Marianne Faithfull’s favourite The Rolling Stones song: “I’m very fond of Keith”
In the history of The Rolling Stones, there are far more characters than there were ever band members, and Marianne Faithfull played a vital role. As Mick Jagger’s long-term girlfriend during the band’s dizzying early years, she was there through many major moments, but even the bad times never stopped her from loving their music.
But Faithfull isn’t just ‘Mick Jagger’s Ex-Girlfriend’. As an artist in her own right, she’s had a fascinating and difficult life, dealing with drug addiction, homelessness and illness. Still, she’s endured as a powerful musician and one of the ultimate, widely recognised faces of the 1960s.
Her face, next to Jagger’s, became the ultimate it-couple of the era. In 1964, she went to an early Rolling Stones gig, where the pair met. The same year, she made her name as a singer when she released her first single, ‘As Tears Go By’, written by the Stones writing duo, Jagger and Richards. For the next four years, Faithfull was there as the band blew up and out of the London jazz scene, into the dizzying heights of their fame that came off the back of the number one hit, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’.
But she was also there at the lows. “To be The Rolling Stones, to be the greatest rock and roll band in the world, you have to be very, very tough, and I rather admire that,” she said on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 1995. In 1967, during a drug raid on Richards’ Redlands estate, Faithfull was found wearing only a fur rug. It would come to pass that she was the one that had to be tough.
While the arrests only added to the band’s rock and roll image, the singer was publicly crucified. “It destroyed me,” she said. “To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorising. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother.” The couple split soon after, and years of intense hardship followed.
However, despite it all, the band still hold a close place in her life. During her essential picks, she gave a coveted spot to ‘Gimme Shelter’. The track is said to be somewhat inspired by her, fuelled by the sense of rage and jealousy that fueled the band at the time, as Jagger and Richards fell out after each slept with the other’s partner. But it’s all passed now as she said, “I’m very fond of Keith, I’m very fond of Ronnie, I adore Charlie,” but acknowledges, “the only one I have a bit of a problem with, and it’s obvious when we do meet which is so rarely, is Mick. There’s a lot of blood under the bridge there.”
But however bad that blood may be, it can never poison her love for the music. Faithfull stays loyal as a fan of the band, and a key part of their history.