It is the evening of the day
I sit and watch the children play
Smiling faces I can see
But not for me
I sit and watch as tears go by

My riches can't buy everything
I want to hear the children sing
All I hear is the sound
Of rain falling on the ground
I sit and watch as tears go by

It is the evening of the day
I sit and watch the children play
Doing things I used to do
They think are new
I sit and watch as tears go by


A line may define a book. One decision a life.

I’m leafing through ‘A life on record’, a 2014 collection of photographs documenting the life of Marianne Faithfull. The foreword is written by – no kidding – Salman Rushdie. Yes, the Nobel Prize winner who survived a fatwa. Which means Nobel Prize winners are stronger than fatwas. Good.
     Still, i was rather surprised seeing Salman Rushdie popping up in what looked quite like a photo album. “What’s a guy like you doing in a dump like this” – that kind of feeling. As i went along through the edition though, little by little i became aware of what had been biting Rushdie in order to accept this, for a Nobel Prize winner, slightly weird task. As Rushdie puts it at the end of his foreword: “It’s a fine story. Not exactly a fairy-tale. A story William Blake would have liked. He knew something about the journey from innocence to experience, too.”
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Well, Rushdie might be right: the life of Marianne Faithfull reads as a modern Macbeth. Or, rather maybe, a Greek tragedy, because where lady Macbeth can be held fully accountable for her deeds, things aren’t that clear as far as the life of Marianne Faithfull goes. It all depends on how much guilt you award her, for… yes, peaking way too early. Leaving the home she created, for her child, her husband, herself. Venturing into London. Breaking off her marriage.

Innocence. Somewhere at the beginning of the book is a picture of a school report (her last, as she writes in a caption accompanying the pic), she’s 17something then. It mentions, under General Remarks: “Marianne has found it difficult to cope both with school and out-of-school activities; she has much ability but lacks method.” And also: ‘Absent: 29.5 days’, which is, surely in those times without any climate protest marches, an awful lot. Under Dependability (in my opinion it’s no less than wonderful this was a criterium: yes, those old days must have been jolly good) it says “variable – Marianne forgets easily”. Hm. Bear this in mind for later. Under English literature: “Marianne’s interest and wide reading, added to a pleasing and mature style has resulted in good work. I hope she will be able to continue.”

Well, unfortunately she did not. London’s calling. In one and the same year, 1964, she’s 17, she marries John Dunbar, whom she had met at convent school, and in a party bumps into Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Rolling Stones. It has to be said The Rolling Stones at that time, after having scored a couple of hits interpreting R&B classics, were the talk of the town. The next big thing. Now the poor man - Andrew i mean - is quite impressed by Marianne’s presence: as a result of their meeting – or so the story goes – he locks Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in a kitchen, telling them they can’t come out unless they write a song “with brick walls all around it, high windows and no sex". Okay, very clear, Andrew. A song for Marianne. It will be one of the first songs the two Stones write together.
     Mick and Keith finally come up with a song called ‘As time goes by’. In his 2010 autobiography Life Keith Richards writes: “We thought, what a terrible piece of tripe. We came out and played it to Andrew (Oldham), and he said 'It's a hit.' We actually sold this stuff, and it actually made money. Mick and I were thinking, this is money for old rope.”

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At that time the Stones had put their first album into the world, modestly called ‘England’s newest hit makers The Rolling Stones’, and, well… if you’re up for a dive into the 60s, i mean the real stuff, the sound and the colour and the vibe and everything, then you ought to listen to this from A to Z. I found an original 1964 copy in a vintage shop. Of course i’ve put it in my shrine where it can be admired on every February 29th from 3 till 3.15pm, only by people able to hold their breath for quite some time.
     Do listen to this record: if you don’t like The Rolling Stones (i must say i’d never been a big fan), then you’ll certainly be one after listening to this, their first album (and the next ones). Those covers of blues songs are capable of letting 100 Lazaruses stand up from the death and start hopping around. Let’s call it an R&B uppercut. The real stuff. After 10 seconds in the first song you suddenly realize today’s ‘R&B bands’ are wussies. All of them. “The Rolling Stones are more than a group – they are a way of life,” Andrew Loog Oldham wrote on the album’s backside. “A way of life that has captured the imagination of England’s teenagers, and made them one of the most sought after groups in Beatdom.” The 60s were just about to get started, then.

Now i can imagine it must have been big fun in that kitchen where Mick and Keith wrote the ‘Marianne song’. Those guys were used to rock at 200 mph, and now they were asked to write a ballad. “A ballad?!?” Yes, Keith, a ballad. For a 17 year old girl. “17… A girl?!?” Yes, Keith: long hair, curves, big eyes, … well, a girl, you know. “Oh, okay.” And- the fun still had to begin: Mick was soon going to fall in love with this girl (chances are considerable he already was). Bugger. No: twice bugger.
     Well, this ‘terrible piece of tripe’ – in the meantime called ‘As Tears go By’, Oldham had changed the ‘time’ for ‘tears’, a wise move – in my humble opinion is one of the greatest songs ever written – that is: when rendered by the right performer: Marianne Faithfull. So it became an instant success and catapulted Marianne into the charts. The guy who decided on the distinctive oboe part is a genius, Marianne’s voice and phrasing are simply heaven, and the words and melody evoke the kind of lingering melancholy which is plainly startling when one considers Jagger was only 21, and Richard 20 when they wrote this. Kept prisoner in a kitchen.

Marianne, btw, is only 17 when she records As Tears go By. In the song an older woman is, in the ‘evening of her day’, sitting and watching the children play. The smiling faces she can see are not for her though: she’s got only tears - almost dying of melancholy as she is.
     What a masterly move it was to let this song be performed by a girl at the pinnacle of her youth and beauty. The resulting contrast is devastating. Google ‘As tears go by Marianne Faithfull 1964’, and, yes, shout “Eat your heart out Marilyn Monroe”, - because you simply know you’re witnessing the kind of thing unearthly blobs will be blown away by when they’ll finally land and ask us for some proofs about our sweetness. (You didn’t really think blobs would be interested in the production quota of Unilever, did you?) Btw go for the version with the subtitles for the deaf. I don’t know why – i guess it must be one of those countless perversities hidden in the back of my otherwise maidenly pure brain -, but it gives a certain extra to this video. And no, don’t divulge this to anyone.)

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Now in ‘A life on record’ i found two quite inconspicuous scraps of paper – excerpts from newspaper interviews – telling a lot. In one of them Marianne says: “For 15 years I was groomed to be a lady. Then, when this pop thing happened to me, they didn’t know how to handle me. I met people I can honestly say I hardly approved of. And some of the expressions they used appalled me. That was how much I was prepared for show-business.” And, in a Dutch newspaper (my translation from the Dutch): “In the meantime I was married to John (Dunbar). Our marriage didn’t suffer under the tours I made through England. For John and me marriage was still a noble, fragile matter. We were happy and had almost no dime to spend, but our love made up for a lot. If we would have been living in Cambridge, things probably wouldn’t have gone wrong. John and me would probably have four or five great kids instead of one.” Well, bugger.

(Btw – history sometimes plays funny games - at that same time Jagger was performing (and recording, on the above mentioned first 1964 Stones album) the R&B song ‘I’m a King Bee’:

Well, I'm a king bee
Can buzz all night long
Well, I'm a king bee, baby
Can buzz all night long
Yeah, I can buzz better, baby
When your man is gone.

Hm. Let’s put it like this: it has the advantage of clarity.

When the Rolling Stones recorded ‘As Tears go By’ themselves – which they did the year after Marianne had scored a hit with it – it must have felt very weird. ‘Angie’ was still far away, and the concept ‘ballad’ was not really on top of Jagger’s and Richards’ list – to put it mildly. The song appears on the 1965 Stones album ‘December’s Children (and everybody’s)’. A brilliant album, again, with the first ripe fruits of the Jagger-Richards songwritership: Get off my Cloud, and I’m Free, amongst other mind blowing R&B interpretations. 

And so, a bit awkward and lonely amidst all that power, the fragile As Tears go By. Someone seems to have put a muffler on Jagger’s voice on that one, and he simply can’t avoid balancing on the verge of gravity as well as persiflage, he somewhat sounds like having fun, almost against all odds – the real strength of the song residing in his melancholy tones. So i guess at a certain point someone must have been shouting from behind the mixing tables: “Let’s just pour a battalion of strings over it, for God’s sake.” So this they did. Doing so they saved it in some way.
     The song never even gets up to the knees of the Faithfull version though; there’s no dog believing Jagger when he’s interpreting this. And they got rid of the oboe. One can’t get rid of the oboe in ‘As Tears go By’! Even when it’s replaced by a billion strings.

A year later – 1965 - she divorces John. “Marianne Faithfull,” writes a newspaper, “has suddenly become the symbol of today’s generation. She is being hailed as Britain’s ‘don’t care’ girl.” She starts a love affair with Mick Jagger, and gets pregnant. She loses the baby, a daughter. She becomes anorexic and addicted to heroin. In 1969 she’s found unconscious in a hotel suite in Sydney after taking an overdose of barbiturates. Doctors save her life.
     She remarries twice; one marriage lasts a year, the other three. From early 70s on, due to drug addiction, her distinctive, previously melodic and higher registered voice is left raspy, cracked and lower in pitch. Some call it "whisky soaked", and “fitting the raw emotions expressed in her later music”. Yeah, right. Listen to her 1981 album ‘Dangerous Acquaintances’ (it’s all in the title) – it’s ear damaging. That creaking, harsh, over-the-top voice, those ugly supermarket arrangements and, most of all, all this trying too hard: it hurts my soul. “I was only looking for a bit of harmony and grace,” she sings in Intrigue. She’s still only 34 then. Again those lines crossing my mind: “If we would have been living in Cambridge, probably things wouldn’t have gone wrong. Probably John and me would have four or five great kids instead of one.” One decision may mark a life.


It is the evening of the day
I sit and watch the children play
Smiling faces I can see
But not for me
I sit and watch as tears go by.


Marianne Faithfull is 73 now. When i look at recent pictures and scraps of YouTube, i get the impression she has come to terms with life. A somewhat bitter, but soft and kind nebula has dawned upon the years passed, which gives them the utter beauty of acceptance. The jokes she’s delivering herself of, when on stage, have a bittersweet tinge. This is what it is, this was me, then, and this is what i am, now. It was all in me. It is all in me, actually. The real piece of art is my life, the life of Marianne Faithfull, daughter of Eva von Sacher-Masoch (yes, descendant of the guy who wrote Venus in Furs and ‘invented’ masochism). Former wife of John Dunbar, one kid: Nicolas. The beauty, the prettiness, the opportunism, the vomit and the tears. They all go by. And stay forever.


Well I'm a king bee
Buzzing around your hive
Well I'm a king bee, baby
Buzzing around your hive
Yeah, I can make honey baby
Let me come inside

Well, I'm a king bee
Want you to be my queen
Well, I'm a king bee, baby
Want you to be my queen
Together we can make honey
The world has never seen

Well, buzz a while
Sting it bad

(The Rolling Stones, ‘I’m a King Bee’, 1964)


(No need to tell ‘A life on record’, in all its incompleteness, is a gripping, almost hurting kind of photo book, leaving many questions unanswered. Impossible to leave it at that, and not turn to her 1994 ‘My autobiography’. Which is what i’ll do one of these months. So, to be continued.)


(Marianne Faithfull & François Ravard, 'Marianne Faithfull, A Life on Record', with an introduction by Salman Rushdie, 2014.)