Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Marianne Faithfull

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СКАЧАТЬ Don’t change a thing!’ But what Bob really likes to hear is young people criticising him. Because he loves saying what he really thinks. They’ll say: ‘Why don’t you play more new music, Bob?’ And he says things like: ‘Well, Scott from Arlington, the thing is, there’s a lot more old music than there is new music.’ That’s an argument I wouldn’t have thought of, and so very typical of him. He basically thinks modern music is crap, but he does play it occasionally. He played a Blur track the other day called ‘Coffee & TV’, but most of what he plays is stuff you’ll only hear on some old hipster like Hal Willner’s answering machine, the wildest, oldest stuff you can imagine.

      Bob still thinks of me as the angelic Marianne of the mid-sixties and whenever he sees me drinking and smoking he gets a bit cross. I’d like to say I’ve reformed – I have actually, I hope that doesn’t disappoint – but unlike Bob I haven’t found God in the process. Bob is very religious but when it gets to God and all that, I feel I have to say to him: ‘You know, Bob, I’m really not religious actually.’ I know I shouldn’t say those things, but I feel I have to. I’m not a pagan or a witch or anything dark or satanic, I’m just a humanist like my dad. But it’s all over the place. Religion, God, Christ on the cross. And if they’re not Christians, they’re Scientologists. Look at Bono, too, with his big cross and everything. I understand that people have to do what they have to do to get through, but I don’t think you have to impose your thing on other people. But I do know that when you make that kind of statement to Bono, you’re kind of left out, they cut you out of their plan. ‘Oh, well, if she’s not Christian …’ They look askance. ‘Must be something wrong there.’ That’s such nonsense. Christians have always done that. If you’re not part of them, then you’re against them, and I’m not against them, I just don’t want to be them.

      My 2002 tour promoting Kissin’ Time ended in Australia, which is where Bob Dylan was just beginning his tour. We sat together on his balcony with a full moon shining over Sydney Harbour, talking about music – and ourselves – with a smattering of light flirtation. He told me he’d listened to my recent record, 20th Century Blues, and that he loved Kurt Weill’s chords, and he would eventually use them in those thirties-type songs on Modern Times. Kurt Weill took many of his melodies from music he heard in the synagogue and I’m sure Bob knew that.

      I love to hear Bob talking about the blues and how we’re all linked to that music. That was very good for me to hear. And folk music. How you take that music and change it by running it through your own temperament.

      Bob understands my voice because he’s got a funny voice too. I saw him backstage when I was about to start work on Vagabond Ways with Mark Howard and Daniel Lanois and he’d just worked with them. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be fine with them. People like us with funny voices, they’ve only just now figured out how to record us, and the way is not to use digital. You have to use analogue recording equipment.’

      I love the way Bob uses his voice to create a persona. On his radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, you have Ellen Barkin saying, ‘It’s night time, a cat howls, the high heels of a prostitute clicking down the street, the moon shows for a second and disappears behind the clouds. Here’s your host, Bob Dylan.’

      What amazes me about the sixties, because, in my mind, of course, it’s only yesterday, is how historic it’s become. We’ll soon be lumped with the Battle of Culloden, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Armada, and the invention of the loo. Over forty years ago! Longer! The strangeness of the whole passing pop parade – from Mod to Hippie to Glitter to Punk – will soon be part of the Ancientness of Olde England. It’s odd, too, that the sixties, with its grand image of itself, ended not with a whimper but a bang – and woe betide any who got in the way of its thrashing apocalyptic tail.

      Looking back, it wasn’t such a bad idea to go to the country like Paul and Linda and not see anybody after the sixties. It was rather a wise thing to do because there was this dark cloud looming. It’s like that song of Roger Waters that I sing in my show:

       Do you remember me?

       How we used to be Helpless and happy and blind?

       Sunk without hope In a haze of good dope and cheap wine?

       Laying on the living-room floor

       On those Indian tapestry cushions you made

       Thinking of calling our firstborn Jasmine or Jade.

      And then that ominous chorus:

       Don’t do it

       Don’t do it

       Don’t do it to me!

       Don’t think about it!

       Don’t think about it!

       Don’t think about what it might be

       Don’t get up to open the door,

       Just stay with me here on the floor

       It’s gonna get cold in the nineteen seventies.

      And that was written in 1968! That was prescient, if not your actual prophetic vision. Whatever we thought of Linda, and she didn’t make that great an impression on me, I think it was a credit to Paul that he didn’t marry a model. A module. Because that’s what all the others have ended up doing, they’ve married these modules. And they have children who also become modules.

      I heard a track from Paul McCartney’s album Ram the other day on the radio. And with an almighty whoosh it just took me right back to those times I spent living on the streets, and then I found myself thinking about dear old Mike Leander who had been my producer on the early albums. Mike talked me into making that record that was released in 2002, called Rich Kid Blues. Hysterical! In fact it was never finished, and I never really liked it because it was made during my heroin addiction. This was 1972, and I was very, very sick indeed. But listening to this album now, all these years later, I think it’s really rather lovely, even though my voice is very weak. What the record represents is a very important moment in my life, when I, as a junkie, was shooting up on the streets, and then suddenly this really nice man, Mike Leander, comes and finds me hanging out on some corner and makes a record with me. He somehow managed to scam some money and took me into a really cheap studio somewhere in Soho with just a guitar player. Mike played me some songs and then asked what I was listening to. I was really into Cat Stevens’s haunting Tea for the Tillerman album, which every woman in the world seemed to love back then.

      I remember that Mike played me Paul McCartney’s Ram and I thought it was just brilliant. He said, ‘Let’s try and do something like this record.’ And then he gave me some money to get me off the street. I actually remember leaving the studio that day with a copy of Ram tucked under my arm and all this cash to get some digs. That very day I managed to find a little flat and I set up home listening to Macca’s wonderful record. Even now Ram brings a tear to my eye whenever I put it on. Rich Kid Blues is a sweet, folksy collection that is very redolent of the period – you know, James Taylor, Melanie and Janis Ian, that short-lived era of singer songwriters. I hoped it might fly, but then suddenly Glam Rock came along – which, as irony would have it, Mike was instrumental in because he was Gary Glitter’s producer – and my poor little record was consigned for nearly thirty years to the dustbin of oblivion deep in СКАЧАТЬ