Marianne Faithfull - “Never apologize, never explain — didn’t we always say that? Well, I haven’t and I don’t.”

29/12/1946 - 30/01/2025

‘Marianne Flowers” by the legendary photographer Gered Mankowitz [& Christian Furr]

 I was going to post Lucy Jordan . . . or As Tears Go By or maybe a clip from Girl on a Motorbike  . . . but then I thought . . . . a Bob Dylan cover . . . . 

but this will do nicely . . . . . 

this from 

Don's Tunes

Marianne Faithfull, rock ’n’ roll chanteuse and Rolling Stones muse died peacefully in London on Thursday.

The singer, actress, steely-eyed “It” girl of Swinging ‘60s London and subject of numerous Rolling Stones songs including “Wild Horses” and “Sister Morphine,” opened her 1994 autobiography with a disclaimer: “Never apologize, never explain — didn’t we always say that? Well, I haven’t and I don’t.”

Across 50 years as an artist, she issued solo albums including 1979’s bracing comeback, “Broken English,” 1987’s Hal Willner-produced “Strange Weather” and 2018’s “Negative Capabilities” with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

Along the way, she channeled her cigarette-stained rasp to interpret the work of Berthold Brecht and Kurt Weill, Elton John and Bernie Taupin, Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, Leonard Cohen, PJ Harvey, Neko Case, Dolly Parton, Morrissey and others.

She was a soprano when she met her future boyfriend Jagger at a party in London also attended by Richards, Paul McCartney and Peter Asher. Scouted by Rolling Stones producer Andrew Loog Oldham, Faithfull was in the recording studio with him, Jagger and Richards a few weeks later.

A regular in London’s gossip press of the 1960s, Faithfull was soon at the center of the thriving music and fashion scenes. She sang backing vocals on the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine” and the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” and hung with Bob Dylan during his historic 1965 run of shows in England. In 1967, Faithfull was famously photographed draped in a fur rug during a drug bust at Richards’ estate.

With sharp wit, keen intellect and disarming beauty, Faithfull accessed rooms where millions of Beatles-loving teens longed to be. She wrote in her autobiography of hanging out with Dylan and the Beatles during their peak success: “Jesus, how could I have ever thought these scared little boys were gods?”

By Randall Roberts

marianne here . . . .