Marianne Faithfull, who has died at the age of 78, was a songwriter whose career spanned decades, but she was also an artist who embodied both the bright and the dark side of the 1960s dream. With early hits such as As Tears Go By, she helped create a new genre of bittersweet folk pop, the wistful melodies never quite papering over the melancholic undertow of her voice. But her achievements were quickly eclipsed by her relationship with Mick Jagger: she was a singer whom the world (and certainly Jagger) insisted become a muse.
That conflict between the public perception and Faithfull’s instincts as an artist – a good deal more avant-garde than those of Jagger’s Rolling Stones – proved crushing, and for many years she turned to alcohol and drugs to quell the storms that raged within. Then, in the late 1970s, she stepped out of the shadow of her early Jagger-adjacent notoriety and reinvented herself as a musician entirely of her own imagining.
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This was where Ireland entered her story in earnest. Born in London to a family of impoverished gentility, she had become infamous for the 1967 drug bust at Keith Richards’s Redlands pile, in southern England, from which she was led away wearing a fur rug – an incident that immediately threaded into rock folklore (even if many of the wilder rumours about the bash were inaccurate). If the English countryside made her a figure of scandal, however, it was in Ireland that she found herself again.
She lived here for many years: at various points her residences included a cottage in Co Waterford and the famous Victorian Shell Cottage on Carton Estate, outside Maynooth in Co Kildare. And it was Ireland that gave Faithfull her first real hit in nearly a decade, in the form of Dreamin’ My Dreams, in 1976.
“Dreamin’ My Dreams was released in Britain to a resounding silence. And then out of the blue a deejay in Ireland by the name of Patrick Kenny started to play it on his show and it went to number one in the Irish charts for seven weeks – the Irish love a waltz,” she wrote in her 1994 autobiography. “It was a fluke ... I don’t know whether it’s the church in Ireland or the drinking, but these people do know how to forgive.”
Ireland is a sanctuary. I don’t feel I have to watch myself all the time. I sometimes put my foot in it and say stupid things, but I don’t feel that bothered about being me. They’re very forgiving
The single’s success restored the confidence that had evaporated as the idealistic 1960s gave way to the cynical 1970s and her relationship with Jagger foundered. Ireland had sustained her in other ways too. She relocated here permanently in the late 1980s, when her mother’s health began to fade. “She wanted me to be closer to her. I didn’t want to come back to the UK. It was either Paris or Ireland, and in Ireland my friends have sustained me through a very fragile period of my life.”
Those friends included her former partner Paddy Rossmore, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat, who was so haunted by her drug addiction that he went on to establish one of the country’s first rehab centres, at Coolmine.
Faithfull knew great joy but also great tragedy in her life: in 1968 she and Jagger lost a stillborn daughter while she was travelling back to London from Ireland. But the country always seemed a lodestar for her – a place where one of the most misunderstood women in music could make sense of it all.
“Ireland is a sanctuary,” she wrote. “I don’t feel I have to watch myself all the time in Ireland. I sometimes put my foot in it and say stupid things, but I don’t feel that bothered about being me. They’re very forgiving.”
