MARIANNE FAITHFULL
Struck down by Covid in April, things looked bleak for the music legend. But new creation has come: calling from home, she tells us all about her romantic new album.
“Your memory comes back… my lungs are coming back too.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL
MARIANNE FAITHFULL’S forthcoming album interprets the 19th century British Romantic poets, assisted by Bad Seeds multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis and producer Head. Yet it very nearly didn’t come to pass. In early April, just weeks into lockdown, the singer spent three weeks in hospital with Covid-19.
In her first interview since recovery,
Faithfull admits she’s still feeling the aftershocks. “I really hurt my lungs,” she says. “This, after smoking most of my life and having emphysema. And my short-term memory is affected. But I’m told that when you have coronavirus as badly as I did, that happens.
But your memory comes back, and mine is coming back. And my lungs are coming back too. And I’ve made a beautiful record.”
She Walks In Beauty – named after Lord Byron’s portrait of immediate infatuation – was first discussed in 2019, after Ellis and Head had midwifed Faithfull’s twentieth solo album Negative Capability. But the new album’s roots go deeper: to her education at St Joseph’s Convent School in Reading, to be precise. “I had a wonderful, inspirational English teacher called Mrs Simpson,” Faithfull recalls. “Not a nun, obviously. She introduced me to the English Romantics. I had to leave it all behind in order to be a pop singer, but I never forgot them.”
Unable to meet up with her “fucking genius” collaborators, Faithfull recorded seven poems at home in Putney before Ellis added neo-classical arrangements at his Paris base. Brian Eno (arrangements and treatments), Nick Cave (piano) and Vincent Ségal (cello) also feature. Faithfull had only one demand: “No synth pads!”
“They had to come off,” says Faithfull, who brings into the conversation her late friend and former producer Hal Willner, who succumbed to Covid on April 7. “His death broke my heart,” she says. “And I so wanted to talk to Hal, to ask advice and play him tracks. And in a way, we did talk, and his message was – no synth pads!”
While Faithfull was able to record four more poems – in all, the album features three poems by Keats, two apiece by Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron, and one each from Thomas Hood and Alfred, Lord Tennyson – she couldn’t sing Byron’s So We’ll Go No More A Roving as she’d wanted. “The poem has been set to music before – Joan Baez sang it. Speaking it, I can hear all my pain. I think I’ll get my voice back. I just have to practise.”
Given what Faithfull has already survived – heroin addiction, breast cancer, hepatitis and suicide attempts among them – you wouldn’t bet against the restoration of that commanding instrument. “I’m still working, still writing,” she says. “I’m still on the planet. I wish Mrs Simpson was still on the planet too, so she could hear my album.”