Marianne Faithfull’s makeover of the John Lennon ballad “Working Class Hero” is one of the few covers to outclass a Beatle original, but such was her vocal delivery. The singer offered a conviction and gallows humor more powerful than the version on Plastic Ono Band. Driven by a jagged guitar hook, it was one of the songs on 1979’s Broken English, a record fuelled by her desire to reinvent herself from the soft, 60s “dollybird” muse of the Rolling Stones.
Listening to the album in 2025, Broken English encapsulates Faithfull’s artistry. It’s raw and taut, dotted with feminist perspectives, not least on “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan.” Like the best of her work, it was a story set to rhythm.
Faithfull maintained a love of the written word for the rest of her life. “Well, of course, my great hero of all time is Shakespeare,” she admitted to Rolling Stone in 2021. “I think he’s the most wonderful writer ever. And then Oscar Wilde. The great socialists in the world, Beatrice Webb. There are great Americans, too, like Edgar Allan Poe. Then there’s Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Napoleon is a bit of a hero.”
At the time of that interview, she was promoting her collaboration with violinist and songwriter Warren Ellis, She Walks in Beauty. The work was rich with wordplay and musical interpolations. In her hands, a reading of “Ozymandias” had metaphysical connotations, summoning a vocal from the bottom of her gut to demonstrate the wonder and awe behind Shelley’s words.
The daughter of a Baroness and a British intelligence officer, Faithfull was never suited to convention, as Broken English and She Walks in Beauty demonstrated. Oddly, her 1964 hit, “As Tears Go By,” set songwriters Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on a more conventional path, turning them from bluesmen to rock songwriters par excellence.
But to say that Faithfull set The Rolling Stones on their path is to do her legacy a disservice: there’s an emptiness to her vocal delivery, yearning for a life lonelier than the one the protagonist is singing about.
Faithfull later worked on “Sister Morphine,” although it was decades before she was rightfully credited for her contributions. She had her struggles with heroin, which she outlined in Faithfull: An Autobiography. She shouldered an acting career, which led to fiery performances in I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname and Girl On A Motorcycle (Faithfull was one of the first actors to drop the “f-bomb” in a mainstream feature.)
Never keen to rest on her laurels, Faithfull continued to push the paradigm of her work during the 21st century. She worked with Blur on Kissin Time; guitarist Damon Albarn could barely conceal his glee on the title track, his helium falsetto bouncing off her huskier growl.
Albarn later co-wrote “Last Song” with Faithfull on Before the Poison. Pink Floyd bassist Roger Waters contributed the mournful “Sparrows Will Sing” to 2014’s Give My Love to London, a record that paid tribute to the city of her birth.
Faithfull died on January 30th, aged 78. Tim Burgess from The Charlatans paid tribute to the singer on his social media account. “I first heard Broken English on a school trip in 1980 and it blew my mind,” he wrote. “She was such a free spirit and true talent.”
Broken English tipped its hat at John Lennon, and now it serves to eulogize Marianne Faithfull.
-Eoghan Lyng
Photo: Marianne Faithfull, 2008 (Andrew34 via Wikimedia Commons)
Very nice.
Lovely tribute, Eoghan. This is one sad loss.