Marianne Faithfull: A Child’s Adventure

Island Records ILPS 9734

It was one night in 1983, when tuning in to the Mike Hollis show via the legendary, appalling reception of the late lamented Radio Luxembourg (the poor sound was euphemistically referred to as ‘the Luxembourg fade’), that I heard a new single by Marianne Faithfull. It was called Running For Our Lives and quite surprised me, not for any musical or lyrical excellence, but simply the fact that it was by her. To me, Marianne Faithfull was an old name from the 1960s who I’d not known much about at the time, but who I’d rediscovered after the fabulous Decca Records compilation Rolled Gold had turned me on to the Rolling Stones in late 1975.

I should digress here by explaining that, having been a fan of early-to-mid-Seventies rock, I had completely failed to engage with Punk and New Wave, and had instead – with the exception of Bob Marley and the legion of dread poets and dub masters who jumped into the breach he had created with his Live At The Lyceum set in 1975 – turned my back on current music, gone completely retro and immersed myself totally in the classic sounds of the Sixties, a time I lived through and remembered but hadn’t understood or appreciated. Anyways, this had led me to Rolled Gold in the window of a record shop in Cowcross Street near Hatton Garden, which in turn prompted me to read a paperback version of Anthony Scaduto’s biography Mick Jagger which had chronicled Mick’s life and Sixties high times with Ms Faithfull.

As a result I purchased Decca’s The World Of Marianne Faithfull with its mauve DayGlo sleeve, which covered all the basics of her 1960s career, and also the later, perhaps more thoughtful compilation As Tears Go By. I liked her stuff from this period pretty well, it conjured up the times and all that, but I must stress that this was all 1960s ephemera to me – I had no idea at all that Marianne's career continued after her split with Jagger, hence my surprise on hearing the new single in 1983.

So, having listened to the track a few times (I had actually taped the Hollis show as part of a radio craze I was undergoing at the time, having also rediscovered Luxie after thinking it was no more), I toddled off to buy not the single, but the album from which it was taken, A Child’s Adventure. Frankly, I was not overly impressed with Faithfull’s voice, which was now somewhat tired and grainy, totally different from the sweet trilling found on her 1960s recordings – but the record was well produced and, despite a few bloopers such as The Blue Millionaire, which owed more than a nod to Grace Jones, there were a couple of other worthy numbers included. The extended album version of Running presented a world-weary, aimless take on life and love which suited the singer’s careworn image, while Ireland was topical, even controversial, in the wake of hunger strikes and the continuing IRA bombing campaign (the Harrod’s bomb attack took place a few months after Adventure was released). But my favourite was the side-one closer Morning Come, a beautiful, dreamy ballad that I would play over and over.

After this I thought Marianne deserved further investigation, so I tracked down her previous two albums, the critically acclaimed Broken English , which featured former Spencer Davis Group/Traffic singer Stevie Winwood on keyboards, and its follow up, Dangerous Acquaintances. English which was far more abrasive than what I’d heard on Adventure, with a weird take on US songwriter Shel Silverstein’s The Ballad Of Lucy Jordan, originally covered by Dr Hook & The Medicine Show who spelled it ‘Jordon’, and a rasping rendition of John Lennon’s Working Class Hero. But the song that seemed to grab most attention was the final track Why D’ya Do It, whose savage guitar riff was outdone only by its raw, shall we say, ‘blue’ lyrics. Acquaintances, with its title reference to Pierre Choderlos De Laclos’s 1792 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses, and later allusions to William Blake’s poem The Tyger, fell somewhere between English and Adventure, ditching the new wave arrangements of its predecessor for those of mainstream rock and pop which would be developed further on the latter.

I must confess, this latest fad of mine didn’t last long, my interest waning very quickly with the first two platters, which still lie in my record cabinet collecting dust, and leaving A Child's Adventure as a little-played reminder of a brief, early Eighties visit to mainstream pop inspired by one night of nostalgia rediscovering the Great 208. Morning Come really is sublime, though...