Review: Marianne Faithfull - Marianne Faithfull (1965)
Tracks: 1) Come And Stay With Me; 2) If I Never Get To Love You; 3) Time Takes Time; 4) He’ll Come Back To Me; 5) Down Town; 6) Plaisir D’Amour; 7) Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat; 8) As Tears Go By; 9) Paris Bells; 10) They Never Will Leave You; 11) What Have They Done To The Rain; 12) In My Time Of Sorrow; 13) What Have I Done Wrong; 14) I’m A Loser; 15*) Morning Sun; 16*) Greensleeves; 17*) House Of The Rising Sun; 18*) The Sha La La Song; 19*) Oh Look Around You; 20*) I’d Like To Dial Your Number.
REVIEW
Quick, close your eyes and try to remember which of your favorite artists released two different LPs of musical material on the same day — and who of them did it first. Prince? Tom Waits? Guns’n’Roses? Springsteen? Zappa? Donovan? (Some of the lists posted on the Web use Wear Your Love Like Heaven and For Little Ones from December ’67 as an example, but that’s really cheating, since both were just two parts of a double album, available as separate purchases). As time goes by, the practice has become more and more widespread, but it seems like those who want to trace back its history never bother venturing too deep into the past, or browsing through the registers of the underdogs.
To the best of my own knowledge, the honor of releasing two different LPs on the exact same day — April 15, 1965, to be precise, and I do mean «different», as in «two thematically and stylistically different entities, rather than an artificially separated double album» — belongs to Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull, a.k.a. the Honorable Hereditary Baroness von Sacher-Masoch who so narrowly missed a chance at gentrifying Michael Philip Jagger (imagine all those Stones hits credited to «Sacher-Masoch / Richards»!). The story goes thus: after being signed to Decca in the fall of 1964 and releasing two singles, one of which became a pop hit (‘As Tears Go By’) and the other one a folk flop (‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, no less), the label naturally wanted Marianne to concentrate on her pop side and drop the folksinger act. Marianne refused, and the only way to get her to compromise was to allow her to record two non-intermingling LPs in two different styles — a «pure pop» record and a «pure folk» one, releasing both simultaneously. Ironically, both LPs charted, and the folk one (Come My Way) actually rose a bit higher than the self-titled pop one — though both would be Faithfull’s only charting LPs until her 1979 comeback with Broken English, and even then she would never ever break into the Top 20 again.
Although, technically, of the two twin records Come My Way was the first to show its little head (it is catalogued as LK 4688, whereas Marianne Faithfull got LK 4689), we shall still begin with the self-titled record — when all the arguments pro et contra are weighted, Marianne still emerges as more of a «pop» than «folk» artist, and it is this LP that bears her name, after all. In addition, it was the only one of the two to be simultaneously released in the States, where it also climbed up to a respectable #12 on the charts — a mile higher than anything she’d be able to achieve there in the future.
Two things are immediately striking and potentially treasurable about the record: Marianne’s accent and Mike Leander’s arrangements, and I don’t even know which of the two is more important. Okay, since this is not a Mike Leander record, let us start with the accent. Although in her early, formative years, still relatively free of substance abuse, Faithfull had a clean, melodic soprano, and was capable of striking and sustaining pretty high notes (more prominent on Come My Way rather than here), she could hardly boast the confidence and expressivity of a bona fide pop diva like Petula Clark, nor did she have the full vocal power of a Judy Durham. To compensate for this, she did a thing that, perhaps through her invisible aristocratic European family roots, seemed to come fairly naturally — invented her own artistic diction. (One more thing, in addition to those pouty lips, that she had in common with Mick Jagger, who wanted to sound American, but couldn’t, so he invented his own Jaggerian dialect of English).
Seriously now, I have never heard any female artist from that era to own the same articulation scheme that Marianne has on her early albums. She may have been a secret fan of My Fair Lady and Professor Higgins, but the Mystery Accent that is flaunted here on every single song has not so much to do with the Queen’s English as it has to do with... well, think of it as maybe a mix of French Catherine Deneuve-style vowels with Swedish Greta Garbo-style consonants. It’s all very subtle, of course — it just requires a tiny shift of focus in one’s articulation — but the effect is smashing. With this little bit of trickery, Marianne Faithfull effectively lands the Continent in London in much the same way as Jagger brought the Delta to the same location. Twisted and mutated through the magic glass, but identifiable nevertheless: ridiculous and embarrassing to some listeners, haunting and otherworldly to others. (For the record, that’s just on the record — in her casual conversations, Marianne hardly ever displayed anything other than a typical, slightly posh British accent).
There is no doubt in my mind that it was this «mystery Eurowoman» flair and little else to make people so interested in the new young artist at the time — the songs that she sang were so much more about personality-dependent aura than about personality-independent musical hooks. However, another important component of that aura were the arrangements. For those, Decca paired Marianne with the young and still totally unknown arranger Mike Leander, whose biggest achievement at the time had consisted of spotting the talents of the even younger guitarist Jimmy Page, and convincing him to do session work as a means to earn a living.
When you put the record on, the first thing you hear is not Marianne Faithfull — it is the bright, sharp sound of a playful harpsichord, an instrument that you are going to get a lot of on this album, which, I believe, could be rightfully called one of the first, if not the first, authentically «baroque pop» records to be released in the UK. Harpsichords, chamber strings, harps, chimes, woodwinds, you name it — everything we come to associate with the classically-influenced pop records of the swingin’ Sixties era is here in spades, making this into one of the richest-arranged records of 1965. At times, the raging complexity of the production seems to go overboard, but it is hard to dismiss the impression of Leander as a little kid who just broke into a closed-off candy store, grabbing whatever he pleases and gorging on stuff as if this were his first and only chance to experience all the delicious tastes. And on top of all this comes Marianne’s wonderland-Euroaccent. Who could not be enchanted back in April ’65?
At the center of the candystore comfortably sits ‘As Tears Go By’, the song that the Stones may or may not have written specifically for Faithfull — accounts differ here — but which, unquestionably, fits in better with her than it would ever fit with them: Mick would later do an impressive job trying to re-appropriate the tune for the band, but for him, this required a chameleonic twist and a push for the listener to suspend disbelief, whereas to Marianne, "my riches can’t buy everything / I want to hear the children sing" comes as natural as pie, even under the cloud of the Euroaccent. The only advantage that the Stones had when they employed Leander to re-arrange the song for them was his ability to slow down the tempo and make the 1965 version of the song even more baroque than it was in the faster, more upbeat, and inevitably less nuanced version of 1964 (when the arrangement was still under a serious influence from Leander’s idol, Phil Spector). But the nostalgic, melancholic, medievalistic atmosphere of the song certainly requires it to be sung by a princess in the tower, and last time they held the casting for princesses in towers, I heard Mick Jagger wasn’t doing too well.
It is worth noting at this juncture, perhaps, the weird role played in the life of both Mick and Marianne by the original shapeshifter of their images, Andrew Loog Oldham — who allegedly discovered her at a party, hooked onto her more for her innocent-seductive beauty than her singing qualities (his most famous description was "an angel with big tits"), and decided to market her as his expressly angelic counterpoint to the decisively devilish presence of Mick and the Stones. The way Marianne’s «angelic» persona would later rub off on Jagger, as the Stones themselves dipped into baroque pop and literary excourses à la ‘Sympathy For The Devil’, is well-popularized and undeniable — but less explored is the opposite way of Jagger and the Stones’ «devilish» personalities rubbing off on Marianne, if only because so few people ever take the time to listen to her records. At this starting point, there may be only a slight dot of the Stones’ darkness in the works of Marianne, and vice versa, but all through the rest of the Sixties we shall be witnessing an exciting, disturbing, and sometimes creepy diffusion between the two, and at the bottom of it all stands the sick, twisted, but temptingly exciting evil mind of Andrew Loog Oldham, the guy who would probably be «cancelled» in the blink of an eye in the 2020s, but without whose meddling we would probably have been deprived of some of the juiciest artistic achievements of pop music’s best decade...
Anyway, back to business. Aside from ‘As Tears Go By’, the overall track listing on Marianne Faithfull is not that terribly exciting or unpredictable. Notable — for a female pop artist — is the total exclusion of American or British showtunes; instead, Faithfull and Leander prefer to rely on contemporary pop and R&B songwriters, such as Jackie DeShannon (who wrote ‘Come And Stay With Me’ specifically for Faithfull) and Burt Bacharach (‘If I Never Get To Love You’), as well as expectedly digging into the French pop songbook (‘He’ll Come Back To Me’, ‘They Never Will Leave You’) and tipping their hats to the Beatles (‘I’m A Loser’ — I suppose they specifically wanted to pick out the potentially gloomiest Beatles song to-date, and so they did). The two biggest concessions to the pop glamour of the time are, arguably, the two weakest numbers: ‘Down Town’, a big hit for Petula Clark whose love-of-life attitude feels alien to Marianne’s vocal style (not that this well-acknowledged socialite did not love life herself, but her Euroaccent really only worked when the princess was confined to the tower rather than tried to escape it) — and the Herman’s Hermits hit ‘Can’t You Hear My Heartbeat’, whose only prominent feature is that you get to hear Marianne make orgasmic noises during the fade-out (few things feel hotter to male audiences than watching hearts of Ice Queens melt before their eyes, even if they’re just faking it).
I do not feel the urge to go into details on particular songs, since I have already attempted to describe the most important features which tie them all together — and most of these have been done better by other artists anyway. One big exception is ‘Come And Stay With Me’, a nice country-influenced pop ditty from DeShannon whose message of innocent loyalty and devotion was clearly written with Marianne in mind: it is hard not to be charmed by her lip-synced performance from the Hullabaloo TV show, where a beautiful smile combined with a total lack of motion somehow complete the musical picture. (Compare Cher’s cover of the song which feels so totally unnatural — when Marianne sings "I’ll send away all my false pride / And I’ll forsake all of my life", you want to believe her; Cher, who is physiologically incapable of conveying vulnerability or loving submission, is definitely not fooling anyone, not even Sonny). Another little baroque beauty, co-written by Jackie with her then-lover Jimmy Page, is ‘In My Time Of Sorrow’ — a song whose telling key changes from the moody and morose ("in my time of sorrow, in my time of feeling bad...") to the nostalgically uplifting ("oh what I’d give, just to relive all of the good times that I’ve had...") now sort of eerily predict Marianne’s own life story, though she could hardly have imagined the horrors that were waiting for her at the time.
A few of the songs were written by Leander himself (usually credited to his legal name, Michael Farr), and they are neither too good nor too bad — rather decent, moderately catchy, middle-of-the-road pop ditties whose arranging and singing styles are far more memorable than the melodies. The best of these is probably ‘Morning Sun’, a stately ballad only available on the expanded CD issue of the album — it was the B-side to John D. Loudermilk’s ‘This Little Bird’, Marianne’s fourth single which was used to open the US variant of the album (quite a haunting and deservedly successful performance which allegedly brought Marianne a lot of discomfort, since she had to do publicity photos with doves on her shoulders and she allegedly hates birds!). ‘Morning Sun’ may not be a better song than the A-side, but it definitely has a better arrangement, what with those echoey, weirdly processed harps looping around your ears in the intro, mini-solos from woodwinds and an almost psychedelic fade-out.
A good example where Leander’s creativity really goes off the rails is their arrangement of ‘Greensleeves’, which was used as the B-side to ‘As Tears Go By’. The introduction, with its echoey background vocals and epic soaring spaghetti-western strings, is practically Morriconesque — 16th century England meets the Wild West! — and the instantaneously recognizable melody of the theme is carried across exclusively by Marianne’s vocals, while the wildly rampaging instrumentation around her does everything but that, with violins, cellos, pianos, and percussion creating not so much a single, Spector-style, wall of sound, as building up random mini-walls around the place. It’s a weird as heck approach that probably does not work, but is well worth getting acquainted with: I mean, who else would think to fuck so much with frickin’ ‘Greensleeves’ in the fall of 1964? Only a great-great-descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and a guy who took his artistic name from the Greek hero who would cross the Hellespont every night to be with his one true love. In any case, if you ever decide to check all of this harpsichord madness out, it will certainly bring you a different — or, at least, expanded — perspective on the guy who most people only know for arranging the strings on the Beatles’ ‘She’s Leaving Home’.
Whatever be, Marianne Faithfull is a classic, textbook example of how, when you do not really have a huge amount of substance at your disposal, you can still make things intriguing and impressive on the whole by almost literally drowning substance in style. To be successful, the enterprise still depends on a proper alignment of the stars, and few times in the history of popular music boasted a more successful alignment than the brief window of 1965–66 — arguably, neither Marianne’s odd enunciation nor Leander’s production style would have felt so unusual and transcendent in a post-Revolver or post-Hendrix era. (Like many others, I guess, my first acquaintance with Marianne Faithfull was through her performance of ‘Something Better’ in the Rolling Stones’ Rock’n’Roll Circus, where she felt totally out of place, out of date, and out of style with everything else that was taking place in late 1968). But in early 1965, this fresh, peculiar take on the young-and-innocent pop diva worked just fine — even if this image was far from the artistic ideal that Marianne herself would prefer to symbolize, and did her best to bring to life on Marianne Faithfull’s twin companion, Come My Way.