Marianne Faithfull And The Dark Light Within Broken English
- betNwa
- Jun 12
- 4 min read
A love letter from betNwa, tracing the scars and sorcery of Marianne Faithfull's Broken English — a record that never let go.
It’s funny how lists can serve to highlight what was left off them. A list I made last month did just
that. To illustrate the dark effect of my dad’s listening habits on my childhood, I cited a song by
Lou Reed, “Kill Your Sons”, only to be haunted a few days later by the wisp of a melody,
'Witches’ Song' by Marianne Faithfull.
Shall I see you tonight, sisters Bathed in magic grief? Shall we meet on the hilltop Where the two roads meet?
I said that the effect of Dad’s music was dark, but in truth this is the lightest song on Broken English. Still, it’s light from a unique source, perverse and defiant.
Danger is great joy Dark is bright as fire
I think there can’t be many albums so aptly named. Broken English, to me, is Faithfull’s voice, here so richly lived-in it cracks after five steps up the scale. But it could also be her synopsis. By her late 20s she’d plummeted from the drawing rooms of swinging London, where she’d partied with Anita Pallenberg and the Rolling Stones, to a bombed-out vacant lot in Soho where she’d nod off for hours against a wall. Her voice, so the story goes, was damaged by laryngitis contracted during a homeless winter. In 1976-9, following a surprise return to recording after almost a decade that yielded an Irish number one (“Dreamin’ my Dreams”, a maudlin country song), Faithfull lived in a series of squats with the bassist from the Vibrators and hung out at punk venues, being cast as Ma Vicious in Who Killed Bambi, Russ Meyer’s unfinished Sex Pistols movie, and attending John Lydon’s wedding.
As she wrote later in her sharp vivid autobiography, by then she’d had a gutful of the convent-girl image, which even the “Butterfly on a Wheel” scandal hadn’t fully banished. To the British public she was the hapless innocent debauched by the Stones. But whereas the Stones had weaponised their notoriety following that famous drug bust, Faithfull was pitied or reviled, and a decade later still remembered as “Mick Jagger’s girlfriend”. From a newsreel of the arrest of Ulrike Meinhoff she took her album title, claiming “The same blocked emotions that turn some people into junkies turn others into terrorists,” and wrote a title track about that “Cold lonely puritan” that sounded like Pink Floyd gone new wave. From punk she took the bile, the belligerence, the willingness to play the villain. The result is an album so knowing, so bitterly sophisticated, that it scared me senseless as a child. The most terrifying track? Faithfull’s opus, “Why’d Ya Do It?” Here, she finally killed the convent girl once and for all.
“Why’d ya do it?” she said. “Why’d ya let that trash Get a hold of your cock And get stoned on my hash?”
Oh boy, that song is fire. I’ve never heard anything else quite like it. Musically a fusion of “Purple Haze”, reggae, new wave, and an atonal guitar solo straight out of the Lounge Lizards, it’s the perfect bed for Faithfull to get feral on. I suspect her years in the theatre helped here, firstly in her recognition of a transcendent script – the lyrics are a poem by squatter-activist Heathcote Williams, which Faithfull had to beg from him since he was hell bent on giving them to Tina Turner – and secondly in her performance, which barely qualifies as singing. It’s a monologue, a a rant, an unhinged tirade. It’s astonishing.
“Why’d ya do it?” she said. “They’re mine, all your jewels. You just tied me to the mast Of the ship of fools.”
There are three great interpretive performances on Broken English. The second is John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero”, which chilled my bones as a child: “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small.” You don’t say? I may be biased, having not heard the original till decades later, but Faithfull’s version has a cosmic gravitas that I don’t hear in Lennon. It’s the production, partly. The entire album is quintessential late-night late-70s: close-miked drums, spacious synths, spare funk grooves. The effect is one of seductive menace, a postpunk headphone album by a former hippy who can hurt your eyes open with a single howl.
The third act of interpretive alchemy is the slyly heartbreaking “Ballad of Lucy Jordan”, written by Shel Silverstein, author of kids’ book The Giving Tree and Johnny Cash’s “Boy Named Sue”. I don’t know if words can convey what this song does to me. It has lightly raked its nails across my consciousness since pre-puberty, since before the image of poor Lucy “’neath the covers dreaming of a thousand lovers” meant anything to me. Musically it’s bizarre – some spur-of-the-moment synth jam with guest star Steve Winwood, I’m guessing – but thoroughly cohesive. As a 20- and 30-something I mostly disowned or forgot Marianne Faithfull, reconnecting with her by chance at 28 in a foreign land before deciding that she, or this song in particular, was too sentimental. I guess I was in denial. I listened to “Lucy Jordan” just now and cried from start to finish. It’s an exorcism. It’s Faithfull saying goodbye to the dream of a nuclear family, incredibly, by narrating the story of a nuclear mother saying goodbye to the dream of a life like Faithfull’s. And to someone who also missed out on young womanhood, it’s a knife to the heart.
For whatever reason – my refusal to claim my inner feminine, I’m guessing – I did not realise how this album shaped me until that day a few weeks back when “Witches Song” called out from my childhood. “Danger is great joy” – for too long I followed that dictum. “Dark is bright as fire” – I hope, at last, that is not true.
Marianne Faithfull died in January this year. Her life was considerably more fascinating, and harrowing, than I have been able to summarise here.
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