The singer -songwriter Marianne Faithfull died on Thursday at the age of 78. “It is with profound sadness that we announce the death of the singer, singer -songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull,” said the singer representative in a declaration. “Marianne died serenely in London today, in the company of her beloved family.”
Faithfull became an emerging star in 1964 with his first single, the ballad AS Tears Go by. The track would have been the first song that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote together. Although he was only 17 years old and his voice played fragile and young, he sang the texts on feeling excluded with a belief that would have guided all his subsequent works. He continued to collect successes throughout the mid -sixties, before disappearing from the spotlight due to some addiction problems (story he told in the texts of Sister Morphine).
Re -emerged in 1979 with the amazing Broken Englishan album that drawn musically from punk and new wave and showed off his new dark vision. His songs, like The Ballad of Lucy Jordan, Guilt and a cover of Working Class Hero by John Lennon, they adapted perfectly to the way his voice had changed during the period in which he had been far away. In the following 40 years, he remained on the same road, singing of love and relationships on dramatic musical backgrounds. In recent years he has recorded songs by PJ Harvey, Nick Cave, Roger Waters, Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan. His most recent album, Negative capability he came out in 2018 and Rolling Stone praised him as an “end -of -his career masterpiece”.
Becoming famous at a young age, the disputes obscured most of the early years of his career. He had a relationship with Jagger from 1966 to 1970 and was put to the pillory by the press after the police raided in Keith Richards's apartment in search of drugs and found her naked, except for a fur blanket in 1967. Towards the end of the decade, he was homeless and dependent on the heroine. After the death of his son, he tried suicide. In the end he cleaned up in the mid -eighties, just before redefining himself again with Strange Weathera jazzate album influenced by the cabaret that presented a new interpretation of AS Tears Go by.
In recent years, Faithfull has had to fight against a series of health problems. In addition to a diagnosis of hepatitis C, in 2016 he received a treatment for breast cancer and two years later he underwent shoulder interventions.
In various moments of his career he has revisited AS Tears Go by Several times and was surprised in an interview of 2014 with Rolling Stone how deep the song was. “Song still every night,” he said. «I still think it's a beautiful song. I am very grateful that Mick and Keith have given me and written for me. I really understood it when I was about 40 years old. It struck me during one of my moments of lucidity seem to happen periodically. That moment of lucidity was when I cleaned up. “