Like a lot of stories of scandal, ruin, and the opportunity for redemption, it started with a pretty face. In the spring of 1964, 17-year old Marianne Faithfull walked into a swinging, star-studded London party and landed a record deal without singing a note; Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones manager and world-class sleazeball, famously summed up the matter with his usual showbiz aplomb: "I saw an angel with big tits and signed her." Within the year, the bookish baroness' daughter was climbing the charts and making the rounds at concert halls and the BBC, thrust into a pop career she didn't much want in the first place. ("For one brief, blissful moment I thought I saw a way out of my pop nightmare," she wrote three decades later in her autobiography, Faithfull, which is every bit as insightful, vivid, and deliciously bonkers as Keith Richards' Life.) Faithfull was a passable vocalist with a folksy, melancholy, relatively generic lilt, but there was a certain vacancy and listlessness about her that suggested she'd not yet become comfortable in her skin. If you watch some of her earliest performances on YouTube, she has a way of making Lana Del Rey look present.
Faithfull started dating Mick Jagger in 1966, and her 60s output is generally only discussed in terms of how it relates to that of the Stones: "As Tears Go By" is more famous for being the first song Mick and Keith wrote together than for being Faithfull's debut single. On the personal front, though, the opposite was true: Notoriety had a way of sliding off the boys and sticking to Faithfull. After the infamous Redlands drug bust, the press dubbed her "Miss X" and, a bit more personably, "The Girl in the Fur Rug." ("SCANTILY CLAD WOMAN AT DRUG PARTY" screamed one representative headline.) To those closer to the Stones' circle, she was The Muse-- though by her account, her relationship with Jagger was a pretty mutual exchange of ideas, old records, and hallucinogens. Ever the avid reader, a little while prior to the Beggar's Banquet sessions, Faithfull handed him The Master and Margarita and suggested that this Lucifer guy might make for a good character in a song. She wrote the lyrics to "Sister Morphine", and cut a shudderingly melancholy version that makes the Stones' take almost seem like a romp. This was maybe the first big, public hint that Miss X knew more about pain and suffering than a lot of people wanted to assume. When she slipped into the coma that almost killed her-- the result of taking 150 Tuinals in a hotel room in Australia-- she had a vision that Brian Jones, just six days in the ground, was beckoning her over a cliff. He leapt; at the last minute she decided to stay. When she opened her eyes in a hospital room six days later, Mick said, "Marianne, we thought we'd lost you." In that milky voice that was already starting to curdle, the first thing she said to him was, "Wild horses couldn't drag me away."
That's the thing about pretty faces. We'd much prefer to watch them wilt. We don't expect them to belong to the fighters-- the junkies and monks and cockroaches who'll survive every atomic bomb and suicide attempt and outlive us all. And we definitely don't expect them to make songs as gnarled and candid as the ones on Faithfull's finest record, Broken English, but there you go: the best records are all, in some way or another, the ones that blow a mouthful of smoke in the face of expectation. The world that thought it had tsk-tsked Miss X into submission was probably not ready for Broken English in 1979, and even today as it's released in a deluxe edition, it's still raw enough to make you squirm-- the cracked, undead voice of a woman back from exile to make a record about the simple audacity of staying alive.
If you know one thing about Broken English, you probably know that Faithfull was living on the streets right before she made it. And unlike the Mars Bar myth (now thoroughly debunked by Faithfull, Keith Richards, and an honest-to-goodness policeman), this checks out. Broke, heroin-dependent, and (it seemed) professionally washed up, Faithfull spent the better part of two years living in a roofless pile of rubble in Soho, a bombed-out ruin of the Blitz. She was squatting with her then-husband Ben Brierley (of British punks the Vibrators) and riding the unexpected success of her forlorn ballad, "Dreamin' My Dreams" (a dud at home but a surprise hit in politically tumultuous Ireland, where, in 1976, "forlorn" was the mood of the hour) when somebody at her label rather improbably gave her the money to cut another record.
The resulting album feels so intimate and personal that it's easy to overstate its singularity. But Broken English is more than just a portrait of the addict as a middle-aged woman; it captures an entire generation's disillusioned comedown. "The days of mind-opening drugs were over," Faithfull writes in her autobiography, reflecting on the spiritual climate of the mid-70s. "The world had tilted. A major change in key had taken place. It was a Mahler symphony whirling madly out of control." And that's the key in which these songs were written and recorded. Much in the way the Stones did in the late 60s, Broken English taps into a collective consciousness. The new-wave-tinged title track evokes the anxious, prickling paranoia of the Cold War, a chillingly grim cover of "Working Class Hero" longs for the counterculture's idealistic faith in individuality, and the excellent "Brain Drain" ("Got so much to offer/ But I can't pay the rent/ I can't buy you roses 'cause the money's all spent") captures the hopelessness of the junkie's lifestyle. A rapidly deteriorating Tim Hardin co-wrote the lyrics on that last one with Faithfull and Brierley on a debauched trip to Antigua. Both implicitly and explicitly, it's a ballad of wasted genius. It's one of the last songs to bear Hardin's name-- he was dead of an overdose a little over a year after the record came out.
After dabbling in baroque pop and country, Faithfull drew fresh inspiration from the Sex Pistols and Brierley's clan in the late 70s, but Broken English is a punk record more in spirit than in sound. (It doesn't sound much like any of her subsequent records either; afterwards, she moved towards the Weill-meets-Tom-Waits-in-a-dank-cabaret sound of the excellent Strange Weather.) Stylistically, Broken English is a fusion of new wave, blues, reggae, and pop, created by a backing band talented enough to genre-hop deftly. Guitarist Barry Reynolds adds a particularly distinct flair to the record; on the incendiary "Why D'ya Do It", his barbed, sneering riff is the perfect match for Faithfull's legendary performance. Easily one of the best songs in her repertoire, "Why D'ya Do It" is also probably the most controversial-- a Heathcote Williams-penned, unfiltered torrent of lovers' rage scattered liberally but purposefully with a few words that still have the power to shock.
Broken English's most affecting moment is Faithfull's spellbinding rendition of Shel Silverstein's "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan", a song about a bored housewife dreaming of the exhilarating life and "thousand lovers" she never had, slowly going mad. Obviously, it's far from autobiography, but when you know Faithfull's history (a veritable primer on the pitfalls of an exhilarating life), the subtext becomes almost unbearably poignant. "Lucy Jordan is me if my life had take a different turn," she has said. "It's a song of identification with women who are trapped in that life and the true private horror of the 'good life.'" But the pain in her fractured voice tells a more complicated story, pointing towards the classic catch-22 that still plagues famous and unfamous women alike: The world will size you up and make you choose one of two roles, Miss X or Lucy Jordan. And the worst of it, Faithfull is saying in this evocative performance, is that the dreamy conjectures about what your life would have been had you chosen differently will not only prove incessant, they might actually drive you crazy.
The bonus material on this deluxe edition of Broken English doesn't add too much to the experience. With only one exception ("Sister Morphine"), the extra disc is all alternate mixes and extended cuts of the songs that made the record. If anything, the remixes' noodly accoutrements will make you appreciate the record's purposeful minimalism anew. In almost every case, wisely, producer Mark Miller Mundy and engineer Bob Potter let the unvarnished power of Faithfull's voice carry these songs. The deluxe edition also includes the great experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman's early music videos for "Broken English", "Witches Song", and "Lucy Jordan", but if you can make peace with the low quality you could have watched these on YouTube years ago. This particular re-release of Broken English isn't notable because of any new insight it brings to the listening experience, but for the simple fact that it might bring some new fans to an enduringly great record.
Faithfull has been clean for a while now, but she still speaks freely and unapologetically about the experiences that lead her to making this record. Last week I was listening to an interview with her that I assumed was current, done in promotion of the deluxe edition. I didn't realize it was a few years old until she started talking about Amy Winehouse hopefully and in the present tense. "She's young, she's rich, she feels absolutely immortal," Faithfull said, with obvious empathy. "They judge her [harshly]... but she's going to get through it all, I know it." Feeling a little haunted after hearing this, I put on Broken English immediately, and its sheer power and purpose had never felt more obvious. This record documents a particular shade of darkness not everybody lives to describe. Like Faithfull identifying with her opposite in Lucy Jordan, Broken English is an almost otherworldly communion with the other side; it's a record for the Joneses and the Hardins and the Winehouses and all the other voices that the wild horses dragged away before they could say anything this honest about their pain. Aching and defiantly alive, it still bleeds like it was cut yesterday.
