Year One

by Marianne Faithfull, David Dalton

This extract from 'Faithfull', Marianne's autobiography was specially prepared for the Penguin 60s series; she is assisted in the writing by David Dalton.

Ondon in the sixties, and Marianne Faithfull's first fateful encounters with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Marianne Faithfull is the daughter of an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat and a British army nurse. She was brought up in Lancashire and Oxfordshire, and was educated in a convent before moving to London. Her first hit 'As Tears Go By'. written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, launched her musical career, which has spanned four decades. 'Faithfull', her acclaimed autobiography published in Penguin, recounts with candid humour the exploits and adventures, highs and lows, of an extraordinary life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Music

52 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Marianne Evelyn Gabriel Faithfull was an English singer and actress who achieved popularity in the 1960s with the release of her UK top 5 single "As Tears Go By" and became one of the leading female artists of the British Invasion in the United States.
Born in Hampstead, London, Faithfull began her career in 1964 after attending a party for the Rolling Stones, where she was discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham. Her 1965 debut studio album Marianne Faithfull, released simultaneously with her studio album Come My Way, was a huge success and was followed by further albums on Decca Records. From 1966 to 1970 she had a highly publicised romantic relationship with Mick Jagger. Her popularity was enhanced by roles in films, including I'll Never Forget What's'isname (1967), The Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) and Hamlet (1969). But her popularity was overshadowed by personal problems in the 1970s, when she became anorexic, homeless and addicted to heroin.
During her 1960s musical career, Faithfull was noted for her distinctive melodic, high-register vocals. But, in the subsequent decade, her voice was altered by severe laryngitis and persistent drug abuse, which left her sounding permanently raspy, cracked and lower in pitch. The new sound was praised as "whisky soaked" by some critics and was seen as having helped to capture the raw emotions expressed in her music.
After a long absence, Faithfull made a musical comeback in 1979 with the release of a critically acclaimed seventh studio album, Broken English. The album was a commercial success and marked a resurgence of her musical career. Broken English earned Faithfull a nomination for a Grammy Award for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance and is regarded as her "definitive recording". She followed this with a series of studio albums including Dangerous Acquaintances (1981), A Child's Adventure (1983) and Strange Weather (1987). Faithfull wrote three books about her life: Faithfull: An Autobiography (1994), Memories, Dreams & Reflections (2007) and Marianne Faithfull: A Life on Record (2014).
Faithfull received the World Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2009 Women's World Awards, and in 2011 she was made a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the government of France.

Reviews

[Daren · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a Penguin 60s book of 48 pages and is an excerpt from her autobiography Faithfull.
This excerpt is about Faithfull and The Stones - 1960s London, her career taking off at the same speed her marriage to John Dunbar was collapsing. Her version - as a drug-addled artist, he had no income and was living off Faithfull's earnings, and wasn't keen on her becoming involved in drugs (to protect her income). More and more she went out to spend time with her friends and obtain her own drugs! Primarily it was Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg whose flat she ended up at. Keith Richards was inevitably hanging about there, and Mick Jagger was around and about too. The rest is history, and well publicised history too I guess.

I enjoyed this, and would be tempted to read the whole biography given the chance - mainly because I am a Stones fan, and haven't really read much about them, although the promiscuity in the '60s probably doesn't make any of these characters look good, it was what the '60s were about. Faithfull doesn't pull any punches, and why would she, when well after this chapter she shares her downward spiral into drug addiction (albeit not in this excerpt).

Very well selected excerpt.
5 stars.

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excerpt from Marianne Faithfull's full biography this was a lovely and rather foreboding look into the mid-sixties when Faithfull first fell in with the Rolling Stones. It vividly brings out the lushness of the 60's as it was in the there and then and as it is told in first-person, retrospective narrative which works well (In fact I am not sure there is any other way that WOULD work, the social conditions were so different then that telling them in a current context would be kind of horrible).

It is a nice into to that world and Faithfull's story in it's own right but it makes me want to track down the full autobiography and read it one day.

[Gerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a recording artist Marianne Faithfull was never one of my particular favourites but she was an interesting personality and regularly made the news by some of her more outrageous exploits. 'Year One' is an excerpt from her best-selling autobiography 'Faithfull' and concerns her early encounters with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones.

It is a very entertaining and honest read despite being full of hedonistic tendencies with drink, drugs and sex to the fore. She even comments on one occasion when Brian Jones was pestering her, 'I was unable in those days to say no to anybody.'

This extract begins in 1966 when she describes London as it then was, 'Bengalis selling scarves with magic signs on them, two buskers in Elizabethan rags playing hurdy-gurdies and tiny drums, two hustlers selling knock-offs of those big plastic Biba bracelets when she was lodging in Courtfield Road, Earls Court, with Jones and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg. She describes the period as 'The Paint-It-Black Summer'.

She felt that she should have been grown-up but that she was still 'very much a child playing make-believe ... Convent girl reading forbidden books, budding bohemian [I was once described as 'mildly bohemian' in an annual report], pop star, wife, mother'. And in the circle around /Brian she had found 'desultory intellectual chit-chat, drugs, hip aristocrats, languid dilettantes and high naughtiness'.

Explaining that they were doing 'so many drugs - LSD and hash mostly - you had to be a bit careful on what you focussed on or you would become completely obsessed'. Then she was introduced to Keith and Mick Jagger when going to see the Stones play at Colston Hall, Bristol. Summing it up in hindsight she says, 'There was a lot more I could have done at the age of 19 that would have been more healthy than becoming Mick Jagger's inamorata.'

But that is what she became and, despite having a fling with Richards, who rejected her for Pallenberg, she felt 'there was definitely something very powerful physically with Mick'. However, her final word in this extract is 'It enhanced us both in a way that, in the end, almost destroyed me.'

It is certainly a read that invites the reader somewhat enticingly to have a go at the full autobiography.

[Russ Spence · Rating 4 out of 5]

there's never a good time to read a book in tribute to someone recently passed, but this has been on my list for a while, long before Marianne Faithfull's recent passing. It's a brief except of her life, starting in the middle of the "swinging" 60s, when she's in the middle of a pop career, with a young child and a dissolute husband who is living off her. Then she is dragged into the orbit of the Rolling Stones, mainly by Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg, and describes encounters with both Mick and Keith. This is worth reading for the recollections of another time, a time of peace and love, by someone painfully aware of the contradictions therein, where she feels beholden to sleep with Brian, then Mick, then Keith, because that was what you did at that time. Another point she talks about the drugs present in the scene at that time, and those drugs that it was done for her, as a woman, to partake of. I will read a fuller account at some point. A brilliant mind now lost to us

[Peseto Loco]

Aventurillas de una marrana con façade de mula.

[Liedzeit Liedzeit · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, she really loved Keith. Not, that I really care.

[Erin White · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vibrant excerpt from an autobiography- I’ve not explored this genre but I might now :)