From The Vaults Reissues, remasters and compilations

Back to the beginnings, and proof that behind the scandals and celebrity affairs lay genuine talent.

- By Simon Price

Marianne Faithfull
Cast Your Fate To The Wind: The Complete UK Decca Recordings
★ ★ ★ ★

Proper Records UMCLP 109 (6CD, 5LP)

Oh, but there was a place and time for girls like her. If the 60s didn’t already have Marianne Faithfull, it would have needed to invent her. Nobody else embodied, so effortlessly, the decade’s slide from innocence to decadence.

You can map it in visual terms, from the teenage ingenue sprawled in The Salisbury in floral frock and knee socks in that Gered Mankowitz portrait to the leather-clad libertine getting unzipped by Alain Delon in sexploitation classic The Girl On A Motorcycle. You can map it in headlines, cleaving starkly into before or after The Evening Standaras hysterical “Nude Girl And Teapot” screamer when cops and colluding hacks found her wrapped in a fur rug at Keith Richards’ seaside abode. And you can map it musically, from the courtly chamber-pop of As Tears Go By to the narco/necro narrative of Sister Morphine. In four words: ‘good girl gone bac’.

On Good Friday, 1964, aged just 17, Marianne Faithfull's life changed when she attended a launch party for another aspiring star, Adrienne Posta, and was immediately headhunted by Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who carefully constructed her public image as a demure, convent-educated debutante. The persona was rooted in truth ~ Faithfull was born to a Baroness of the Sacher-Masoch family ~ but belied an already turbulent young life of marriage, miscarriage and more, not to mention the horrors of homelessness and addiction lurking in her near future.