Go No More a Roving” —
“but Nick thought that was a bit negative,” she said with a laugh.
She seems genuinely surprised that the album has worked out
so well.
“Warren and I listened to quite a few records that people
have made with poetry and music behind them, and most of them are awful. It’s
quite hard to do it right. We were very lucky,” she said.
Survivor
The poems have been close to her heart since her schooldays
in 1950s England, for which she thanks a Simpson, one of the only teachers at
her convent school who was not a nun.
That was before her famous entry into Swinging Sixties’
London, spotted at a party by the manager of the Rolling Stones and becoming a
muse to Mick Jagger, with all the baggage that came along with that status.
She enjoyed the highs of sudden fame and fortune, but also
deep lows of drug addiction and homelessness, and emerged on the other side
with tales to tell.
She built a long career with more than 20 albums to her
name, including the landmark “Broken English” from 1979 that has become a
touchstone for dark, orchestral pop, ensuring a steady stream of younger
artists keen to work with her, including PJ Harvey, Jarvis Cocker, and Beck.
Ever the survivor, she faced her hardest trial yet with the
pandemic that nearly took her life last year, but she pushed through and
managed to record the album at a distance.
“It was not as hard as I thought it would be,” she told AFP.
“But it was a bit of a problem. When you’re in the studio
together you can tell a lot about what people are thinking from their body
language. We didn’t have that at all. It’s incredibly lucky that it turned out
as well as it did,” she said.
Though she worries about losing her singing ability for
good, perhaps the poetry offers a way forward. Would she consider a French
version, in memory of the many years she spent in Paris?
“I’d love to do Baudelaire, Rimbaud, but I don’t speak
French well enough. I’ll have to think about it ...” she said.
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