Marianne Faithfull
Negative Capability

Is it possible that the end-of-year charts are now the domain of frequent house guests?

Let's discuss it.

Stuff of testamentary legacies and last words to be passed down to posterity, the smell of incense, and sterile legal jargon.

Death, as we know, sells well. It creates hype, tickles morbidity but doesn't make you feel voyeuristic. On the contrary, it might even seem like a duty to solemnly attend, to watch attentively, and to share in mourning.

Of course, sweet Marianna has walked that thin line between life and death all her life.

Since when, as a sweet nymph in the mid-sixties, she whispered, between innocence and lewdness, that “As Tears Go By,” which was meant to make her the dream of love for legions of young and healthy British lads.

A role that was snatched away from her one fine day by a police raid. They were looking for the “stuff” of those Stones druggies, and instead found good Mick intent on eating a chocolate bar kindly offered to him by Marianna.

Which would be nothing unusual if it weren’t for the place where the said chocolate bar was lodged.

Sure, it becomes difficult now to play the role of the “girl next door.”

Marianna adds a personal touch: sex, drugs, attempted suicide, alcohol, darkness, and madness. It's no surprise that the blood of the Von Sacher-Masochs flows through the young lady’s veins.

Having definitively burned the mask of sweet Lolita, from the abysses emerges an angel of the night with a coal voice. A sort of Tom Waits in a skirt, as comfortable with the Brechtian repertoire as with electric ballads suffused with disorienting psychedelia.

And she's also a brilliant actress.

So here she is, at over seventy years old pulling out a record like this “Negative Capability,” where everything seems in place: from the names involved (ranging from Nick Cave, who, if we talk about Death seems almost natural to emerge, to Mark Lanegan, Ed Harcourt who penned as many as five pieces, to Warren Ellis), to the appropriately nocturnal and emphatic mood, but always with that detachment, that aplomb of a great lady of the bourgeoisie, with that touch of nobility that not even the mud on the dark side of the street could strip away.

And maybe that's precisely the problem.

Because, you see, the aplomb of a grand dame, the style of a fine lady is not sexy. That's why – in the end – Marianna was never a Nico or a Janis Joplin or even a Tom Waits. She should have tousled herself, pulled out her guts, and fed everything to the daimon of Art.

And instead, no, she kept something for herself. And she was right to do so.

Thus, at first listen, this might seem like an album of subtle atmospheres, great craftsmanship, self-congratulatory and appropriately emphatic, groomed, the kind of stuff that, at the right moment, even makes you look good.

And yet, no.

When Marianna sings to you, with a voice that always seems on the verge of breaking, an “In My Own Particular Way” proud confession of having lived or, even better, when – again, for the umpteenth time – she re-proposes “her” “As Tears Go By,” but this time loaded with awareness and an aching sense of “could have been,” or gives us the painful elegy of a “No Moon In Paris,” or, again, ripples with electricity that “They Came at Night” shared with that other dark soul, Mark Lanegan, then, in the backlight, you notice that a bit of guts can be seen.

And you remember that was (and is) the body of Lilith the Demon from Kenneth Anger, that those are the hands of Irina Palm, that this is the voice of sister morphine.

All made more real and fragile by the awareness that the journey is about to end, by the presence of illness.

To me, it’s her masterpiece.

I would say it’s an album that grows with each listen, if the gods of the nearby areas hadn't made me a child of a lesser ear. Therefore, unfortunately, I can only go from memory.

But you, listen to it, don’t trust me as I cannot be objective with Miss Marianna.

I can't.

If only because she made chocolate forever more delicious to me.

….And in thee beauty revives, / The golden beauty whereof there was

Sole comfort to the ills / Of mortal, erring minds….