Marianne Faithfull: Broken English

I hoovered this up on one of my raids of Fopp's £5 stock on the basis of its longstanding reputation. When I mentioned to Tim that I'd got it, he remarked how good it was. "When was the last time you listened to it?" I asked. Not for many years, I think. Because it sounds very dated now, rooted chronologically and stylistically between Moroderised Donna Summer and Pat Benatar. Like Avalon a few years later, the production on this album seems to anticipate the shake'n'vac sterility of CD sound. I think there's a human drummer (musicians are listed — including the mighty Steve Winwood — but not their instruments), but s/he's trying to sound like a drum machine, and the bass often has a synthesised sheen to it. The most interesting part of the sound, the grain of Marianne Faithfull's voice, is pegged back in the mix, as though its very human character were something to be ashamed of.

The only song that I'd heard before I bought the album was The Ballad of Lucy Jordan. I'm almost certainly imagining this memory but I picture myself humming the song to myself as I was driven in a Pininfarina sports car, with the warm wind in my hair, through the late-night streets of… Hamburg. That would have been on my 1984 trip to Germany. The car was driven by a woman of whom I could never quite get the measure: she appeared a lot older than me — probably about 25 — and enthused to me about Werner Herzog and the making of Fitzcarraldo as she later drove me up to Schleswig-Holstein for the weekend. I don't remember her name. I kept a separate journal for that trip, but it disappeared from my private draw at home a few months later.

There's an interesting little story about the impact of the frank and graphic language in Why D'Ya Do It, which remains mildly shocking (as in "did she really sing what I think I just heard?") today. Ms Faithfull is still eating out on this tale of unfaithfulness according to this video:

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