As Marianne Faithfull boils the kettle in her Dublin flat, I nip out to get her more Marlboro and ponder my opening question. Tempted, naturally, by those questions I'm not going to ask - and you can guess what they might be - I remain determined to keep it to music. And music is precisely what Marianne Faithfull is all about today. She is deadly serious about her work, and her new album Vagabond Ways is a very fine record indeed. So I skip all those "convent girl who fell in with Mick" stories, and those subsequent and factual tales of survival and I stick to the singing. Certainly that quite intimidating past is still very much part of what she is - her voice in particular - but these days it informs rather than dictates. These days, Marianne Faithfull, formerly of Hampstead, London, and now of Dublin, Ireland, is one of the most powerful performers around, forging ahead in ways that many of her contemporaries have long since forgotten.
The new album sees her in cahoots with everyone from Daniel Lanois to Frank McGuinness, and it's her first mainstream recording in four years. In between she has mainly been involved with the music of Kurt Weill - particularly her recording of The Seven Deadly Sins with the Vienna Symphony - all of it transforming her into something of a modern day cabaret queen. Add in the oldies like As Tears Go By and The Ballad of Lucy Jordan and you have a genuine artist, of some longevity who ought to be taken very seriously indeed. And perhaps her biggest talent is a deceptively simple one - choosing a song that suits her.
"I usually like songs that I wish I'd written. But with songs that have been done so well before, and they always have been by the person that wrote them, you'll not make them better - you just have to be very sure that you can make them as good in a different way. "I do a song as if I had written it, and I can pretend when I'm doing it that it's mine. For instance Tower of Song by Leonard Cohen - I would have sold my soul to write that song because it's exactly how I feel too. And I've used it like that - it's like my surrealist manifesto. What it must be like to sit down at least once a week and write something like that, I can't imagine."
Whatever it is she sings, it always seems to be somehow autobiographical - and yet the notion of "covers" is often dismissed in music circles as some kind of second-hand expression. The reality of course is that many cover-artists are not attempting to express anything in the first place.
For Marianne Faithfull, however, the well-chosen cover can serve a deeply personal and entirely meaningful purpose. Someone else's song can be a very powerful thing indeed.
"When I was in the programme in Boston and New York, I noticed that when you were in a meeting and maybe feeling that you wanted to say something, somebody else would say exactly what you wanted to say - perfectly. I think that's when I realised that you can't do everything yourself and that somebody else will get it just right. "It's something to do with understanding that these songwriters are so special and daunting and unique, but at the same time, sometimes it could have been me who wrote the song, and perhaps they could have written one that I wrote. So a lot of it is whoever plucked it down first. "There are some things that I find just too hard to try because they're so perfect. For instance I would never do Girl or A Day in The Life. I'd love to do Pain in My Heart but I wouldn't touch it. It's just impossible."
Many writers have a real need for a collaborator while others simply cannot contemplate the process at all. With her own very first hit a co-write between one of rock's most successful collaborations, Jagger and Richards, Marianne Faithfull has had long experience of working closely with another. What she personally looks for in a collaborator is, she jokes, "total obedience" - pointing out, still joking, that she didn't get it from Frank McGuinness. He was involved in two of the songs on the album, notably on one of the stand-out tracks, Electra. "I can depend on Frank. He argues if he doesn't agree with me but he gives me a lot of leeway. And he likes the changes that I make to his lyrics. And I'm right because Frank has a tendency to be almost too poetic and too literary and what I'll do is change that as much as I can. "I do have to go on at Frank all the time - not to make it too complicated, not too many long words. He is so incredibly educated and sometimes it's hard to bring that into rock 'n' roll - although I really think you can. Of course some people don't think so. I remember when I wanted to make A Secret Life, I went to Jack Nitzsche and he couldn't see how you could make the lyrics of The Wedding into a rock 'n' roll song."
Vagabond Ways comes directly out of 11 months on the road with The Weimar Cabaret and the recording of The Seven Deadly Sins. For Faithfull, the experience of performing the works of Brecht and Weill was like "a fantastic sabbatical". In terms of singing and performance it has moved her into an entirely different place.
"I couldn't have done anything better for my own writing or my own performance. It's taught me a hell of a lot about what they call `working a song.' It's really all the stuff I knew already - but more so. "I already knew that it was all about creating a character and telling a story, but doing Brecht was like taking a Masters." That creation of characters can be a risky business for a singer. As Lou Reed (another Brecht/Weill fan) put it in an interview with me for The Irish Times - "The assumption of a character's voice is really fun, but sometimes they can linger on. Sometimes they're so close you kinda wish you hadn't opened that door." For Marianne Faithfull, singing a brutally honest song, even if she hasn't written it herself, is a matter of skill and control. "I know the public don't like to think that, because there is a tendency to want you to be whatever it is you're playing. But I've got very skilled at that now. I've done it with Lucy Jordan and with a lot of characters. But in my case I am still singing about myself. "I know that for sure because every character in your dream is you. Everybody in my songs is me, is all about me - absolutely. But it's not actually a linear, autobiographical thing - it's a created thing and so you can jump around. I can make myself young and poor or pregnant at 14. "I can do anything because I'm in charge. With Electra I said to Frank that there wasn't really a great song about a really, really, wicked, wonderful bad woman and why don't we write one? And that turned into Electra.
File It Under Fun From the Past is one of the songs on the new album which will inevitably be interpreted as a commentary on the old days. Given her status which grows to myth in certain quarters, this song and others will surely provoke intense speculation from trainspotters everywhere - all of them looking for clues. Faithfull herself is well aware of it and, now that the album is out, admits to being "in dread" as to how the songs might be misinterpreted. Certainly File It Under Fun From the Past seems clear enough.
"I never really like to specify what it's about because I have an ego too - but it's about somebody that I loved very much. And where do you put these feelings ? People are always asking me this and so I said well OK, I'll tell you. It's about love and you don't regret love. If you do, it wasn't love. "But then, it's very, very naive to think that everybody is what they appear to be, and that the part they're playing is who they are. Of course every part you play, on the stage or in the movies or in songs, has got to have a bit of you in it or it wouldn't work, but it's not the whole picture. That's why so many people have a hard time writing songs - it's a fear of revealing too much. In this case I just got reckless."
Marianne Faithfull puts the kettle on again. I could sit here all day.