Memories, Dreams and Reflections

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 the vaults at Gem Records. Now it seems that the record is regarded as Marianne Faithfull’s ‘lost album’, and I guess in many ways that’s right, because this album is the missing link between my early work and Broken English.

Sometime late in 2000 I received the proofs of a book through the post called Turn Off Your Mind, Relax, and Float Downstream by a member of Blondie. It’s about the ‘mystic sixties’, and it really does capture the light and the dark side of the decade. And there was a lot of dark, creepy stuff in the sixties, I can tell you: The Process, Kenneth Anger, Mel Lyman, Manson, Anton LaVey, and L. Ron Hubbard. Those people were always trying to get hold of me. Somehow I managed to negotiate my way around them quite successfully. I didn’t get involved in any cults, apart from going up to Bangor for that regrettable weekend with the Maharishi and the Beatles, the weekend that Brian Epstein killed himself.

It’s so odd that few of my friends see anything negative about the sixties. Most of them from back in the day say, ‘Oh but, Marianne, I don’t remember the sixties like that at all … it was wonderful!’ When I hear things like that I question myself, wondering if I got it all wrong and am mad. But I think I have been completely sane all along. Back in the sixties I certainly did seem to attract the most dreadful people: fringe types, cranks, weirdos, people who were after power. It was all so creepy …

This reminds me about the time at the tail-end of the sixties when dear Henrietta Moraes – about whom much more anon – wrote an investigative article for the Daily Telegraph colour supplement about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Scientology religion. She infiltrated meetings in order to write her piece, which went into great detail about what she saw as the dark rotten core of what Hubbard did. She wrote all this stuff about how his partner, Mary Sue Whipp, was a homunculus with three breasts, and how he planned world domination through the power of the spirit. Hen was sure he was all about mind domination, and about muscling in on you immediately and filling your head with all this nonsense, isolating you from family and friends and brainwashing you. So of course he was furious when the Telegraph published Hen’s article. She became convinced that people were following her around and waiting outside her house, and got so terrified that she eventually went to the police.

I wanted to leave the sixties in a blaze of glory – under a volcano. That would be the Vesuvio, Spanish Tony’s Million Dollar Bash, almost emblematic of the blithe, hedonistic sixties overweening-ambitions-and-carpe-diem approach to life. Spanish Tony was the dealer to Swinging London’s stars and the jeunesse dorée.

All of London’s rock aristocracy were in attendance the evening Spanish Tony, nefarious drug dealer to the stars, finally opened his nightclub (which had, actually, only one night). Like all dealers, he didn’t consider himself just a dealer, he wanted to be something else, something a bit more grand, a ma?tre d’ to the hipoisie. Thus, the Vesuvio. It was pretty much of a dive, but the people there were just stupendous: le tout Londres hip. All the Beatles, most of the Stones, a few Whos, spangled guitar slingers, mangled drummers were there – in short, everybody who was anybody, or thought they were. The punch had, of course, been spiked with LSD. And in strolls Paul – very casually, very cool, almost whistling, you know, with one of those little smiles on his lips as if he’s got a really big secret. John was already there and seemed to have had quite a bit of punch by the time we arrived. George, too, of course, and Pattie Boyd, the quintessence of Pop chic. So there’s our Paulie, looking rather pleased with himself. He was in fact very cool, a real man-about-town and interested in different things than George. Curious Paul, fascinated with all sorts of strange things – he really was like that. And what swinging scene would be complete without Robert Fraser, Groovy Bob – the title of Harriet Vyner’s biography, a bricolage portrait of the archetypal boulevardier of swinging London. The Robert Fraser Gallery was the place to be. He showed the classic Pop artists of the sixties – Richard Hamilton, Jim Dine, and Andy Warhol – and made avant-garde art hip to the rock princelings. He was beautiful, took a lot of drugs, and could always be found where the new thing was happening. ‘More than any other figure I can think of, Robert Fraser personifies the Sixties as I remember them,’ so blurbed Lord McCartney on the back of the Vyner bio. Robert even tried to turn Paul on to heroin, but Paul didn’t care for the experience – that was lucky!

So there we were, all having a wonderful time, really high and even a little bit of alcohol, which to us was anathema. It was punch, which is easy to drink and a rather delicious sort of drunk. Little did we know what was in it. Finally we decide to drink, and it was acid! And then in the middle of all this, Paul, sidling about with his hands behind his back.

‘What have you got behind your back, Paul?’ we are crying out.

‘Oh, nothing, really,’ says he. ‘Just something, um, we’ve just done.’ Knowing that everyone would say, ‘Oh! Play it!’

Well, the thing about the Vesuvio that was really great was the speakers. That’s where all of our money had gone, on the very best speakers, huge speakers, the biggest that you could possibly get. Everything else was on the floor, of course; just loads of cushions. Come to think of it, the set-up would never have worked as a club, but Tony wasn’t one to get hung up on the details. For a private party, however, it was perfect. So there was a lot of ‘Oh, go on, Paul, please!’ You know, you always had to do that with him, basically.

‘Oh, yeah, all right, then,’ he says. And then he proceeds to put on ‘Hey, Jude’. It just went – boom! – straight to the chest. It was the first time anyone had ever heard it, and we were all just blown away. And then, of course, we couldn’t stop playing it, we just played away, mixed up with a bit of Little Richard and some blues.

What a night! Right then you just knew how lucky you were to live in these times, with this crowd. That song was so impossible to describe or even take in that I didn’t know what to say to Paul, but of course I did go up to him (we were a polite little lot) and probably burbled, ‘Wow! Far out, man!’ The required string of incoherent sounds, but I felt I had to say something even though, the state I was in, I could hardly speak. Even Mick said it was fantastic, because it was. I guess most people would think the Stones may have had mixed feelings at that moment, and perhaps they did. But (possibly due to the laced punch) the main feeling was one of: aren’t we all the greatest bunch of young geniuses to grace the planet and isn’t this the most amazing time to be alive. It was as if only with this group and at that moment could Paul have done it. We had a sense of everybody being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. And every time something came out, like ‘I Can See for Miles and Miles’ or ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘Visions of Johanna’, or the sublime ‘God Only Knows’ from Pet Sounds, or anything at all, it seemed like we had just broken another sound barrier. Blind Faith, the Mothers of Invention … one amazing group after another. Tiny Tim, anything, we were instant fans! And I don’t think it was just the drugs.

It was one of the most incestuous music scenes ever. And how did they all find each other? And how did they all seem to be in the perfect group for them? Most knew that they were, but some, like Eric Clapton, kept jumping about trying to find exactly his right space and never quite finding it. But even that made sense for him. If not for the peregrine wanderings of Eric we would never have had ‘Layla’ and all that. Experimental Eric, mixing it up with different bands: Derek and the Dominos, Greg Allman, Delaney & Bonnie, Blind Faith. He was in so many different bands – a restless troubadour. In the end, though, all this wandering about from group to group made him into a separate entity: Eric Clapton. He’s his own brand.

The Vesuvio may have limped along for another couple of weeks before it closed. Of course, the whole venture was a very dangerous idea; it would have been a place where people went to score. Definitely needed, of course, but somewhat unwise. How tempting it must have been to all – a sort of one-stop shop: you go to the club and you get the drugs right there. It would have made life easier for Spanish Tony because instead of having to drive down to John and Yoko and then to me and then drive to Robert, he could just lie on his cushions and make money. Convenient, yes, but also quite convenient for the local constabulary!

I think Spanish Tony’s fear of immediate arrest may have been unfounded. Probably the first thing that would have happened would have been the local fuzz saying, ‘Okay, how much are you going to pay us?’

In my mind’s eye the last image of that night is this: John and Yoko, both completely legless, deciding to drive themselves in the psychedelic Rolls over to Ringo’s old flat on Montagu Square. They would’ve crashed and killed themselves. Driving wasn’t John’s forte, never mind the acid. I see Spanish Tony, keeping himself cool on coke and smack, rushing out and putting them in a taxi. He hands the driver a twenty-quid note and tells him, ‘Don’t let them out till you get to 38 Montagu Square.’ There’s a picture in my mind’s eye of Mick and Keith in front of the Vesuvio with its painting of Mount Vesuvius behind them. So very camp. Mount Vesuvius was an apropos image for swinging London. We were all living underneath a volcano, getting high, getting dressed, getting together, swanning about in clubs with witty names while forces we hadn’t even guessed existed were about to fall down on us. Scintillating, vibrating creatures in fantastically beautiful clothes from Ossie Clark and the Antique Market, all frolicking beneath a volcano on the verge of erupting.

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 I recorded with Dan, and Mark Howard, in the Teatro, the recording studio that belongs to Daniel Lanois. Mark produced it. Dan and I wrote some songs together – beautiful stuff. I’m not particularly fond of what he does with U2, but his own records I love. And the ones he does with Emmylou Harris and Bob Dylan, of course – Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind. That wonderful song ‘She’s gone with the man with the long black coat …’

What was going on in my life when I was making this record? I was emerging from my cocoon. I’m very one-pointed. I’d done 20th Century Blues and then The Seven Deadly Sins. So Vagabond Ways was my first record back in my own genre. I felt I had to make a bit of a statement. A Mariannifesto. To say, ‘Here I am! I’m back!’

looking back at anger

In early 1970 I was in bad shape. Not long after I’d left Mick I found myself on a slippery slope – I’d become a heroin addict and spent my days seeking oblivion, sitting on the wall of a demolished building in Soho. As if things weren’t dire enough, I agreed to play Lilith, a cemetery-haunting female demon, in Kenneth Anger’s occult allegory Lucifer Rising. Needless to say, the film didn’t improve my situation, either karmically or financially. And that was that – or so I thought, but karma has an awkward habit of bouncing back at you. It reminded me, yet again, that dabbling in the occult – even if you don’t entirely believe in its coiled powers – has a nasty way of casting its baleful influence long after you have left the scene – and accumulating vengeful force along the way.