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Review:Remaining faithfull/Marianne Faithfull/Inna Palm


KiwiCoromandel

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You could say Marianne Faithfull has had a few lives. In public it began with folk ingenue and fey pop songs like As Tears Go By before she took on the fur coat of rock star's muse and, all too soon after, the rotten teeth and ravaged visage of the celebrity drug addict.

Then there was the ragged-voiced deliverer of home truths on the "comeback" album, Broken English, a jazz and blues singer, a fine interpreter of Kurt Weill and, impressively, a stage and film actor, the latter most recently seeing her portray an aged provider of hand relief in Irina Palm.

I mention this not just to prove I can look up Wikipedia but because this Hal Wilner-produced album of interpretations across a variety of styles and songwriters — available as a 10-track single disc or an 18-track double — feels like the sum of those experiences. Or, to put it another way, to bring the feeling, the knowing wit, the mix of sly and serene, the sheer bloodymindedness and the interpreter's craft to this collection, you need to have lived. A lot.

In some ways you can see the truth of this in her slow-draw take on Merle Haggard's Sing Me Back Home. Less experienced heads than Wilner and Faithfull would have played up the pathos excessively but here it has something closer to world weariness. There's a similar easy hand on the tiller in Bessie Smith's Easy Come, Easy Go, which arrives with a half-smile to match the half-swing of the light jazz blues.

At the other end of the emotional spectrum, Dolly Parton's Down From Dover begins to leak pain slowly under the brass-hued, Dylanesque torch song arrangement and there's almost a florid emotionalism in a more Morrissey-than-Morrissey take on Dear God Please Help Me.

One favourite is The Crane Wife 3, a highlight from a Decemberists album, on which Nick Cave provides genuine support. Faithfull takes ever more assertive strides in the song, building it to something proud and defiant.

Elsewhere, Neko Case's Hold On, Hold On is soulful rock complete with a jagged guitar solo, Randy Newman's In Germany Before The War, with Faithfull's just-right croak, sounds as if it emerged fully formed from Germany before the war and there's some actorly craft in the sharp-tongued Black Coffee, which takes it somewhere neither Peggy Lee nor Ella Fitzgerald went.

Not bad for someone once assumed to be, if not dead, then well on the way.

source:Bernard Zeul/SMH

image:SMH.com.au....Many lives … Marianne Faithfull makes full use of her experiences.

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I pirated quite a few of her albums. I can see a couple I bought from where I'm sitting. They are from the 60's, "Marianne Faithfull" and "Come My Way". I may have another one or two but I'd need a search warrant to find it.

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I pirated quite a few of her albums. I can see a couple I bought from where I'm sitting. They are from the 60's, "Marianne Faithfull" and "Come My Way". I may have another one or two but I'd need a search warrant to find it.

i`ve got a 7 cd (mp3) collection of hers somewhere with the original versions of "working class hero" and "why`d ya do what ya did?" from "broken english"...a fucking mean album mate...i`ll see if i can dig it out and give it a long-overdue airing ... :lol:

check this link for an excellent live version of "why_d_ya_do_it".. mate..it`s a killer...some brilliant brass too.. :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

http://www.actionext.com/names_m/marianne_...d_ya_do_it.html

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