marianne faithfull

 

"Do me a favour, don't put me in the dark" sings Marianne Faithfull in her best Dickens good-time girl. Ex-resident of Ormskirk, habitué of so many rehab clinics and now Baroness Sacher-Masoch courtesy of her paternal great-great grandfather is infamous as much for her drug dependency and her relationship with Mick Jagger in the mid-1960s as for her music and acting career. Now aged 62, I believe she is never more at her best. Two years living on the streets of Soho in the early 1970s - she slept on a wall (I would like to visit this wall) - and an addiction to heroin and cocaine caused a severe laryngitis that altered the pitch and the timbre of her voice forever. An indignant Sunday Times newspaper journalist once wrote that she had "permanently vulgarised her voice."

As if this were a bad thing.

Nobody wants to hear the convent-educated Marianne of "This Little Bird" - we want the raw expression and emotionality of someone who has track-marked themselves out of the possibility of continuing addiction, who has lived without telephone, electric light and  curling tongs, and whom has recorded this song.

It is taken from the Broken English album released in 1979, although I didn't hear it until the summer of 1982 while in Paris. Adapted from a poem written by the poet and playwright Heathcote Williams and set to a 4/4 tango rhythm it is a mistresspiece of sexual jealousy and poisonously barbed spite. It caused a certain controversy. A female using the word cunt, let alone in popular song, is an act of transgression and it simply isn't on, don't you know. 
I cannot imagine any another artist being able to deliver this song with such conviction and unsentimentality. Of course, Ms Faithfull has lived it. Some of the lyrics are explicit - this is quite possibly the very first rap song - yet when expressed with such cracked candour, authenticity and glorious weltschmerz, 'profanity' is not profanity at all. It is poetry.