Marianne Faithfull is no longer the beautiful child with Andrew Loog Oldham’s commercial face and empty eyes.

At 26 she’s beginning to resemble a subtle, more luxurious version of Fenella Fielding. Her voice has dropped a full octave and, judging from the distraught images from old newspaper stories, she’s more composed and settled with herself.

Not settled enough, however, to keep the first appointment we’d made for an interview. She’d responded to a call through her agent and phoned the office to say that, as it was precisely ten years since “As Tears Go By,” she’d be willing to talk. But at the appointed place and time there was no sign of Marianne... not even a last-second arrival garnished with elegant excuses.

This was to come a week later when she confessed over the phone: “I’m sorry. I got the horrors, I’d been reading an interview with Lulu and I thought it was so awful and degrading. I just couldn’t.. .”

Looloo? But surely that’s an entirely dissimilar story of Bee Gees, vin rouge and country cottages ordinaire. A mild and tepid yarn several lifestyles removed from Our Lady’s own rocky horror show, starring Marianne as the lonely vamp walking into plate-glass windows, passing out on planes, in hotel bedrooms, losing Mick’s child, tumbling down the stairs and prematurely delivering Nicholas Dunbar weight 4 lb. . .

Suicide bids, drunk in the streets, a love affair with heroin and valium and Mick and an Italian film director called Mario Schifano, Lord Paddy Rossmore and now Oliver Musker...

“When I was younger 1 was very idealistic. I thought it was possible to make the things you do really great — but when you get older you realise you’re lucky if it’s just good. When you’re 19, you’re so impatient that you want it be be just fantastic.”

Despite her havoc-strewn existence she began with a cool, almost perverse desire to Make It.

Life in a convent with all thdt terrible guilt about growing bodies. The turgid mediocrity of daily life in Reading. More than enough to drive a girl to hook up with the most despicable rock ’n’ roll band of the day — although that move was strangely incidental.

“When I was about 161 wanted to be an actress, and a scholar too. But whatever I wanted to be I wanted to be great at it.”

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So she calculated:

“My first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend. I slept with three and then I decided the lead singer was the best bet.”

Was the lead singer the most attractive or the most important?-

“I knew he wasn’t the most important because I had always understood that, in The Stones, Keith was the most important — and I think, in the beginning, I was always really in love with Keith much more than anyone else, as a fan. He’s the epitome of the Romantic Hero and, if you’re a middle-class girl and you’ve read your Byron, that’s Keith Richard. .. even now. He’s turned into Count Dracula now, but he’s still an injured, tortured, damned youth which is really such fun, isn’t it? I mean, he really is such fun.

“There’s always this image of the person you want romantically — but then it’s really: Who can you actually live with and be happy with? It’s the person who can tease you, make you laugh. Someone who’s amusing and funny.”

So Mick wasn’t really the Walrus. Keith only said it to be nice. But could it be that Jagger is less of a Rolling Stone than Richard? There’s been much conjecture along, these lines just lately and it’s probably doing Mick’s credibility no good whatsoever.

“He isn’t less. Perhaps he’s cleaner. I ,mean, that’s the thing about The Stones. That they’re dirty and awful and arrogant, and Keith is still like that.”

The Rock ’n’ Roll Story, Part 2, records that Marianne first became acquainted with the band via a brush with Andrew Loog Oldham, who she met at a show-biz party and who, at the time, was masterminding his Rolling Stones Blitzkrieg.

Marianne, he decided, had a commercial face, plus other resaleable commodities and, above all, she perfectly complimented the prospect of life with a bunch of degenerate uglies.

“I’m not going into how we all got together. Mick will kill me. I’m on bad enough relations as it is.”

Suffice to say, the scheming soon had to stop.

“Then, of course, I fell in love with him and that was that. From that minute I really couldn’t calculate. I couldn’t work it.

“Eventually I blew it completely, because I became addicted and I realized I had to leave. I didn’t want to leave. I just had to leave or I’d have died.”

She says she felt the same about Reading and how, if you know anything or want anything, the first move had to be a flight to London. Fabulous London, where she made “As Tears Go By” which Mick always said he wrote for her, although she somehow doubts it.

“It was a romance. I think he added that bit later.”

But here we leap forward to the more sinister controversy that surrounded another Jagger/Richard song.

“We all went one day — Mick and Keith weren’t there. . . some friends of mine. . . Michael Cooper. Robert Fraser.. . the entourage — we went to see Otis Redding and he sang ‘Satisfaction’ and it was just when they’d done ‘Rubv Tuesday’ and what we wanted to do was go backstage and say to Otis ‘Do “Ruby Tuesday”.’

“So we went in and said ‘That was a great version of ‘Satisfaction,” Otis’ and he said “Yeah, do you like that song. I just wrote it,’ and we just went HUHH and then, of course, we thought well perhaps he did write it. I mean he’s black. He knows.

“So then we went back and we said ‘ere, Mick, you didn’t write “Satisfaction.” Otis Redding wrote it.’ And he said ‘But I wrote it’ and we had this big argument about whether he really wrote it or whether Otis wrote it. Otis swore blue that he wrote it. But I don’t think he did. I think Mick wrote it.

It must have been fairly harrowing if you could actually see Marianne dangling on Jagger’s chords, squirming and wriggling at her Satanic Majesty’s request. But then Marianne was equipped with her own magical properties: a slender, palpitating voice that drove young men to a state of erect frenzy — plus a body — one gaze at which could drain the sap from any right-thinking male.

What does she remember of those early sessions?

“That they were in the daytime. I was so insignificant and so young. Yes, they were in the daytime. And I was 17 when we did ‘As Tears Go By.’ It was all done in half an hour. Mike Leander did the arrangements, and what a nightmare he’s turned out to be.

“It was very strange because they didn’t speak to me. There was Andrew and Mick and Keith and friends and I just went in there and did it. I was quite staggered that they wouldn’t even give me a lift to the station. I thought I was somebody after that. I didn’t realize that they didn’t know. I really knew that it was going to be a success and it was. But of course, they didn’t

“After the session I thought: Now, I’m entitled to sort of star treatment. I |i didn’t say it but I really felt, you know — where’s the car? And when I actually had to walk out of that scene and get a taxi back to Paddington and me tenand-six backv to Reading I felt very pissed off.”

It was recorded at the old Olympic studios under the auspices of freak genius Andrew Oldham. The timing was immaculate.

Marianne, for the perves in the audience, was still at school — but only just. By the time the record began rising in the charts she was into her school holidays and able to back it up with live and TV appearances.

She never did go back to the convent.

“I knew I could makeenough money to get out of Reading and start to hustle my own life. But then I fell out with Andrew, which was stupid. I thought I was so smart and didn’t like to be so dependent on someone. I was just a kid.

“Andrew was such a genius in this sort of thing and it made me uptight, and it made Mick uptight in the end. This feeling that you’ve got this very clever person masterminding it all and you can’t stand... the human being can’t stand it. I wasn’t going to leave it to him. I was quite sure I was just as clever without him and it was important to prove it to myself.

“And I did have two more hits without Andrew (“Come Stay With Me” and “This Little Bird”) and then it started to dawn on me that I wasn’t really so clever, so I didn’t keep it up. But I don’t know if you can really keep it up.”

In those faraway days, a girl singer wasn’t so much noted for her singing abilities as for how well she was equipped with sexual mystique. And it wasn’t just a case of a nice pair of jollies and a well-turned gluteus maximus, since this would have disqualified teenage dumplings like Looloo and Helen Shapiro.

“Chick singers are such nebulous objects. It’s built on such funny things. And it’s not really good music. It’s just if they’re pretty or sexy or say something at the time. But you can’t actually build a career as a pop-singer if you’re a woman. It’s impossible.”

“What was sexy about me was that I didn't give a damn. ”

But there weren’t that many , sexy singers around at that time were there?

“I wasn’t either. That’s what was sexy about it. I think: that it was so unconscious. Not totally unconscious, of course, but it’s horrible when you see women trying to be sexy.

“What was sexy about Sandy Shaw and me was that we didn’t give a damn. I didn’t give a damn anyway. I didn’t give a damn what happened to the record and I didn’t give a damn what happened to any of them. I had a completely separate way of life plotted out for myself and this was just a way to get out of Reading.”

By 1965, her marriage to artist-writer John Dunbar had fallen apart and she was living with Jagger. Her singing career had dissolved after four albums and she’d begun to stray into legitimate theatre. «

“Mick and I had a marvelous holiday in South America and when I got back I did Hamlet with Tony Richardson at The Roundhouse and Nicol Williamson played Hamlet.

“And then Tony Richardson, of course, talked Mick into doing Ned Kelly. I wanted to go because I’d been working three months in Hamlet and Mick was always going on holiday with Keith and Anita without me, and I felt very left out.

“So, although Tony Richardson wanted me to go to America with Hamlet, I went with Mick. And this was really the beginning of the mess. When I got there, I took 150 sleepers and that’s the beginning of my unreliability.”

TURN TO PAGE 72.

Marianne Faithfull

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 47.

Why the deathwish?

“Brian had just died too. I can’t remember very much about it, and then there was the concert in Hyde Park and these were the things that brought me down. Especially Brian dying. I don’t really remember what happened.”

Did she want to be saved?

“I don’t know. Yes of course. Not when I took it, but afterwards. Mick saved me. But I’m not going into it. It’s a very strange story but I’m not going to tell it to you.

“I hadn’t really picked up the pieces until then really. It just got more and more desperate and unhappy until I had to leave. And I kept trying to leave and he kept getting me back.

“I ran away to Italy... I mean, I couldn’t leave. I just couldn’t. It?s as if we were locked into this thing that would go on forever and that’s when he wrote ‘Wild Horses’, because I was always trying to leave.

“That’s the killer. I’d left him one time and he’d got me back in the house1 and said: ‘I want you to listen to something I’ve just recorded.’ I was being very cool. Like, ‘I’ve left you.’ And he puts this song on and it blows, my tiny mind.”

Childhood living is easy to do

The things you wanted, I bought

them for you,

Graceless Cady you know who l am

You know I can’t let you slide

through my hand

I watched you suffer a dull aching pain

Now you’ve decided to show me

the same

No sweeping exits or off-stage lines

Could make me feel bitter or

treat you unkind

I know I’ve dreamed you a sin

and a lie

I have my freedom but I don’t

have much time

Faith has been broken, tears must

be cried

Let’s do some living after we die

Wild horses couldn’t drag me away

Wild, wild horses couldn’t drag

me away.

“And I cry, ‘I can’t leave you, Ohh,’ hug, ‘Such a beautiful song, you wrote tliat for me? I love you!’ ‘I love you too. Come back.’

“And this is how it went on for years. We couldn’t split. It was my fault. I wasn’t working, for various reasons which we won’t go into... Brian and this and that and other sorts of things.

“I stopped being able to function as an artist in my own right and it was destroying me and Mick tried to help, but he couldn’t.

“I was jealous to see him going out and doing better and better work. All my traumas and all my unhappiness he changed into brilliant songs and it made me sick to see him, like a really good writer, or any really good artist, turning the traumas in his own home into work.

“He was doing it all the time anjd it made me crazy to see these things which were destroying me making him greater and greater and greater.”

So Jagger was furthering his career. Marianne was contemplating suicide and Fleet Street was provided with the kind of succulent gossip they hadn’t encountered since the days of Marilyn Monroe. ,

“It’s like having a butterfly or an insect on a pin. It’s beautiful and fascinating. I was, and I am, so complex and get so disturbed and he couldn’t let me go. He had me on a pin and he was watching me flair and writhe, but it was something that fascinated him as an artist.

“I was really running away from him for ages... All the time when I was a junkie. I’m not even saying I’m right. I’m not saying he is after me or ever was. But there was a time when we couldn’t get away from each other.”

Jagger, she says, is a resilient creature with a muscle-bound psyche, but even his iron resolve must have been shaken by the constant traumas.

Coming home after a session and finding her sprawled across the bathroom floor... again. The suicide bids were regular by now and only a touch away from being final.

“I must have been a nightmare to live with. Poor Mick. Anyway I’m OK now. I don’t take handfuls of Mandies every night and not a valium passes my lips.”

She’s also been off the braindamage for around 17 months. And what a cure that turned out to be.

“No smart clinics in Switzerland and blood changes. If you’re poor you go to the National Health and put up with it.”

A case of ice-cold turkey.

“It was painful, but then I get very determined. If I want to do something, I really believe now, that things like pain are controllable. This is what Mick knew because he was cleverer than me — or older than me, perhaps.

“I know. this now. It’s absolutely true. Every human being is a terribly sensitive thing and of course if you want to peel the skin off, you’re jgoirig to feel' it. But you can stop yourself feeling all these things and you can turn it on when you want to.

“And this is what you have to do if you want to be a really good actress, because you can’t go about in that kind of state all the time. You just have to be able to use it when.you want to.”

And this is why the beautiful people and the not-so-beautiful people switched from stout to' God pills and nights of instant karrpa.

“This is what happened to a whole generation. We all wanted to have as much feeling as we could get hold of. We wanted to experience as much actual feeling, whether it was awful or nice, or whatever. We wanted it because we knew, and we were right, that anything is better than no feeling. But I feel it can be controlled now.

“You have the martyrs of that school of thought who died and it’s silly— but immeasurable numbers of people came through it... damaged, but through. We’re all fucked up. We’ve got to accept that. But it doesn’t stop you operating. It doesn’t stop you being creative. You can still do it.

‘^But there are areas in which one gets messed up. I can’t have an orgasm any more. Little things screw up. And that’s come from flooding myself with too much feeling. But I think it’ll come back.”

Does she, gulp, have any regrets?

“No, Do you? I love it. That’s the thing about it. I adored all that. Revelled in it. All the pain. And I’m very glad I had a resident artist in the house to record it all.

But the money’s all gone and, since it’s precisely ten years since “Tears”, she’s anxious to make a further contribution to the college of musical knowledge. The ideas are there already; now she’s after a Mr. Big to sort them out.

“I would have to be someone who also has good ideas. But I haven’t decided who because, unfortunately, the only song I ever wrote was ‘Sister Morphine’ and if I could recreate.. . but I need someone to strike it off. I need Mick, or someone like that...” ¶§

(courtesy of The New Musical Express)