Well this was a revelation. Having spent a decade in the wilderness of poverty, drug dependency, and eating disorders, Faithfull comes back with an album of confessional, cathartic, and downright furious music.
Her voice has a bit of a Stevie Nicks quality to it, an impression further reinforced by the track Witches Song, with its folk-rock feel and themes of sisterhood and witchcraft. The more bluesy Brain Drain could also, perhaps, be a Fleetwood Mac/Nicks song.
The rest of the album, though, touches more on Eighties pop with its synth-based sound, like the title track Broken English, or goes to deeply dark places. Even Broken English, which is quite commercial sounding, is about terrorist Ulrike Meinhof - “Cold, lonely, Puritan”, asking “What are you fighting for?”
And it’s this sense of examining the experiences of women that informs the album. Guilt is inspired by Faithfull’s Catholic upbringing and explores why we should feel guilt when “I never stole a scarf from Harrods, but if I did they wouldn’t miss it”. She covers The Ballad of Lucy Jordan which is a Hedda Gabler-esque tale about a housewife who will never “drive through Paris with warm wind in her hair”, until she is driven insane and lives that life only in her imagination. There’s a touch of Janis Joplin in her delivery.
There’s a fierce version of Lennon’s Working Class Hero, delivered over a dark, pulsing electronica beat that serves to emphasise the bitterness in Faithfull’s voice, which leads into the climax of the album, the marvellous Why D’Ya Do It?, an excoriating, furious, expletive-laden attack on an unfaithful man. If you think Alanis Morissette’s tracks on Jagged Little Pill are those of a ferocious woman scorned, this one will burn your ears off. I loved it.
It sometimes feels with this list that I’m in a neck-and-neck race with Death. By the time this gets published, it’ll be a year and a bit since Faithfull died, it’s a lot closer when I listened to this album. Lorna Doom from Germ passed away not long before. I guess that we’re still in a period from 45 or more years ago, making the artists on average in their mid-60s, so it’s perhaps not surprising, especially among people that lived fast. I originally wrote that some stars seem indestructible, mentioning a new Black Sabbath tour. About a week after I wrote that, Ozzy Osbourne died, so I'm going to stop saying things like that. At least these artists have left their music, and this album alone is a worthy testament to Marianne Faithfull.
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