SO LONG. MARIANNE i/o

Sylvia Patterson recalls the conversation she shared with Marianne Faithfull, who told of her life with Mick Jagger, her time on the streets, and her fear of not being interesting

- Sylvia Patterson

Of all the celebrated maverick spirits of the Sixties and Seventies counterculture - from Keith Richards to Bob Dylan to Jim Morrison – surely aristocratic songbird Marianne Faithfull was the most rebellious of them all.

An iconic pop star at 18, and a year later the girlfriend of Mick Jagger, when she was 22 she rejected the lot – fame, money, status as the Most Beautiful Girl in the World – to become a homeless heroin addict living in the bombed-out rubble left by the Second World War. This she preferred to domestic bliss with Jagger at the height of his peacock fabulousness. “Which is very, very insulting to Mick,” she told me back in 2009.

This was, I suggested, a spectacular act of punk-rock defiance, a cry of “I reject everything.” “Yes, it was,” she agreed. “Because I saw through the whole pop business. At 21, I could see it was bullshit. A formula that keeps making money. There was also that thing of ‘two stars in one house’, my own little ego fighting for a chance.

“I’d been trying to run away from Mick for a long time! I did love him. But the life was difficult, living with such a very famous person. And such an incredibly promiscuous person. I could see it very clearly. ‘I’m not required for this... I’m gonna fuck off.’”

We had this conversation over lunch in a fine-dining bistro in Luxembourg, where Marianne ordered “beef filet, au poivre” in her exquisitely scorched, profoundly theatrical voice. That year there was no accompanying glass of wine: the sometime alcoholic/drug addict had been clean for five years. “Even a little alcohol is too much,” she told me. “It’s just being an addict.”