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“I regret not having given more affection to my parents, but other than that, I don’t regret anything I did in the past.” 

*By Marcelo Sonaglioni
That’s nobody but Marianne Faithfull speaking, once again making clear her philosophy of life. It’s curious to read that most of the media spread the news of her death referring to her as “the Rolling Stones’ muse”, which is precisely the last thing she would have liked to hear about her, since throughout at least the last four decades she did everything possible to get rid of that label.

A definitive muse of pop in the ’60s, without a doubt, all supported by her almost soprano voice (at least until years and years of smoking took her pitch almost to the opposite extreme) and even that of “an angel with tits”, as Andrew Loog Oldham best came up with to define her when he discovered her, although he later ended up denying the statement. Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, also without a doubt, after he left Chrissie Shrimpton. Active member of the most intimate Stones circle and pivotal figure of the ‘Swingin’ London’ of that time? Nothing to argue about that.

The fact that she became famous after her recording of As Tears Go By only belongs to the past now, although it was the song that catapulted her career. But her relationship with Jagger ended in the worst way. She was heartbroken, and even made him indirectly responsible for having lost their child in her seventh month of pregnancy. At the end of the ’60s Marianne was completely torn and without direction. She decided to become a real “junkie” (as an avid reader of William Burroughs, the task wasn’t really difficult for her) and move to the streets. She survived, survived again, killed survival, and survived again.

She would only return to the ring almost a decade later, in 1979, with her album Broken English, the most successful of all she recorded (and there were many). Her last years were also about survival. This time it wasn’t drugs, but breast cancer and emphysema, bulimia, and even Covid, which in 2020 led her to end up hospitalized for almost a month and practically led to her death, but, a true expert in survival, Marianne Faithfull did it again. She left the France she had adopted (after denigrating her country of origin) and returned to her homeland.

Her activity in Latin America was limited, but no less significant. She went on holidays with her then boyfriend Mick (and her son Nicholas, from her previous marriage) to Rio de Janeiro and Salvador in early 1968. The sounds of the places they visited (add to that Bulgakov’s book The Master and Margarita, which Marianne had given to Mick) led him to compose Sympathy for the Devil. They returned to Brazil at the end of the same year, adding Keith Richards and his then girlfriend Anita Pallenberg to the traveling group.

Rio again, and then Matão, in the interior of the state of São Paulo (which Keith Richards historically referred to wrongly as “Mato Grosso”, confusing the city with the name of the state, and where the songwriting duo got the inspiration for their song Country Honk, the embryo of what later became Honky Tonk Women) The group continued their journey to Peru, but now without Marianne, who, tired of the heat, returned to England with Nicholas. These were Faithfull’s only adventures in South America.

At least until 1999, when she did three free shows in São Paulo city, later on surprisingly returning in 2011 to the country to perform in Brazil (Porto Alegre) and then in Buenos Aires, Argentina with a one-time concert at the Teatro Coliseo (“Marianne Faithfull – An Intimate Evening”, joined onstage by guitarist Marc Ribot) in September of that year. I can’t think of any better way to remember that visit from here than with the review of the show that I wrote in those days (Spanish only, sorry) Don’t ask Marianne about her death, then, because she surely won’t regret it either.

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