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| Ten Thousand Motels |
MARIANNE FAITHFULL
Marianne Faithfull is set to take another step in her climb back from the brink of self-destruction by appearing in a London stage play for the first time in 30 years.
She will play Pegleg, the satanic lead in William Burroughs' fable, The Black Rider, which receives its English premiere at the Barbican Theatre in May.
"I've had all sorts of nonsense offers in recent years - they wanted me to be in The Graduate," she says. "But this play is exactly me."
After all, she was once publicly criticised by the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury. But Faithfull, now 57, has long since exorcised the worst devil in her life, heroin, and is no longer the high-risk investment she was in the 60s and 70s.
People only know my name - they don't know what I do
Marianne Faithfull bewails her media image
Then, her audition for one role ended abruptly when she "passed out cold", and at her lowest point she spent two years, homeless, on the streets of Soho.
"By becoming a drug addict you damn yourself immediately as a whore or a slut and a bad person," she says.
Fate seems to have dealt Faithfull some strange hands. Her mother was an Austrian baroness, a descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose novel, Venus in Furs, was the source of the term "masochism".
At 17, Faithfull was applying to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Royal Academy of Music. But then the Rolling Stones entered her life.
She was at a party with her boyfriend, John Dunbar, shortly to become the first of her three husbands and the father of her son, Nicholas, when the Stones' manager, Andrew Oldham, "looked across the room and saw an angel, with big tits".
She dated both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote As Tears Go By for the blonde with the doe eyes and full lips, "and the next thing I'm on tour with the Hollies and Freddie and the Dreamers. I hadn't made a life choice, but I got hooked."
A mother at 18, she rejected the advances of Bob Dylan, but not Mick Jagger. And in 1967, partying with Jagger at Richards' house, Faithfull was found to be naked under a bearskin rug - a Venus in Furs.
But then, being cast in the past has always been a millstone around her neck.
Dark arts
There has rarely been a franker autobiography than hers - how she really loved Keith, her lesbian encounters, losing Jagger's baby, her days in a drug and drink-induced coma in a Sydney hospital, how a lover and fellow addict at a Minneapolis clinic leapt from a 36th storey window.
You damn yourself immediately as a whore or a slut and a bad person
Faithfull on drug addiction
But "the hardest thing was that nobody would have asked me to do this book if I hadn't had these relationships with Mick and Keith. People only know my name. They don't know what I do."
In 1979 she earned respect in the music industry for the first time with a comeback album of her own songs, Broken English. The tiny, plaintive soprano voice had gone, to be replaced by a husky contralto.
And, like a damaged Dietrich, Faithfull's world-weary voice opened up the sombre cabaret of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, both on stage and with her album, The Seven Deadly Sins.
Faithfull once played Ophelia in Hamlet with Anthony Hopkins and Nicol Williamson.
Now a grandmother and on good terms with the son she abandoned when he was small, she has the chance to resurrect her acting career and complete another stage in her long quest to forge an identity in the present, rather than the past.
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| Steel Wheels |
Another one who needs to shut her tooter. |
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| glencar |
I like her swipe at "The Graduate" & by extension, Jerri Hall. |
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| Steel Wheels |
A case of one broad who sees herself in another.
Two useless, toothless, brainless cowards unwilling to crawl out from under their security blankets.
Meanwhile, why does That's How Strong My Love Is sound so perfect and pure through my earphones? The Stones have a magic. They are the real shaman that the joke psuedo-artist Morrison mused about.
Out of Our Heads makes me out of mine.
Satisfaction is still so grand to hear. A few licks, a few truths from Mick, Charlie as always Charlie. Magnificent and strong like a wild Arabian Stallion running for gold. God damn Charlie is good tonight and every night. Satisfaction has more emotion and attitude than the entire output of Areosmith, Grand Funk Railroad, Kiss, The Foom Fighters, Yes, Kansas, Foreigher, ELO, Genesis, The Who, Public Enemy, and Mariah Carey.
Charlie makes the track. His pounding. His wild, sexually charged beating. Like a savage tearing into your skull, like a swift kick to rip a door from it's hinges. Like a deviant having his way with your woman. That's Charlie.
My drummer, drums better than yours.
Damn right.
He drums better than yours.
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CHAT
ROOM aka THE FUN HOUSE] [
RESTROOMS]
