Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Marianne Faithfull

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       i guess she kept those vagabond ways

      Singing Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht for two years was incredibly good for my writing. The bar shot right up. Not that I can now write like Bertolt Brecht or Kurt Weill, but still the experience of singing their songs on my sabbatical, as I call it, changed my way of thinking about songs – and the point of view of the song’s narrator. A kind of charged ambivalence that inflects all the imagery.

      Vagabond Ways is quite a dark record – which is my speciality as I do dark quite well! I had to go into that gothic space and I didn’t have to take heroin to do it. It’s the most unrepentant of my recent albums, but then, I hadn’t done anything so bad recently that I had to repent for except … well, let’s not go into that right now.

      By the time I came to record Vagabond Ways in 1999 I had been well marinated in the Brecht/Weill canon. It was like going back to school. You really learn how to use a song to tell a story. The song, ‘Vagabond Ways’, was written with Dave Courts, my dear old friend and hip jeweller – Keith’s skull rings. I came across a little piece in the New York Herald Tribune, where I do get a lot of material. The article talked about how in Sweden they hadn’t stopped their sterilisation initiative until 1974. These were programmes used to sterilise drug addicts, homeless people, nymphomaniacs and alcoholics. I was surprised.

      And when I read about this hideous practice I thought, ‘Oh, here’s a song!’ So I put myself into the character of the girl about to be sterilised. She’s talking to the doctor. And then at the very end it just says, ‘It was a long time ago.’ They took her child away. And she was sterilised. She died of the drink and the drugs, but yes I guess she kept those vagabond ways …

      It’s quite subtle, you know. Nobody ever believed me when I told them there is an actual story there. And a subject – other than myself. It’s quite hopeless. Everybody always thinks everything I write is about me.

      Of course there are some parallels or I wouldn’t be interested in the story in the first place. I’ve got to feel some empathy with this girl. But at the same time when I write a song or perform any of the songs, they’re stories. ‘Broken English’ was about Ulrika Meinhof. It wasn’t till years later that I understood that it could be about me, too.

      ‘Incarceration of a Flower Child’ is a Roger Waters song. But how perfect a lyric is that! It had so many reverberations about the sixties, the end of the sixties and the consequences. It’s possibly about Syd Barrett, the founder and original lead singer of Pink Floyd, who became deranged as a result of obsessive drug-taking in 1967 and spent most of his life in institutions – a legendary loon. He died in July 2006. But songs are composites, they’re about many different things, not just the ostensible subject. Roger wrote ‘Incarceration of a Flower Child’ in 1968 but he never gave it to Pink Floyd.

      Speaking of the past, ‘File it Under Fun’ is my way of dealing with my history. It’s about anybody I’d ever really loved. The title may sound a bit flip, but it’s not intended to be that ironic; it’s more true to my life, true to my feelings than sardonic. It’s got a kind of it’s-all-right-now feel, we’ll file it under fun, don’t worry about it. It’s true there’s a certain world weariness to it, but that’s probably because I’m always being asked about my past and it does get wearying. That was my reply at the time I wrote it anyway. I may have changed; Vagabond Ways is a long time ago.

      The title, ‘Wilder Shores of Love’, is taken from Lesley Blanch’s book of the same name, about the exotic and possessed lives of four wild women who lived as they wished: Isabelle Eberhardt, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, Jane Digby and Isabel Burton. But wilder shores of love has a bit more personal reference than just the book. It came from a line of Anita’s. She said she’d been to the wilder shores of love. Not sure I have! Love to me is much more practical. Maybe she had just had some great sex. I have, too, but I wouldn’t exactly describe it as the wilder shores of love. ‘For Wanting You’ comes from my asking Elton and Bernie Taupin to write a song for me – and that’s what they came up with. It was a wonderful moment when I received that in the post. Of course, as per usual, I did not do it in the most commercial way you can imagine. I’m sure it could’ve been a hit, a big hit, but I underplayed it.

      ‘Great Expectations’, written with Daniel Lanois, is the story of my life. It’s the story in my mind as it goes through my life in pictures. It’s as if you’re sitting outside a tent around a fire and I’m telling the story. As I recount it I can’t remember everything that’s happened and, truth being so subjective, it’sa fable rather than an autobiography. The exclusiveness of memory as it fuses with the mythical life story and with Dickens’s wistful novel. It’s a slightly bitter little song.

      To do a song like ‘Tower of Song’ with a light touch is quite hard. The tendency is to be earnest and intense, so it isn’t easy to pull off. But I think I’m getting over that. Still, you have to approach ‘Tower of Song’ like the great monument it is, a Tower of Babel of all songs and all the great singers who’ve gone before you, including the haunting voice of Leonard Cohen himself. The way Leonard does it is dark and broody. I lightened it up a bit. Some people didn’t like that, but there’s no way you can out-gothicise Leonard Cohen.

      ‘After the Ceasefire’ is a Frank McGuinness bit of magic. It’sa very Irish song, and quite literal in that sense. It’s not about Ireland, it’s about a relationship, but also Frank’s relationship with Ireland. Just a lovely lovely lovely little poem.

       It was all the others’ fault, they thought at any rate

       After the ceasefire to put an end to hate

       She was reaching for her knife, he a fork and spoon

       They sat about devouring the poison of the moon

       Shared a fatal cigarette neither one would light

       Their breath was flame enough, nobody said goodnight

       After the ceasefire, after the ceasefire.

      FRANK McGUINNESS and DANIEL LANOIS,

      ‘After the Ceasefire’

      Vagabond Ways СКАЧАТЬ