New romantics
Bad Seed and Grand Dame united through poetry. By Victoria Segal.
Marianne Faithfull With Warren Ellis
She Walks In Beauty BMG. CD/DL/LP
THANKS TO Lady Caroline Lamb’s description of Lord Byron as “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” the core matter of romantic poetry – revolution, revelation, the eternal quest for the sublime – has long been considered a young man’s game, an attitude that filtered down to the flamboyant rock seekers of the ’60s. It’s a joy, then, to hear a 74-year-old woman – one so often overshadowed by her male contemporaries – taking on the legacy of Byron, Keats and Shelley on She Walks In Beauty, staring them in the eye with an unflinching gaze, showing how completely she can inhabit their world.
Troubled by illness, addiction and homelessness across the decades, Marianne Faithfull has come closer to the porous extremes of life than most. She found herself on that unsteady ground again when she became ill with Covid-19 half-way through the recording of this spoken-word album. As she recovered in hospital, she discovered her medical notes had marked her down for palliative care only. That she returned to record Shelley’s monolithic, merciless Ozymandias – a dread-filled reminder that all human endeavour is destined for dust – or
Byron’s dying fall So We’ll
Go No More A-Roving, adds a sharp unscripted poignancy to the album. Yet even without those circumstances,
She Walks In Beauty would have been an emotional collection. Faithfull has loved these poems since she was at convent school, encouraged by an English teacher called Mrs Simpson: as a girl, Faithfull says, she liked to imagine they were all about her. Viewed in that light, Thomas Hood’s The Bridge Of Sighs, about a doomed young woman, or the references to Camelot in Tennyson’s The Lady Of Shalott (inspiration to Mick Jagger as he wrote As Tears Go By for Faithfull), land with the bittersweet impact of someone looking back at their past selves.
Now, though, the burnished patina of her voice carries all the experience needed for Wordsworth’s heart-breaking Surprised By Joy, or Keats’s Ode To A Nightingale, every word delivered with sculpted clarity. It’s not the only magical instrument here, though. Bad Seed Warren Ellis, displaying his usual impressive balance of eloquence and restraint, creates music that hovers on the right side of tremulous awe, never saccharine or sentimental. Nick Cave’s piano silvers these songs, too, alongside palely loitering cello and violin, while Brian Eno disrupts and distorts a starkly gothic La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
This is music that seems to inhale and exhale around Faithfull, making space for wonder to unfurl without crassly signposting it. To Autumn, Ode To A Nightingale, She Walks In Beauty: these are familiar – even over-familiar – poems. In these settings, however, Ellis and Faithfull hold them up to the light again, letting it stream through. Mrs Simpson, you hope, would approve.