"Good Lord, why?" rasps Marianne Faithfull, as she sinks into the hotel's rumpled bedding. “It’s so strange, why would you be a fan of somebody who’s never really done anything until now. A fan of what? A fan of Mick Jagger’s girlfriend?” Without much luck at clarity, I try to explain my devotion to the hypnotic ether that emanated from Marianne’s earliest recordings. “It was new,” she decides at last. “That’s what it was.” She can accept the tentativesingles on grounds of originality, if not for the adulation which greeted them a long fifteen years ago.